by William Bell
Dad stopped fiddling with the tapes and stared down at them. I knew what he was thinking. He looked up at me, at my eyes. I knew he understood that we owed it to Xin-hua to get the contents of the tapes and films on the news.
Then it was Dad’s turn. He told me that on the night of the fourth, he was shooting tape fast and furious on Chang An Avenue — the burning armoured personnel carrier, the students helping the soldiers out, the soldiers disappearing into the crowd, all of it made a perfect image. Then the troop trucks came and the soldiers jumped down from the trucks and started to fan out. He saw a knot of uniformed men coming at him in his viewfinder.
“I tried to outrun them — or out-push and shove them. You could barely walk through that crowd. Some students saw what was happening and tried to protect me. They formed a circle around me but they were no match for gun butts and bayonets. The soldiers got to me, smashed the radio with their gun butts, smashed the camera, and dragged me back behind their lines. I was thrown into the back of a car and taken away somewhere. They kept me overnight and criticized me and took me to the airport the next day. Told me to get out on the next plane.”
Dad went on to say that as soon as they had left him at the airport he took a cab to the foreign hotel compound on the airport road. He figured the Lidu Hotel would be the best place to phone from. He called the Beijing Hotel time and time again, finally getting hold of Eddie, who was all right but worried to death when he got back to the suite to find no one there. Eddie had said to stay at the airport because Dad would never be able to get back to the Beijing Hotel.
“I could hear the gunfire over the phone,” Dad added. “Eddie said he’d try to find out where you were. It was hell, Alex. All we could do was wait to see if you showed up.”
“What about Eddie?” Mom asked, lighting another cigarette.
Eddie had headed back to the hotel after he had told me he would. He got back safely.
“What happened to his two-way, Dad? He went off the air suddenly and I couldn’t raise him again.”
Dad smiled — for the first time a real smile, not a forced one. Eddie had been on his way back to the hotel on the east side of the square. He stopped to look at the students’ barricade of buses across the square near the Monument to the Peoples’ Heroes. While he was lighting his pipe he dropped the radio.
Over the next few days, I got poked and prodded by the doctor, who said I was “traumatized” — as if I needed him to tell me that — and clipped and buzzed by a barber — so I am almost blond again with a brushcut.
Xin-hua’s videos made it onto the news. There are reports about China on the news almost every night, and the stuff that Xin-hua and I got has been shown — edited, of course — over and over again. It’s all there for the world to see.
Eddie sent all my journals and notes over from Beijing, along with a nice letter to Dad and me, saying he was sorry the way things had worked out. He’s still there, still at the hotel, still sending reports. He reported that the Chinese government is telling a bag full of lies about what happened in Tian An Men Square on June fourth, just like Xin-hua said they would. They’ve been rounding up the so-called hooligans and bad elements who caused the so-called counter-revolutionary revolt and executing them. There’s a massive hunt on for student leaders and for people who talked to foreign reporters. These people are being shot, too. Eddie found out that after the government shoots someone, they send the victim’s family a bill for the bullet.
Last night Dad had to go out after supper. He fussed about leaving me alone — he’s barely been out of the house since we got back — but I convinced him I wouldn’t fall down in a fit if I was alone for a couple of hours. After he left I flopped in front of the TV, using the remote to flip through the channels, looking for a brainless sitcom to take my mind off things. One of the American channels was showing a program called Storm in Beijing.
On the screen was a video clip that had been shot in daylight from the roof of the Beijing Hotel. The date given was June sixth. That would be when I was still at Nai-nai’s house. On the screen a convoy of four tanks was rolling down Chang An Avenue towards the hotel, unchallenged in the deserted street. The hatches were closed and the big machine guns up top were covered in canvas.
I felt a chill of fear as the tanks seemed to draw me back to the wide avenue in front of the Forbidden City. My hands shook as I searched for the button on the remote to change the channel.
Suddenly a man sprinted out into the street. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He carried a little briefcase in one hand, and a rolled-up windbreaker in the other.
He stopped right in front of the lead tank, facing it, defying it, standing almost at attention.
The tank stopped so suddenly the big gun dipped. I held my breath, waiting for the machine-gun burst that would rip the man from his feet and hurl him backwards onto the road. Nothing happened for a moment. Then a belch of diesel smoke spurted from the side of the lead tank. It moved forward, then swung sharply to one side to avoid the man.
The man sidestepped, skipping in a lateral motion that kept him in front of the ugly machine. The tank stopped again. The man stood at attention, challenging. Another belch of smoke as the tank pivoted again, this time to the other side. The man moved with it, forcing it to halt.
Then he walked forward and climbed up onto the tank.
His arm rose and fell as he banged on the hatch. Finally the hatch opened, but no one appeared. The man seemed to be talking to whoever was inside.
He climbed down from the tank and turned his back on it. Again the puff of diesel smoke spurted out the side of the tank. As it began to move forward, the man turned and stood in front of it again, stubborn, unyielding, a thin ordinary man against the military power of the PLA.
Just at that moment, three or four people dressed in civilian clothes ran into the street from the right. They grabbed the man and appeared to plead with him. Finally, they pushed him roughly to the side, his body bent in a bow as he resisted them. The tanks started up again and ground forward along Chang An Avenue, the Avenue of Long Peace.
I let out a sigh, relieved.
On the screen was an American news announcer. He said the man was a student named Wang Ai-min. He had apparently pleaded with the soldiers in the tank to stop the killings that continue in Beijing.
I felt a surge of admiration for the stranger whose name I now knew. He seemed to represent all those people I saw in Tian An Men Square demonstrating for democracy, facing the guns with empty hands. Well, I thought, at least someone escaped.
“Shortly after this incident,” the announcer said, “Wang Ai-min was arrested. Yesterday he was executed.”
I sat there on the couch, numbed by what I had heard. I don’t know how long I sat there, probably just a moment or two. But with every passing second something inside me, something like a steel spring, wound tighter and tighter. The TV announcer’s words replayed in my head. “Yesterday he was executed … Wang Ai-min was arrested. Yesterday he was executed.” The spring coiled tighter and tighter until it screeched with the tension. “He was executed … executed … executed.”
Then the spring snapped.
I jumped up from the couch, screamed something at the top of my voice, and fired the remote against the TV. It hit the top corner, split open, spilling out the batteries, and fell to the floor. I ran from the room, crying and cursing the murderers in uniform who were still murdering, and charged up the stairs and into my room. I stood just inside the door, panting, my wounded leg throbbing from the pounding on the stairs, and glared at the plastic model planes that hung from the ceiling on black threads. I had used black to create the illusion that the planes were actually flying. I punched at the nearest plane, a MIG fighter, and felt a jab of pain as the plane spun on the thread and arced out of reach. I swung again as it arched back towards me and missed. I cursed again and flung open my closet door and rummaged around for a moment before I found an o
ld hockey stick.
Grasping the stick at the blade end I started swinging it like a bat, crying and shouting in anger as I wailed away at the planes. The MIG spun away and cracked into halves against the wall and fell to the floor. A military transport streaked across the room, one wing ripped off it, and plopped onto my bed. It split into bits as I brought the hockey stick down on it. A HUEY helicopter exploded into a thousand pieces that dropped to the floor like plastic rain.
When I had smashed the planes out of the air I turned to the model personnel carrier on my desk. Two quick crushing whacks and it was a small pile of splinters. I turned next to the tanks that guarded my dresser. I imagined a thin isolated figure standing in front of each tank, defiantly. Then I raised the stick over my head. I slammed at the tanks over and over, pounding them into a confusion of dark green plastic bits, bogey wheels, strips of track, and broken guns.
Last came my trophies. They were lined up along a shelf on the wall. I held the stick at arm’s length and slid it along the shelf, watching with satisfaction as each trophy toppled off the end of the shelf and crashed to the floor. They lay there in a meaningless pile.
I was still crying, still sobbing, when I stopped. I was breathing heavily. I looked down at my shaking hands. Blood flowed freely from a deep gash in my finger onto the handle of the hockey stick and down to the blade. I threw down the stick and left the room.
I had to walk downstairs carefully. My calf throbbed where the bullet had gone through. I walked into the kitchen and flung open the cupboard where Dad keeps all the pots. I yanked out the biggest, a Corning glass saucepan, sending the rest of the pots crashing down and tumbling out onto the floor. Holding the pot I went down into the basement, switching on the light when I got to the bottom of the stairs.
The ancient Xi’an army stood silently — the honour guard of the First Emperor — in formation. The bowmen were kneeling, their empty hands waiting for the arrows that I hadn’t made yet, the long arrows that they would hold in a formal pose. In my head I heard Lao Xu’s quiet voice. “Thank you for lending us your arrows, Cao Cao. You can be sure we will return them soon!” The overhead light gleamed on the soldiers’ bright clothing and winked on the brass coloured studs on their armour. Six men remained to be painted.
I limped to the hot plate I use for making the soldiers, slammed the pot onto it, and turned the control knob to MEDIUM. I hobbled over to the big cupboard, pulled open the doors, and began to lift out the shoe boxes inside. I placed them on the Xi’an display board and unpacked the lead soldiers from the cotton batting inside, standing them upright on the painted plywood. Then I tossed the shoe boxes and cotton aside.
I stepped over to the hot plate and turned the heat to HIGH. In a few moments the bottom of the pot glowed cherry red. I went to the Xi’an display and gathered up a handful of the new two-thousand-year-old lead soldiers. The blood from my finger leaked onto their armour.
I carried them to the hot plate and dropped them into the pot.
The paint smoked and burned as the soldiers began to melt. I limped to the table, scooped up more soldiers, fed them into the pot one by one. The bottom of the pot was a lake of lead and each bloodied soldier sank slowly into it.
I worked steadily, calmly. When the Xi’an army was gone I began on the others, lifting them to the pot, dropping them in one after the other, Horsemen of the Light Brigade, guerrilla fighters from Dien Bien Phu, Canadian infantry from Vimy Ridge, Mounties and Metis from Frog Lake, bows, arrows, cannon, sabres, rifles, machine guns. All the soldiers from all the wars melted down together into lead again.
Later on, Dad came home. From my room I heard him come in, slam the door, utter an exclamation. Footsteps raced to the basement door, clattered down the stairs, creaked slowly up again.
In the kitchen, the sounds of tea being made — water running, the whistle of the kettle, the clink of spoons in mugs. Then Dad’s footsteps climbing the stairs to my room. Silently he handed me a mug of tea and sat at the foot of the bed, holding his tea in both hands. He sat there, silent, for a few moments.
“You know, Alex, I think I’ve finally started to grow up.”
I leaned back against the headboard and said nothing, just waited.
“Even when the soldiers roared into the square and jumped down from the trucks I was still at it, still trying to get the perfect image, you know? Still after the great award-winning shot. As if I wasn’t there, as if I was a camera, not a person, not … involved.”
He shook his head and took a sip of his tea. I looked into his face. He was confused. This was hard for him. He was trying to work things out, like Xinhua when she explained about the PLA in the Five Pagoda Temple compound.
“Even when I was being arrested, part of me was saying, This is great! The big newsman arrested while he tried to get the story out to the public. Hero stuff.
Then when I realized that you weren’t at the hotel, that you were gone, it wasn’t a game anymore.”
He stopped talking and swallowed hard. His hand trembled as he raised the mug to his lips and sipped the steaming tea.
“I realized it could have been you Alex. All those kids about your age, shot down, bleeding in the street. Any one of them could have been you.”
Dad looked around the room, composing himself again. His eyes rested on my dresser, then my desk. The tank and armoured personnel carrier models had been beaten into bits. He looked up at the empty strings dangling from my ceiling. He nodded slowly.
“So it’s all gone,” he murmured.
“Pardon, Dad?”
“All that work you put in, Alex. All those hours. And the lead soldiers, they’re gone too.”
Then I knew what he meant. “I guess it was all a game to me too, Dad,” I said. “It isn’t anymore.”
I thought about Beijing, the big spring winds, the walls and alleys, the Forbidden City and Tian An Men Square. The night filled with machine-gun fire and screams, crackling flames and Lao Xu’s shout of outrage before he died. And, a few days later, that single crack of gunfire.
I hadn’t been able to do anything to help. I hadn’t been able to stop anything.
I had known two real heroes in my life and they were both dead. I had seen another on TV today and he was dead, too. Not one of them had worn a uniform.
I took a long drink of my warm tea. “Nothing will be the same now, will it, Dad? Everything will be different, and we will too.”
A couple of moments passed before he answered.
“Yeah, but we can’t let this get us down. We can’t let this beat us.” Dad’s voice had some of the old fire in it. His eyes sparkled. He tried to smile. “Right, Shanty?”
I smiled too and shook my head. “It’s Shan Da, Dad.”
Afterword
The number of those killed in the Beijing massacre on June 4, 1989 has never been officially recorded.
Approximately one month after the incident, Chen Xi-tong, Mayor of Beijing, submitted his report to the Politburo of the Communist Party of China. “During the whole operation,” he wrote, “no one, including those who refused but were forced to leave, died.”
A Note on the Pronunciation of Chinese Names
The Chinese names in this book are given in the official form of transcription called Pin-yin, and each syllable is given separately. Here is a brief pronunciation guide for surnames:
Xu — Hssoo
Wang — Wong
Nie — Nee-uh
Liu — Lee-oh
Zhao — Jow to rhyme with the bow of a boat
Other words:
Lao — pronounce the “A” as in father
Xiao — long “I” and long “A”: hss-e-a-oh
About the Author
William Bell holds Masters degrees in both Literature and Education. Currently the Head of English at Orillia Collegiate, he has also taught at the University of British Columbia as well as colleges in Harbin and Beijing.
William Bell’s other novels include Crabbe, No Signature, S
peak to the Earth, and Zack. Forbidden City has been translated into more than ten languages.
Copyright © 1990 by William Bell
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copyring, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.
This edition contains the complete text of the original paperback edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
FORBIDDEN CITY
Seal Books, published by arrangement with Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Doubleday Canada edition published 1990
Laurel-Leaf edition April 1996
Seal Books edition February 1999
For information: Seal Books, 105 Bond Street, Toronto,
Ontario M5B 1Y3
eISBN: 978-0-385-67412-6
“Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited, 105 Bond Street, Toronto, Ontario M5B 1Y3, Canada.
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