Bye bye, Beijing

In the summer of 1991, I graduated from high school and was headed for Peking University, one of the hotbeds of the pro-democratic movement which had led to the Tiananmen Square protest two years earlier. But after the bloodshed in June 1989, the government had decided, as a precaution, to send all students entering Peking University to the army for a year of disciplining or "political re-education." This programme lasted until the university had "changed blood" - meaning that younger students would no longer have direct contact with the troublemakers of Tiananmen.

We arrived at the army camp in Xinyang, a grey city in central China plagued by pickpockets and hepatitis A, in September 1991. The Soviet Union had just collapsed and, for the first three days, we were put into emergency ideological training. China was now sole leader of the communist world and we were to keep extra vigilant. On the way to our barracks, we sang a Soviet marching song. We also sang a Polish marching song, with the refrain, "Go Warsaw, let's go forward bravely," though, of course, Poland had also fallen by the wayside.

How, I have long since wondered, did China stay red amid the turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s? The country was opening and closing at the same time. Unlike North Korea and Cuba - both isolated and tightly controlled by dictators - China, since the early 1980s, had decided to welcome capitalist investment and western influences. In 1980, when I was seven, our neighbours purchased our building's first television set. As if this event was not wondrous enough in itself, it was then announced that the main government television channel would broadcast a British drama series. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening at 8pm, the kids in the building turned up at the neighbours' apartment for a programme called David Copperfield, which was said to be good for children. I vividly recall the crowded room in which we sat in rows, all eyes fixed on the nine-inch, black and white set. The story of David Copperfield, dark and frightening and beyond my understanding, depressed me. But my parents would not let me skip the bi-weekly television show - it was an opportunity they could not have dreamed of when they were young. Later that year, Madame Mao was publicly tried as a counter-revolutionary. The trial was broadcast and many adults joined the children in our neighbours' apartment. Even though my parents told me how important it was, I nodded off right after Madame Mao was escorted into the court, and slept through the most significant event of the year.



While the system stayed the same, the country changed rapidly. Imported luxuries became more evident: refrigerators, washing machines, colour televisions, stereos. Newly translated books appeared at an astonishing speed. By 1986, as a junior high school pupil, I was reading Leaders by Richard Nixon, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave - books considered to be nourishing. But when deeper changes loomed, the state made its position clear. In December 1986, college students in Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei and ten other cities marched into the streets demanding an end to the totalitarian system. The protests, a prelude to what would happen in 1989, lasted less than a month and ended on 1st January 1987. In the first public announcement of the year, the government declared that it would use violence to quash any activities that advocated democracy.

Over the next two years, both the economy and national morale plummeted. The corruption of communist officials at all levels was so widespread that no story surprised us - not the private prison and torture system set up by a communist entrepreneur in Hebei province, nor the cash purchases of mansions in California by the children of high-ranking party officials. Inflation took off. In my family, we tried to stockpile everything: soap stacked under the bath, toilet paper and soap powder cartons piled up on the heater. Matches got damp; moth larvae wriggled in the rice bags. The years 1987 and 1988 seemed dominated by the rice moths flying blindly around our apartment. By early 1989, the situation seemed out of hand. Outside, in the streets and on buses, people spoke about how hopeless everything was. "When will it all end?" they asked.

This freedom to express discontent in public ended when hundreds of people were shot dead near Tiananmen. Eight months of martial law in Beijing followed. The optimism of 1985 and 1986 was replaced by a terrified hush. Every day before I went to school, my parents would remind me to keep quiet in public. Our Mandarin teacher, a tiny old lady, warned us not to write anything in our weekly journals about the political situation. Then she begged us not to tell on her to the school authorities.

There have been many discussions since 1989, especially in overseas Chinese communities, about what exactly led to the bloodshed: the resolve of conservatives to control the capital city at any price; the loss of power by party reformists; the immaturity of the student demonstrators, especially in late May and early June, when their anti-communist and anti-government slogans provided the excuse for military involvement. Debates about Tiananmen become heated every year around the June anniversary, but the wider question of why Chinese communism was able to survive the ideological earthquakes of the late 1980s and early 1990s remains unanswered. My army career may shed some light on it.

When i arrived at the camp, the first shock I had was that not all my fellow students knew why we were in the army. Later, my husband, who is from a small town in a border province in northeastern China and who went to the same camp, told me that when he had applied to Peking University, he had heard nothing about a year of re-education until he was told to report to an army camp in his admission letter.

Before I left for the army, my parents had warned me not to talk about politics, especially not the Tiananmen massacre. "Imagine a zipper on your mouth," said my mother. "Zip it up tight." But, of the nine girls in my squad, I was the only one from Beijing and despite my parents' advice, a month into the training, I felt a duty to bring up the topic. It was on a Sunday evening at our weekly squad meeting. We first sang a song together (there were only a handful appropriate for these occasions: "Communism is so Good," "The Song of the Red Women Warriors," "Get Ready for the War"), then we took turns to read our weekly ideological reports. "In the last week, I have kept my love of our communist motherland" - we all started this way. When it was my turn, I read the two lines in my notebook: "In the last week, I have kept my love of our communist motherland. And in the last week I have been enthusiastic about our training."

"That's it?" asked Xing, my squad leader and fellow student.

"Yes," I said.

"You need to give a more thorough report."

"I have nothing more I want to say."

"But you are lying in your report," Xing said. "You lost points twice last week for your 'internal affairs,' and you did not sing with us just now."

She was right. I always opened my mouth without making a sound. I persisted with this small, futile gesture for the whole year. My "internal affairs" score referred to the fact that every day we had half an hour between morning drill and breakfast to make our beds impeccably: blankets and quilts folded at right angles, like sharply cut tofu cubes. I refused to spend more than five minutes on the blankets, and several times my squad lost the weekly honour stars because of me.

This time, however, I said: "Aren't we in the army just to learn how to lie? Does anybody believe what we are taught to say here?"

No one replied; my squad mates all stared at me. I too was shocked by my words. But their silence angered me. I went on to give an anti-communist and anti-army speech. I could not stop myself. I talked about an eight-year-old boy my mother had witnessed on the night of 4th June, shot dead near his home, a bowl-size wound in his chest. I talked about how, against my father's instructions, I had slipped across the street from our apartment to the nearby hospital and seen scores of bodies laid on top of each other, a young student's arm and half his upper body gone. I wanted to make my squad mates admit that there had been a massacre two years earlier in Beijing, and that our being in the army was a punishment for what our seniors had done - and that they had done nothing wrong. Did we want to be trained like parrots, our brains emptied? I forgot about zipping my mouth.

After a long silence, a girl asked, "Was it true people got killed?"

"Don't spread rumours," Xing said sternly.

"It was true," I said. "Innocent people."

"People's Liberation Army soldiers were murdered by the mob, we all saw that on television," Xing retorted. So, very unwisely, I turned to the rest of my squad mates. "Do you all believe the propaganda or do you believe what people saw with their own eyes?"

My squad mates did not reply. Some were attentive, others stared at me with disgust. At 18, I was too young to understand a person's right to silence, especially in the face of danger. Perhaps the girls in my squad had all been given a zipper by their parents too. After the incident, some kept their distance, but two or three remained friendly. Everyone, however, thought I was crazy. I was dismayed. I forgot that in the previous two years, people in Beijing had lived in the same silence. I did not understand that fear, the best friend of any totalitarian government, had cowed people into obedience.

But i knew fear too. Despite my daytime bravado, I was terrified at night. I was afraid of being sent to prison for what I had said to my squad mates; I was afraid of failing my brainwashing so that I would be kept in the army for another year or kicked out of Peking University. It was then, one night while in the platoon storeroom, that I discovered the song "American Pie."

I was not the only patron of the storeroom after lights-out. Three other girls in my platoon had shared the expense of a brighter light bulb. Every night when I snuck into the room, they were already in position, two of them memorising English vocabulary and the third one reading a thick photocopied volume of Gone with the Wind. Sometimes other girls would try to squeeze in, but with the four of us taking up the space between the shovels and brooms, there was no place for another person. Other options were explored - the small and damp room where we hung our laundry was taken up by a few regulars, as were the two most desired toilet stalls, the ones with doors. Most of the late-night roamers belonged to the group who believed their only future was to go to America; they studied English at night and lived with their American dreams in the dreary daytime. I did not consider myself one of them, even though I too listened to tapes of English conversations.

When the last of the three girls had finished her late-night study between one and two o'clock, she would replace the bulb with the original one, a greasy ten-watt. After she had closed the door, I took out my journal from my uniform pocket and wrote in the dim light. I did not want anyone sitting next to me while I was writing. Even alone in the storeroom, I wrote in a heavily metaphoric language, not about my life, but about the autumn crickets moaning in the grass, the pigs strolling by the drill ground, the hungry spiders trapping the even hungrier flies. Every day when I was in drill I worried that someone would find my journal under my thin straw mattress. What I could not write about was why I was writing, and obsessively I wrote down irrelevant things so that I could stop worrying.

One night, I put an unmarked tape in my Walkman. Instead of the usual English-language conversation, there was a man playing the guitar and singing the saddest song I had ever heard. The tape had found its way to me because a high school friend of mine, who had a crush on an English teacher, had recorded the song off a tape sent home by his sister from America. His passion ran out before he had a chance to present the cassette to the teacher so, instead, he had stuck it in the pile of English tapes I brought to the camp.

I curled up on the floor and wept before the last girl left the storeroom. She looked briefly at me and returned to the photocopied novel. I did not understand most of the lyrics, but a few lines, sad and slow, made me shiver. "And in the street the children screamed/ The lovers cried and the poets dreamed/ But not a word was spoken/ The church bells all were broken," the man chanted. I did not understand how he could remain calm at such a calamity, singing so patiently about a silenced world that one could not love but still could not give up the hope of loving and changing.

I was a lonely teenager in a cold world, with only a tape of music to turn to. But even the music, the singer told me again and again, would die. Thinking about it made me miss a command during drill which ended with everybody facing Major Tang, our ideological director, and me standing with my back towards him. It took me a few seconds to register the reality, when Major Tang was already in front of me, barking a question about my pig's brain.

Major Tang had a habit of yelling directly into your eyes, spittle spraying your face. When he caught us reading English, he would tell us that we were the walking-dogs of American imperialists. Once he overheard a few girls sing pop songs about love and romance, on a Saturday night. He called a company meeting that same night. "You reminded me of the female cats in spring when they screech at night in need of a fuck," said Major Tang.

I was terrified that he knew about the speeches I gave at our squad meetings. I was sure Xing, or another girl in my squad, would tell on me.

Later, I would imagine that I had answered him defiantly, calling him a stupid ostrich because he had a long neck and a small head. Or I imagined that he had begun to carry out an on-the-spot execution. I was not afraid when he pointed the gun at me; I listened to the song that overcame the noise of death.

In reality, I just tried harder to avoid such public humiliations. In the end, the only other contact I had with Major Tang was comic.

There was a ping pong table in our activity room, and on Sundays we stood in lines to play a game. To ensure that everybody had a chance to play, we had a rule that each game only had three points, and each person would play no more than two games at a time.

One Sunday, Major Tang entered the room. "Aha, Sunday ping pong; let me play a game," he boomed, and pushed to the front of the table. The player on one side handed the bat to him. The player on the other side, a platoon ping pong champion and a friend of mine, smiled and said, "Ready, sir?"

"Yes, see how I'll beat you," Major Tang said, waving the bat and stomping a foot on the floor. The girl served and I was happy to see Major Tang set his bat at the wrong angle. The ball flew into the wall. Beside the table, I announced, "One-zero."

After my friend had won three points, I picked up the ball. "Three-zero. Sir, you're out."

"What? I'm not warmed up yet. Three points are not enough. Let's play six points a game."

When the girl beat him six-zero, he insisted on a game of 11 points. It kept growing to 15, and then to a full game of 21 points. Some of the girls waiting in the line started to leave. When Major Tang lost again, I announced innocently, "21-zero. Sir, you're out now."

Major Tang stared at me for a moment before he stormed off. Two minutes later, he blew his whistle and called for extra formation drill because, he said, we had allowed ourselves to slack off. The game was a small triumph but we lost the rest of the Sunday to drill and listening to his speech.

As a communist party representative, Major Tang ruled. Each work unit, like a small empire, was (and is) ruled by the party, and abuse of power is very common. In many cases, party officials who violate national laws are subjected first, and sometimes only, to inner-party discipline. Of course, to profit from the system, one has to be a party member. Xing, our squad leader, submitted an application to join the party the second month we were in the army. This alone guaranteed her control of the rest of us. Oddly, despite all my gestures of resistance, I had to draft most of her public speeches because among the nine girls in my squad, I could write the best. It is hard, even now, for me to reconcile the fact that I would criticise party propaganda, but at the same time write pages of it myself. In truth, the more defiant I was at the squad meetings, the more afraid I was of Xing and her possible revenge - my writing for her was a trade-off for a limited space of disobedience. Isn't this the perpetual dilemma faced by many Chinese intellectuals?

Xing joined the party the first year we returned to Peking University. Unlike in the late 1980s, joining the party became trendy for college students in the 1990s. With a machine gun in one hand and the offer of privileges in the other, the party, in the post-Tiananmen era, successfully enlisted the next generation. When I was in college, it was clear that there were only two possible ways to live my life - to join the party or, like many of my classmates, to apply to American graduate schools.

I chose america for many reasons, but the person who made it possible was Lieutenant Chang, my platoon officer. She had joined the army after junior school and had worked for three years as a switchboard operator before being sent to a military nursing school. After graduation, she was among the lucky ones to be chosen as a training officer for the Peking students. Like all the other female soldiers who had worked for some years at the switchboard, Lieutenant Chang was slightly deaf, and spoke with a thundering voice. She was aged 24, tall but not pretty.

Something about Lieutenant Chang let me drop my guard with her from the beginning, though she was as dislikeable as all the other officers. My letters to my parents, as I recently discovered when I re-read them, were filled with reports on Chang. "Lieutenant Chang has not been in a good mood recently; for each misdemeanour, we have to write a self criticism of 1,500 words," I wrote. "The first unlucky one who got the assignment was a girl who accidentally fell down while running. Lieutenant Chang told the girl to explain in depth her failure to run well." Lieutenant Chang would take away half of a Sunday and make us discuss the meaning of slogans such as, "the gun aims at where I point it to; I aim at where the party points me to." Once, she made one of my squad mates practise 50 "face-rights" because she had smuggled half an apple in her pocket for drill; the way that girl wailed through the commands makes me shiver to this day.

Yet I didn't fear Lieutenant Chang as I feared Major Tang, or even Xing, and I allowed my contempt to show when she talked too much. She was not an eloquent person, and once I even volunteered to speak in our discussion because I wanted her to know that I could speak better than her, even when I did not believe a single word I said.

A few months into training, I was caught by Lieutenant Chang reading a Hemingway novel in one of our communist faith classes. I was so absorbed in the book that I did not hear the cough of warning from a neighbouring girl. Chang snatched the book and told me to see her at the end of the day.

It was the first time I had entered her room. It was a small one, with a perfectly made bed, numerous prize certificates framed on the wall, and a bookshelf empty except for a few pop magazines. She smiled and asked me how I felt about army training.

"Nothing is more honourable than being here to accept the best re-education ever," I said.

She asked again what I truly thought of the army.

"I truly think it's my honour to be here," I replied.

Lieutenant Chang was disappointed. "What do you think of this?" Chang said, flicking through the novel. "An English book, in communist faith training. Do you recognise your mistake?" Only after she repeated the question did I reply, "Yes."

"Write a self-criticism and I'll give the book back to you," Lieutenant Chang said.

I had expected worse. But somehow her gesture of leniency made me even more stubborn. "I don't have anything to write," I said.

Chang stared at me and said, "You must write, or you won't get the book back."

"Why don't you keep it then?" I said. "You could learn a little English for a change."

Lieutenant Chang looked at me, and I stared back. Her eyes were filled with dismay and hatred. I watched both her hands squeeze the book; I waited for her to hit me with it. She could do whatever she wanted, but we both knew that I would still win. I was smarter, better educated, with a future that she would have no part in. She ripped the book in half and I did not flinch. In a tired voice she ordered me to leave her room. For a brief moment, I felt sympathy for her shame, but more than that I felt proud of what I had done to make her ashamed.

For the rest of the year, to my surprise, she was very kind to me; I repaid her kindness by not making fun of her. The day we left the military, all my squad mates went to say farewell to her, but I refused. A while later, an order was sent to me that she wanted to see me in her room. I showed up light-hearted, ready to leave the camp and be a free person again. There was no sign that I would be kept back for another year; there was no threatening jail term awaiting me.

The moment I saw her, I knew she had been crying. "Sit down," she said and pointed to the only chair in the room. I took the chair, and she leaned on the table, much taller but I did not look up at her.

"I'm asking you here just for a chat," she said.

I nodded.

"What will you do after college?" she asked.

"I don't know. Maybe try to go to America."

"What is there in America?"

"I don't know. You have to take a look to know."

She nodded. "You'll have a bright future," she said, and brought out the confiscated book. It had been mended carefully with tape. She held the book out for me. "Here. I have no use for it," she said.

I accepted the book and thanked her vaguely. She waved her hand to dismiss it, and said, "You're not happy here in the camp."

"Of course I'm not happy. How can I be?"

Chang shook her head. "You're too stubborn. Listen - this is the only thing I can tell you because I'm older. You're smart and you'll have a happy life if you learn to let things go. Don't think too much about what's right and wrong. You'll only hurt yourself."

I looked up at her, and she smiled. "I know you better than you realise. I read Xing's reports about you. I did not pass them on to the company officers because it wouldn't be good for you. But you have to know that not everybody will watch out for you."

That was the end of my year as a dissident. Chang had done the one thing within her authority which could truly help me - to keep silent when her role required her to act otherwise.

I left the army with no more fears, but also no more desire to speak out. I had been lucky. I had been stubborn and naive and idealistic, but I could not go on being a dreamer because such luck would not last.

Thousands of others must have experienced such an epiphany in the early 1990s. Money became the central topic of everyday talk. In 1992, the party replaced the "planned economy" with a policy of "communist market economy." It did not take long for people in Beijing to forget about Tiananmen. Silence, and the pain of the deaths, were replaced by a habit of joking when 1989 was brought up. It had been a different era, everybody had been young and immature, but reality had taught us a lesson. Now we had acquired the wisdom to look back and laugh at ourselves.

I spent my college years studying single-mindedly for one goal - to get into an American graduate school so I could leave the country. Of 110 graduates from the biology department in 1996, 70 went to America to study. Five years later, nearly 100 of us were in America. In the post-Tiananmen era, the dream of democracy was outdated, replaced by more immediate concerns for personal welfare. It was a success for the government too. A generation of young people had become either leavers, or collaborators.

I left my tape of "American Pie" for Lieutenant Chang when she gave me permission to leave her room at the end of our conversation. She did not understand English, but I always hoped she might understand the song. She was 24, still young enough for a different life. But when I told her so, she smiled and said that the army was the only life she had known since she had been 15. I asked her to come and visit me in Beijing; she agreed, but when we said farewell at the train station, both of us knew that we would never see each other again.