by Spencer Wise
Gang’s elbow rested on the hood of the cab. His face blank. Uncomprehending. These things didn’t happen at his factories, in his town.
I looked up and Dad wasn’t at the window. I felt this instinct to slip the red armband off and slink away, belly crawl down the canteen alley and back to the house. Why put your father through more pain? I felt the clammy air weighing against me, my knees shaking. No, that’s deserting, I told myself. You can’t desert an army you joined ten minutes ago. You aren’t a deserter. You’re scared—that’s all.
I inched away from the door. A short distance back from the gate, Gang lifted the receiver to his mouth. The speaker mounted on top of the Humvee crackled and his voice boomed around us in Chinese.
The crowd stirred. Ivy was facing the demonstrators. A dark oval of sweat on the back of her cotton shirt. She shouted into a bullhorn, first in Chinese then in English, all for YouTube, for the outside world watching, which didn’t even seem possible to me right now—that there was an outside, that it wasn’t just us here alone.
“How are we trespassing?” Ivy said. “We invite you to listen. But you order us to leave immediately.”
Gang spoke again. Louder, angrier. Only in Chinese.
There was a stirring on both sides. Everyone seemed to take two steps forward.
“He calls us traitors to the country,” Zhang said from up on top of the rolling ladder. “Enemy of the people. Terrorists. Threatens us to go back to work or else. They built a fortune off our backs and now they want to teach us another lesson. For speaking up, we deserve a beating?”
The demonstrators’ voices grew louder, a rolling slur of confusion and anger. Hisses and boos.
I turned back to Gang. He barked an order and the officers lowered the shields over their faces. The black canisters of tear gas hooked to their rigger belts shimmered in the heat. They patted the magazines jutting out of their rifles. I heard the clatter of boots and vests. Gang was losing patience.
Ivy was yelling into the bullhorn at the demonstrators, “Stay peaceful. Stay back from the gate. This is a peaceful strike. Stay back. Forward is trouble. Don’t provoke. We stick together.”
A noise came up from the crowd. They were pushing toward the gate, tightly clotted. Faces blurred by me. Sweat glistened. Sinewy, sunken cheeks. Angry. Who were these people? Were they really ready to die now?
Across from them, the police came forward in slow vine steps, strafing toward the gate.
Ivy looked over at me.
I froze.
She nodded my attention toward the policemen. A desperate look on her face.
I shook my head no.
She put the bullhorn down on the ground.
I shook my head again. “Get out of there,” I shouted, waving her away.
Ivy turned slowly to face Gang and took a step forward, then another, and suddenly there were two other girls beside her and all three girls linked arms and walked several more steps forward, shoulder to shoulder, and they lay down on the ground in the middle of the gate blocking Gang’s way.
My throat tightened. It couldn’t be the plan. She hadn’t meant this. She was panicking. She thought it was all going to shit and the only way to save the workers now was to sacrifice herself.
I looked beyond the girls to the Humvee. Gang, balanced on the running board, braced against the half-open door, slammed his fist against the roof of the truck and shouted orders in both languages now: feˉn-sàn, disperse; fàng-qì, give up. Again and again, his voice rolled over me.
“I am the Secretary of Foshan Municipal Party Committee,” he shouted, using his full title, his voice tense and strained.
But why wasn’t he throwing the tear gas already? Or sending his officers in? He was grandstanding almost. Maybe Gang didn’t want this to get out of hand. Didn’t want to lose control of the situation.
I looked straight ahead to Zhang and I pointed to Ivy lying in the road. I shouted, even if he couldn’t hear me, “What is she doing? What the fuck is she doing?”
Zhang scrambled down the ladder. To get the girls up I was sure. To stop this. But when he reached the ground he didn’t go for Ivy or the two women. Instead he stood in front of the wheelbarrows of shoe lasts and cement glue at the foot of the rolling ladder—and he grabbed one of the shoe lasts from the pyramid, lifted it over his head and shouted to the workers, to the smartphones still rolling video, “Don’t give them your neck to chop. They won’t hesitate to shoot us. Don’t act surprised. Come on. Self-defense. Grab a shoe and charge them. Throw hard as you can.”
My mind wobbled.
The shoe lasts and cans of flammable cement glue—these aren’t props for the strike, you fool, they’re ammunition. This was his plan all along.
The crowd came forward a few more steps, blocking my view of Zhang.
All right. You’re running out of time. First things first. Stop Zhang. He wasn’t far off. Twenty yards. The width of the courtyard. Across the road. Only a short distance off but I needed to fight through the crowd to reach him.
I started clawing my way through. I could knock Zhang on his ass but that would only start a riot. He wanted that. I needed the workers on my side. I needed a translator.
I stopped. I scanned the crowd, searching their faces. Suddenly there was the wide-open shirt, the chest scar shaped like a rampike.
“Hongjin,” I shouted, but he sailed past. Didn’t hear. I took two quick steps and reached for his shoulder.
“Laˇobaˇn,” he said. Boss.
I leaned close to his ear. “Zhang wants a massacre,” I told him. “I need you to translate.”
Working our way back through the crowd, we quickly reached Zhang, whose eyes widened when he saw me.
He cocked his arm back, ready to hurl the shoe.
I froze.
Zhang had a breakaway group surrounding him. Twenty workers—some armed with lasts, others dousing the huábiaˇo statue with flammable cement glue. They were going to light it on fire.
I started shouting to them, “Stop,” over and over, while Hongjin repeated it in Chinese, Tíngzhiˇ, loud, like metal scraping metal in my head.
The breakaway group turned to look at us; their faces puzzled.
“Put the shoes down,” I said to the workers in the breakaway group. Hongjin beside me translating. “Don’t throw. Put them down. Get back. This isn’t the way. This won’t change anything.”
Zhang was yelling, “He’s one of them. A government puppet.”
Their heads shifted back and forth between me and Zhang.
“Listen to me, please,” I yelled. “If you provoke them,” I said, pointing toward the gate, “everything I told you during the rally that we can do will disappear forever.”
Zhang, standing in the middle of their group, reached into his pocket, took out a lighter and started toward the huábiaˇo statue standing ten feet away.
“Hold him!” I shouted to the workers, pointing at Zhang. “Stop him! Or everything I said, everything Ivy said, the whole vision, will burn up with it.”
Hongjin repeated it and suddenly the two men closest to Zhang grabbed his arms, twisted him away, heels skidding, carried back away from the huábiaˇo.
Zhang looked at me hard but then his gaze shifted over my shoulder.
I turned.
Beyond the gate, Gang took his hat off slowly and flung it into the cab. Then he dipped his shoulder and sank behind the wheel, pulling the door closed behind him.
Zhang’s voice behind me, “It takes blood, Alex. Sacrifice.”
He gave me this sly closed-mouth smile. No joy to it though. A certitude maybe that he was saying what deep down I’d always known.
I heard the growl of the Humvee engine.
Before me, a few yards ahead, lay the girls in the road.
I was moving forward. Fists doubled.
Gang revved the engine now.
It was a short distance to the mouth of the gate, maybe twenty-five quick strides on a sharp angle. I pressed.
Suddenly the Humvee rolled forward, headed straight for Ivy, but slowly, still giving them a chance to stand up and surrender, but I knew they wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t either.
A few more steps and I passed the girls on my right without looking down, I was just enough past them and I had to stop Gang and he was still coming and now I was in that empty no-man’s land between the girls on the ground and the Humvee and I stopped. I stood between the workers lying on the ground and the oncoming truck, my feet planted shoulder width apart.
The Humvee was twenty yards away and rolling and I squared myself in front of the radiator and Gang was coming, the gleaming fender pointing at my chest, the truck crawling forward, a terrible stretching slowness. The engine gurgled, pattered, and I smelled exhaust and cow shit. I saw the outline of Gang’s face through the tinted windshield, ten yards off, and I wavered, a faint voice saying to run, to get the fuck out, but I forced my knees to lock.
I could try to stop him with a flip of my palm, but that seemed absurd, somehow, to do that with everyone watching, but what else was there? All it takes is standing here, I told myself. You must stand here with your arms heavy by your side, the world dissolving in the flared headlamps.
Here I am.
I brace myself. Squint my eyes.
The squeal of brakes, the chrome brush guard stops an inch from my belt buckle, the fluted hood of the truck panting, the radiator hissing, a plume of road dirt cast into the air, rises, sinks.
Then the window on the driver’s side slid down.
The sun hammered down on my neck, but I didn’t bother to wipe the sweat away. I stood still. Hearing my own breathing. I didn’t want to face him.
I took a deep breath and walked to the open car window.
His eyes stayed fixed ahead.
“You ready to confess?” he asked after a long moment.
A spike in my throat. I looked into the cab. On the seat beside him sat a snub-nosed revolver.
“What do you mean?” I said, trying to buy time.
His neck stiffened. He turned his head.
“You are liar,” he said. Deep folds in his brow. “This going to be big trouble for you.”
I had to speak. Had to cop to something. Any second he could reach for that revolver.
“You betrayed me,” he said. “China. Your father. No more home now.”
I put my hands on the sill of his window. “Sometimes,” I said. This made no sense. Neither the gesture, nor the word. My heart thumped. I sometimes lie? Was that better?
“You have come here to overthrow the government. This is your plan, true?”
This picture rippled through me: Gang leading them out to a field, making them kneel, hands tied behind their backs, facing a freshly dug ditch, the cold snub-nose pressed to Ivy’s temple, and Gang flipping his chin, saying, Shoot them all. Then burn the bodies.
There was that side of Gang too. Not just the pragmatist.
He revved the engine and I felt it in my legs. The moment stretched. He wasn’t going to shoot me, I realized. He was going to kill. Ivy. Hongjin. Die Jo. I’d failed. I couldn’t even get myself killed right.
I had to speak fast. But calm.
“Okay, yes,” I said. “I lied to you.”
Gang stared at me. His dead milky left eye somehow more alive than the good one. I couldn’t read his face.
“Gang,” I said, softening my voice. “I want you to just look over on the balcony of the dorms. Fifth floor.”
I pointed to the left and Gang’s line of sight followed my finger. He peered forward, a shadow falling over his face.
“See her with the iPhone? Now look to the roof. You see the iPhone up there, Gang? It’s pointing right at you now. It’s pointing at us. Look at the girl with glasses up on the corner of the roof. See her? And see over there,” I said, pointing right, to Plant B. “You see those girls filming, leaning out of the windows? Plant C. Closer to us. And kneeling there on the ground down by the gate, see them? And crouching on top of the vans with the red bandanas, see them?”
I watched his eyes tack back and forth even when I’d stopped talking. I let it sit with him for a moment, all those iPhones.
“Have you heard about YouTube, Gang?” I asked. “I think you got VPN, you’ve seen YouTube, haven’t you? Of course. Here’s what they’re going to see, Gang, they’re going to see you in this Humvee and three beautiful girls lying in front of you and you’re running over them and killing them. Fifty million people are going to see that around the world. You’re going to embarrass Beijing. You’re going to make them look like murderers, just as you want more foreign companies to come in here. Jobs are way down, stocks way down, everything down—now you go and do this and you’ll be remembered as the guy who lost China.”
His jaw twitched. Grinding his teeth. His mind grinding too as his eyes jumped from one iPhone to the next. All angles covered. All the spots that Zhang had meticulously planned—I used them, used Zhang’s own plan against him, drawing Gang’s attention to every position.
“What are they going to think in Beijing when they see you drive over these women?” I asked. My tone was almost kind, cloying. “To you they’re expendable, interchangeable people, but what are they going to think around the world? What are businesspeople going to think? You know. I know you know. And now what is Beijing going to think about you when the businesspeople are all thinking that?”
I let that sit with him for a moment.
“We don’t have much time, Gang,” I said. “You got to decide. You decide what happens next. Imagine what’s going to be the next scene streamed live. In that little movie they’re filming. Let’s say you send your officers in to clear the yard. The workers—they’re ready to fight. What are the soldiers going to do? Throw tear gas. Hit kids, half of these are kids and old ladies, you know, hit them with nightsticks, and then, I’m going to tell you something, they have weapons too, Molotovs, homemade. So your officers lift their rifles. Even if it’s just rubber bullets. Still there’s a bloodbath all over the internet.”
Here I paused again and let those images sink in. His hands restless on the wheel. He kept shifting his gaze back and forth between all those iPhones. Not saying anything. Which meant he was listening, didn’t it? He was choosing.
“You’re the enemy in that movie, Gang,” I said, still in that cordial voice. “You’ll make Beijing the enemy. You probably want a different ending. So listen, because we don’t have much time. Imagine, in this next ending, you’re going to step out of the cab, Gang, you’re going to walk over there, you’re going to help pick those girls up off the ground and you’re going to shake hands. You put your arm around them and say, ‘Calm down and go back in. We can work out a solution.’ Just because you say that doesn’t mean you’ve changed policies or that your profits go down. It’s already done. I mean, this is already streaming. Going out to the world. If you want to keep your 8 percent growth, they got to understand that a thing like this can be defused peacefully. Beijing and the business world need to believe you got things under control.”
His hands dropped from the wheel.
Finally he turned to face me. He nodded slowly.
He understood.
A flick of his wrist shooed me away from the door. The cab door opened and he stepped onto the running board in his shiny black boots. He took off his right glove, tucked it under his armpit and walked out in front of the truck.
Then he reached out his arm, barely bent at the waist, and extended his hand to Ivy.
From the ground, Ivy glanced at me briefly, then back to Gang. Her arm came up slowly and she reached out her hand to his and the crowd of workers drew close, so they were standing right behind the girls on the ground and
the iPhone shooters pushed their way to the front to film it as Gang helped her up off the ground.
There was the noise of the crowd clapping and I saw Zhang come forward, glaring at me, but he shook Gang’s hand and soon they were all fake-smiling and posing for photographs.
Someone thrust the microphone into Gang’s hand and he waved the police officers forward so they were shoulder to shoulder with the demonstrators, still wearing their riot helmets, and Gang spoke about the big truce.
The Chinese Dream—that’s what Gang kept talking about. President Xi Jinping had been drilling that doctrine into everyone’s head for years. No one believed it anymore. There was a lot of talk about gestures of friendship, which was how you knew it was all bullshit probably. That Gang was talking about gestures of friendship, not real friendship, and I looked up to the fourth-floor window.
I had to find him. Though it wasn’t all clear in my head what I intended to say to Dad.
But I didn’t need to stay around for the photo-op, the fake smiles and handshakes, the crowd all pushing in, trying to get their picture taken with this man they’d wanted to hack apart a moment ago.
Right before I could pull away, I heard Gang’s voice.
“No one was hurt.” He stared at me coldly, and glanced at the workers holding iPhones close to us. Filming us talking. “I hope,” he added.
“Lucky,” I said.
He forced a fake smile and gave a sharp nod. “Tomorrow,” he said sternly, “we discuss the future.”
Then he leaned in close to my ear and whispered, “Everything is going to go back to normal and you know it.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“You have no idea how little you have done.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
He flashed a smile to the girl holding the iPhone right beside his shoulder and then he turned around.
I snuck out of the circle and walked back into the factory yard.
I was headed for the glass doors of the admin building, but then I stopped myself. I didn’t go up there. I didn’t know what I wanted to say. To him. To Ivy. So I stood there like a schmuck, my world in two pieces, and I went straight back to my house and it was much later when Ivy came back, after I heard the Humvee pulling away and the loud cheers rise up from the yard.