The Middle Kingdom. Andrea Barrett
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The Middle Kingdom
ANDREA BARRETT
CONTENTS
THE CLINIC FOR FOREIGN VISITORS
JUNE 1989
PATIENT: I’ve experienced a feeling of general malaise for quite a long time.
DOCTOR: Since when?
PATIENT: For nearly one year.
DOCTOR: How is your appetite?
PATIENT: I have no appetite at all. I have a feeling of fullness in the upper abdomen – often I really feel very heavy. My gums bled and my tongue is coated with a thin layer of whitish fur.
DOCTOR: Have you lost any weight?
PATIENT: Yes, I have lost ten pounds since last year.
DOCTOR: Let me feel your pulse. Lay your wrist on the little pillow, like this. (Patient puts his right wrist on the pillow with the palm facing upward.) Your pulse is deep and thready.
PATIENT: What does it mean?
DOCTOR: It means there is a deficiency of vital energy.
—adapted from A Dialogue in the Hospitals, English-Chinese (a handbook designed to help Chinese physicians care for English-speaking patients)
ALL OF BEIJING was blanketed with smoke and rumors. From midnight on Friday, when we first heard that soldiers were trying to jog down Changan Avenue, through the chaos of Saturday and the horrors of Sunday morning, those of us still on the Qinghua campus clustered around radios and televisions and ringing phones, relaying whatever we heard and trying frantically to understand what was going on. We heard that the soldiers were unarmed, armed, armed and pumped full of amphetamines. We heard they were crashing through Tiananmen Square, crushing the demonstrators and mowing them down with machine guns; then that workers were ambushing soldiers in the streets. Someone said a soldier had been disemboweled and hung from his burning truck. Someone said snipers had shot out the windows of the Beijing Hotel. Deng was dead, we heard. The army was in charge. Li Peng had been shot in the leg and the statue of the Goddess of Democracy was down. There were two armies, six armies, the armies were fighting each other. Deng was alive and the armies were under his control. Ten thousand people had been killed, someone said. A hundred. None. In the square, someone said, the soldiers were burning bodies with blowtorches and flamethrowers. The students had captured some of the soldiers’ guns and were shooting back. The soldiers were driving over the students’ tents.
Jianming arrived wild-eyed on Sunday night and said she had seen the whole thing. Unbelievable, she said. A massacre. Worse than the worst days of the Cultural Revolution. She and a group of her friends had been huddled at the base of the Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes during the height of the shooting; at first the tracers had soared over their heads, she said, over the top of the obelisk, but then the ribbons of white light had moved lower, lower, until bullets were ringing off the granite. They’d fled then, she said; the streets were burning. She had ridden her bike north through the alleys and back roads, avoiding the columns of smoke. Smashed buses and trucks lay on their sides, and the intersections were blocked by barricades of twisted rubble. Troops guarded the square and were still firing at anyone who approached. A truck was making a mournful procession from campus to campus; in the back, Jianming said (and she was a thoughtful, quiet girl, not given to exaggeration), in the back the bodies of five students crushed by tanks had been packed in dry ice.
That night, on Beijing Radio, we heard the Mayor talking about how the brave soldiers had crushed the counterrevolutionary riot instigated by foreign influences and hooligans, but on Monday, a student from Beijing University arrived with an armload of posters and leaflets that contradicted everything the Mayor had said.
Jianming left Monday morning for her parents’ home in Changsha, after hearing that soldiers and security men were beginning to sweep the campuses for troublemakers. She hadn’t been deeply involved in the movement, nor had the other students I’d been living and working with for the past few years. But all of them had participated – they’d gone to the square in the late weeks of April, when the mood was festive, almost joyful; they’d marched in the big parade on May Fourth and had returned to the square for the demonstrations during Gorbachev’s visit. But then they’d come back to campus, dismayed by the declaration of martial law and the growing rumors. And except for Jianming they’d stayed there, gathering in the courtyards and the empty rooms.
Now the professors left on campus urged the students to go home. Yan and Liren and Yuanguang left that afternoon; Yulong and Qingxin went on Tuesday. Wenwen was the last to go – Wenwen, who had tutored me in Mandarin after classes and who had proved to be the brightest of the students working in Dr Yu Xiaomin’s lab. Wenwen and I had dissected hundreds of fish together, shared a rowboat when we went to sample the lake, cobbled together a paper chromatography setup for a demonstration.
‘I have to go,’ she said, after we’d heard that the student leaders had been ordered to turn themselves in,