The China Coin

by Allan Baillie

  The woman swung her camera forward like a gun and ran, crouched, to a narrow tree ten metres from the passing trucks.

  A few minutes later a truck slid across the street, and stopped. The cyclists looked at the youths with guns and the youths stared down at the cyclists. Suddenly the cyclists wheeled away and fled along Wangfujing, leaving the walkers standing bare, behind trees and in doorways.

  And in that moment Leah stared at a soldier who was staring at her. The soldier stood in the truck with his hand on the side and his rifle pointing at the sky.

  Leah’s body cringed.

  She was certain that the soldier was about to lower his rifle, point it at her. And fire.

  Please, she thought. Please, Tiny.

  Then the woman with the camera started to take pictures. The soldier looked down and a faint frown crossed his face. He lowered his rifle.

  The woman scrambled to her feet in alarm.

  The soldier levelled his rifle.

  The woman ran, the camera banging about her right hip, staring at Leah, mouth wide with her lower lip wet. Leah could hear her now, the sighing pants, the slap of the soft shoes on the road. A whiff of bitter sweat and she was past, a hair comb glinting in the sun.

  The soldier fired, only once.

  The woman crumpled. She took a step, the ankle twisted, the knee skewed, the leg buckled, the body folding. Her arms flapped as she fell, but her face slapped heavily onto the road. The camera rolled into the gutter.

  The truck rolled on and the soldier stared at the woman with a blank face.

  A cargo-cycle man rode fast back down Wangfujing, turning, skidding to a halt beside the woman. People rushed from their shelters to lift the woman to the flat-bed of the cargo-cycle, to retrieve the camera. The cyclist rode off, with men running around the woman.

  Leah was left alone at the side of the road, numb and staring at the spreading stain on the road. After a long time she shuffled back to the hotel like a very old woman.

  She could not tell Joan.

  32 Night

  Leah lunged across the bed to catch the phone on the second ring. ‘Yes?’ She rolled out of the morning glare with a nervous quiver. The nightmare was about to finish!

  ‘Joan Waters?’

  She wanted to hurl the phone against the wall. Not Ke, an Australian man in a hurry.

  ‘No. She’s in the shower.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You’re Leah?’

  ‘Yes.’ Not Ke, but perhaps it’s news from Ke.

  ‘I’m Jim Ellis from the Australian Embassy. I am in your hotel, in the foyer. Can you pack and get here in about five minutes?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Good. We’re getting you out.’ Jim Ellis hung up.

  When Leah told her Joan whimpered, ‘Oh my God’ twice.

  Yesterday Joan had told the embassy where she was, just in case things got serious. She was told to stay in the hotel, that there had been a massacre in Tiananmen Square and soldiers were still shooting people in Changan Avenue. It could not get much more serious. So Joan had waited for Leah for a terrible two hours and when Leah finally arrived she seemed to be in shock. No, she hadn’t seen anything, only some burning buses in the distance, and had Ke phoned?

  Today things must have got more serious. Joan dressed in three minutes while yelling constantly at Leah. Leah scuttled into the bathroom, scooping up everything, into the cupboards, clothes off the hangers, spare shoes off the bed. They were not in the foyer by five minutes but by less than eight. Joan thrust her case at an angular sandy-haired man as he tried to greet her, and paid the bill as if the hotel was about to burn down. They joined a wide-eyed couple in a large car.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Jim Ellis said. ‘We’re collecting all our nationals, getting you all safe. All the other embassies are doing the same thing, the British, the Americans – some soldiers fired at the American Embassy. The government is sending up a Qantas evacuation flight to take you out tomorrow.’

  ‘But I can’t reach Ke,’ Leah said faintly.

  ‘Ke? A friend?’

  ‘A cousin.’ No, that sounded too distant. ‘And a friend.’

  Jim Ellis looked sideways at her. ‘A student. At Tiananmen?’

  She jerked her head up. ‘Yes.’ But his face denied any hope.

  ‘No, I cannot help you. Perhaps the Australian students at the embassy might know of him. Ask around. The hotel knows where you’ve gone. He might phone you at the embassy.’

  Leah remained silent as the car glided along a deserted highway and crawled through a guarded and manned gate. They climbed out of the car and Jim Ellis drove back to central Beijing. Inside the door clusters of tourists drank tea and ate biscuits. Some of them seemed to be excited, but most looked tired and unhappy.

  ‘I’ve lost five thousand dollars, just like that. Bang goes my holiday. Only been in China a fortnight.’

  ‘Hah! At least you’ve seen something. I arrived on Sunday. I may have lost ten thousand dollars, but I’m going to get my lawyers onto my travel group if they don’t give me my money back.’

  ‘But this is an experience! You’ll always remember being evacuated from a city gone mad! You’ll never have something like this again in all your days. It’s thrilling!’

  ‘My travel group are still in China. They left Beijing for Mongolia yesterday, said it wasn’t dangerous. I left them. They’re mad.’

  ‘Do we have to pay for the evacuation flight?’

  Leah watched the two phones at the receptionist’s desk. One was for people trying to make an outside call, to a Beijing suburb or to Australia. People were almost always using it, but they were rarely successful. The other phone was for the receptionist to call out on government business, or for calls coming in.

  After a while she approached the receptionist, a weary Chinese woman. ‘Ah, excuse me, I’m expecting a call.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘From Zhu Ke, a student.’

  The woman softened. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Well if anyone – anyone at all – asks for Leah Waters, or Zhu Leah … well that’s me.’

  ‘I hope for you.’

  A little later the tourists drifted toward the front door.

  Jim Ellis approached Joan. ‘We’re moving the tour groups to safe hotels on the outskirts of the city. Would you like to go with them? Or you can stay with the students, here?’

  Joan swept her hand towards the front door. ‘I think we will – ’ And then she saw Leah staring at the phone. ‘Stay here.’

  ‘Be a bit rough.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  When the tourists had gone the students spread out and relaxed a little. They began to talk.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ a tall boy pulled at a black T-shirt. ‘I just walked in on Sunday to ask what was happening. That was it. They wouldn’t let me out. I couldn’t go back to Beijing University, so this is all I’ve got.’

  ‘The army came to the universities. They shot people.’

  ‘There was a sheet carried from Tiananmen. Was red, soaking. Kids were breaking down.’

  ‘I was in the dormitory and some of the Chinese kids were outside the window making up Molotov bombs to throw at the next tank or truck, no matter what.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home! I want to stay and help them fight.’

  ‘Your parents will love that.’

  The students and Leah made sandwiches for dinner, worrying about an Australian student’s Chinese fiancée.

  ‘Trouble is, the army is sealing off the city. Can’t get into the railway station without something that shows you aren’t a student.’

  ‘They are going to come down on people.’

  There was a collection of RMB currency. People’s Money for the trapped Chinese student.

  A few students carted in some cushions and sleeping bags from an outside storeroom and spread them across the lounge. They were all very tired but few slept. The talking began again.

  ‘Can’t phone Aus
tralia at all now.’

  ‘Sorry kid, didn’t know this Ke boy. You’re just one of us. So many friends we’ve lost, and you never know.’

  ‘They were planning this for weeks, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah. But all of it. Jesus.’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe – ’

  ‘It started on the Friday night, y’know. Five thousand soldiers, unarmed, jogging up Changan to Tiananmen.’

  ‘They were stopped.’

  ‘They were meant to be stopped. They didn’t put up any sort of a fight. They made an excuse for Sunday.’

  ‘A doctor said the body count in the Beijing hospitals was one thousand five hundred.’

  ‘ “Body count?” Christ, it wasn’t a war.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t, but tell Deng that.’

  Leah sat back on a large sofa and after a while the mutterings of the students became a picture. She was in Tiananmen on the morning of Sunday, June 4 1989 …

  Clusters of round lights pick out flashes of red in the rippling movement across the Square. The Monument of the People’s Heroes is alive with banners, weaving torches, but the surrounding buildings – the museum, Mao’s mausoleum, the Great Hall – hunch over their shadows. The students hear distant shooting and some sit in their tents to wait.

  A few minutes before midnight youths run in from Changan, shouting: ‘Live fire! Live fire!’ Troops have attacked a citizens’ barricade of blazing buses to the west, firing to kill. The students’ leader, the tiny girl Chai Ling, gathers people round the Goddess, swearing them to defend the Square to the death.

  A single armoured troop carrier swings into Tiananmen, scattering students as it runs past Mao’s mausoleum, the Great Hall, and away along Changan. A second carrier is attacked with petrol bombs and retreats to the west, slow and on fire. A third carrier is caught on a road divider and set on fire. One of the two crewmen is killed as they both try to escape.

  Troops arrive on the northern and southern edges of the Square, roads blazing behind them. Police burst from the Forbidden City and attack people with sticks.

  Students appeal to the troops on Changan, but the troops seem to be unable to understand them. At 2.40 a.m. they lower their rifles and fire heavily into the mass of students. Some of the soldiers are laughing as they step over the bodies. Behind the troops, tanks and troop carriers form a single line.

  Chai Ling makes a last appeal to the troops over the loudspeakers and is ignored. She then tells the students that only with their sacrifice can they save China. They begin to sing.

  Troops now surround Tiananmen, on the northern edge, the steps of the museums, behind the mausoleum, in the Great Hall. Light gunfire comes from all sides, one of the hunger strikers, Hou Dejian, appeals to the students to hand in any weapons they have collected. Guns and clubs are piled on the top terrace of the monument.

  At 4 a.m. Hou and another hunger striker begin to negotiate with the army commanders to gain a safe passage for the students through the lines of troops. The lights of Tiananmen are turned off.

  In the darkness Hou is promised passage past Mao’s mausoleum, but many students do not want to leave. Students burn rubbish for light.

  At 4.30 the lights come back but the circle of troops has tightened. Students filter toward their promised passage, but troops behind them storm the Monument, clubbing students within reach. Tanks tear through tents, a girl runs between two tanks and disappears. Troops march toward Mao’s mausoleum, firing as they move.

  At 5 a.m. Chai Ling leads the student column through the troops, but the students are later attacked by troop carriers. Several students are crushed.

  ‘Then they cleaned Tiananmen with bulldozers and a fire. Did you see the black smoke?’

  Leah leaned into the warmth of Joan’s body and slept when the last bleak mutter had died.

  She woke when a brash woman strode across the lounge, her necklace tinkling on her neck. ‘This is appalling! Look at the mess. And this is supposed to be an embassy!’

  After a breakfast of bread and cheese and tea an open truck stopped outside the embassy door and was loaded with bags, suitcases, rucksacks and people. Leah looked at the abandoned receptionist’s phone for a moment, then turned away and climbed into the truck. An Australian TV cameraman filmed the truck as it moved away and someone suggested that the students smile for their parents, for certainly the film would get home before they did. Leah tried and failed.

  The truck rolled away from the quiet city toward the airport and passed a small encampment of soldiers. Some of the soldiers pointed at the truck and laughed.

  Joan stared at them in recognition. ‘It’s the mob,’ she said dully. ‘Again.’

  Leah turned away and hauled Ke’s egg from her pocket. She could see the two halves of the coin twirling in the blue together.

  The coin had been so many things: a secret, a treasure, a family keystone, and an accident. What was it now? Just a frozen butterfly?

  No. Not a butterfly.

  Leah lifted the egg to her eye, saw the split coin, almost one coin again, with the marks of a very old town by the Great Canal. It could have been Good Field village, or Turtle Land, or Shanghai, or Beijing. It could have captured the image of a warm, gentle China. But it had been torn apart by a cough, by an eruption of sudden violence and maybe it would never heal. She saw the coin with Ke’s eyes.

  Joan took the egg from Leah’s hands and held it. ‘Pretty …’

  ‘Ke said …’ Leah shrugged, ‘it was China.’

  ‘Well …’ Joan put her free arm around Leah and crushed the girl into her side. Leah looked up and saw that Joan’s eyes were filling.

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Poor, sweet Li-Nan.’ Joan whispered.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Leah closed her eyes. ‘Oh Jesus.’

  The two women clung together in the back of the crowded truck.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Allan Baillie was born in Scotland in 1943, but has lived in Australia since he was seven years old. On leaving school he worked as a journalist and travelled extensively. He now lives in Sydney with his wife and two children and writes full time. He is the author of many highly acclaimed novels for children, and a prize-winning picture book:

  Adrift (Shortlisted for the 1985 Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award, and winner of the 1983 Kathleen Fidler Award)

  Little Brother (Highly commended in the 1986 Australian Children’s Book of the Year Awards and shortlisted for the 1986 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award)

  Riverman (Shortlisted for the Guardian Award and Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award in 1987. It was also selected for White Ravens by the International Youth Library in 1987 and was the winner of the IBBY Honour Diploma in 1988.)

  Eagle Island

  Megan’s Star (Shortlisted for the 1989 Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award)

  Hero (A Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book, 1991)

  Magician

  Drac and the Gremlin (Winner of the 1989 Australian Picture Book of the Year Award)

  Songman (Shortlisted for the 1995 Australian Multicultural Children’s Literature Award and Winner of the 1995 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award – Children’s Books)

  Secrets of Walden Rising

  Allan researched the background for The China Coin during a journey through China with his family in 1989, and he was in Beijing while the dramatic and tragic events were taking place in and around Tiananmen Square in June that year.