by Liao Yiwu
* * *
With the help of Wu Wenjian, his contacts, and my own contacts from prison, I interviewed June Fourth thugs in Beijing and in Sichuan, my native province, from 2005 to 2011, when I finally fled China. With these secret interviews with the unknown survivors of June Fourth, I wanted to document what happened to them during the movement, the torture and imprisonment they endured, and how they are getting by today on the margins of Chinese society. Unable to stop listening and recording, I compiled this book of interviews, calling myself a remembrance worker. Many of those I interviewed were under house arrest or surveillance, including from their own families, and every rendezvous was difficult, requiring careful, secret preparations. For reasons of safety, few in today’s China are willing to speak about Tiananmen, let alone in front of a tape recorder using their real names, but these brave men were. I had suffered less, but I was one of them, and I had the help of trusted go-betweens. Nonetheless, harrowing episodes recounted to me in dozens of interviews will never be published because the victims refused to allow me to make them public.
In each of these stories, including my own, a young idealist is swept along by the revolutionary tide of 1989, when the fall of the Soviet Union made it seem as if democracy might finally come to China. After the massacre, each faced the brutalities of the Chinese prison system, including “reeducation through labor.” Sexual dysfunction, divorce, estrangement from family, homelessness and joblessness, bitterness and betrayal—this is the world of most former protesters, especially those from working-class and provincial backgrounds. One former protester is virtually homeless, while another plans to self-immolate, and a third dreams of becoming a Buddhist monk. Another, released from prison, has an apparently successful life in advertising but secretly, obsessively, paints scenes from Tiananmen. Others remain committed to the movement, enduring imprisonment, harassment, house arrest, and endless surveillance again and again for the tiniest crimes, like paying their respects to the tomb of a slain protester or joining a political party.
Today’s China was forged at Tiananmen Square, and Bullets and Opium is the story of how it happened, in the words of those who were there—the “thugs,” to use the name the Party used to slander them. They were not the “protester elite”: students at top universities, usually from privileged families, who became the voice of the movement and in many cases fled abroad afterward or got off relatively easily. The thugs were working-class people and peasants who supported the students, bore the brunt of the crackdown, and were treated more brutally in prison because of their lower social status. Many of them were men, for reasons that are deeply rooted in Chinese society, and all those interviewed in this book, partly for reasons of access, are men. Far from the human rights limelight, I found the thugs at hot-pot dives in distant suburbs, scraping by on the streets, dodging house arrest and police surveillance, living with parents and without prospects.
The West knows of only one protester: “Tank Man,” the man in the iconic photograph who stood in the street, physically blocking the oncoming column of tanks billowing exhaust like gigantic farting beetles. They kept trying to make their way around him, but he kept getting in their way. “You’re steel, and I’m flesh and blood,” he seemed to be saying. “Come get me if you dare!” This moment was preserved for posterity because a foreign reporter happened to capture it on video, but there were countless Tank Men whose deeds were not captured on camera.
This book is a record of those countless others, people scarred by history and then worn down by money and power. But my dejected interviewees do not think much of the record. I, too, had my own doubts about testimony being collected to be used in the future.
In 2011, after years of listening, it was a story I finally wanted to escape from. After half a lifetime in the nightmare, I wanted to say farewell to 1989. Had it been worth it? I tucked all the testimonies I had collected into my clothes. I turned off my cell phone and took out the batteries, hoping to evade police tracking. That also allowed me to avoid worried relatives.
The first day I officially went missing, I was in the distant city of Dali, drinking with a pack of disreputable friends. Seated across from me were two beautiful female writers in their twenties who could outdrink and outcurse the men. Pointing at my nose, they shouted, “Stupid cunt!” so I had to flip the table. The gang applauded my guts and figured I would hang around there for a while. I could never tell how many informers were around. But seeing me drinking heavily there night after night, not doing anything serious, they relaxed their surveillance. Then, just like that, I suddenly left and never looked back.
Arriving in another city on a long-distance bus, I chose a small inn at random and hid there for two nights to make sure nobody knew where I was. Keep moving, keep moving! I yelled to myself even in my dreams. Before dawn broke, I headed out the door with my bag over my shoulder. It was already dark when I reached a small town on the border. Amid thunder, lightning, and pouring rain, I checked into a hotel and got in touch with the person from the border region who was supposed to help me.
It took him a long time to show up. We whispered to each other for over ten minutes. He said that crossing the border was easy. You could get a boat and just row over to the other side. “The police don’t pay attention,” he said, “and we regularly ‘pay our taxes.’ ” I said I didn’t want to ride in a boat. I wanted to cross over on the bridge.
“That would be a bit difficult,” he said, “but we could try.”
Ghosts of 1989, brothers who suffered hardships in 1989, mothers and fathers of 1989, those of you in heaven, those of you buried underground, those of you in the rain or blown by the wind—from the shadows of the border, I bow to you. The next night, when I walked out of China into Vietnam’s Lao Cai Province, I looked back at my native land as if in a dream and an old line came to me:
The world is a very narrow bridge
Don’t be afraid
You can cross it
PART I:
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BEIJING
The Performance Artist
On the afternoon of May 23, 1989, at home in Sichuan a thousand miles away, I saw a live broadcast from Beijing showing the “Three Brave Men from Hunan”—Yu Zhijian, Yu Dongyue, and Lu Decheng—who had thrown rotten eggs at the portrait of the dictator Mao Zedong hanging from the Tiananmen gate tower. Officials called them the “Three Thugs from Hunan.”
Their protest came just over three months after the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, the most complete exhibit of Chinese performance art ever shown. Among the exhibits were people shooting at a telephone booth, a living person incubating a chicken egg, mourners dressed in white funeral garments, and people distributing condoms to passersby. The performance artists constantly clashed with the police—getting beat up, dragged away from the scene, and detained. A few exhibits were closed down, too. Among progressive young people, it aroused wild enthusiasm, launching performance art in China and adding to the revolutionary mood in the streets.
The smashing of Mao’s portrait by the Three Brave Men from Hunan must have been the most outstanding piece of performance art since the Chinese Communist regime was established in 1949.
A friend asked me if I would be interested in interviewing the ringleader of the Three Brave Men, Yu Zhijian, since Yu Dongyue had lost his mind and Lu Decheng had fled. Yu Zhijian himself was under house arrest for writing a “reactionary article” and publishing it online. Taking every precaution, I traveled to the city of Changsha, and we arranged to meet one night when he would be able to slip away from his captors.
When we finally found each other, Yu looked like an old Shanghai gentleman down on his luck. He was half a head taller than I was, with a head of shiny hair. Before we even had a chance to shake hands, we quickly got into the same cab speeding down ramrod-straight May First Avenue toward the city center, crossing the Xiang River by bridge, and passing Orange Isle in the middle of the river. The car stopped after we went over the bridge. We went behind
the Fenglin Hotel and found a divey, rancid teahouse. We had to shout for a long time before two disheveled-looking waitresses came out and allowed us to pay 80 yuan for a private room and a pot of tea. The women had us wait for a moment and then opened a dark curtain, waking up the three other women workers sleeping there and making them put away their makeshift bed. They put out the tea tables and chairs and began boiling some water for tea.
We closed the door so tight that there wasn’t even any space for air. We were both ashen-faced from sleeplessness. Yu smoked one cigarette after another, his already small eyes narrowing as he squinted. He joked that all we needed in order to look like bandits were two knives.
* * *
Yu Zhijian: I’ve been under house arrest for a number of months. The police have been watching me in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. But even tigers take naps, so at five a.m. today, before dawn, I took advantage of an opportunity and hurried to the train station. I took the train from Liuyang to Changsha. When I got off, I went in circles for a while. Once I knew I wasn’t being followed, I could relax.
You look like you couldn’t care in the least. You are an artist.
Thanks for your flattery. But playing hide-and-seek with the police is instinctive in a liberal. It has nothing to do with being an artist.
In 1989, Lu Decheng, Yu Dongyue, and I were all poor and none of us had ever been to Beijing before. How could we ever make revolution? We took out all our wages and counted them up, but it still wasn’t enough. The night before we left, I went to visit a classmate who made a living as a self-employed businessman selling electrical appliances. He made a generous contribution to the revolution, lending me 1,000 yuan, which would be worth twenty times as much today.
A train ticket from Changsha to Beijing only cost several dozen yuan. When the driver on the bus from Liuyang to Changsha heard that we were going to Beijing to support democracy, he gave us free bus tickets. When we got to Changsha at dawn, we went straight to May First Avenue and the provincial government buildings to find out what was going on. The Hunan student movement was spreading like wildfire. The intersections were full of students and city people marching. We couldn’t help but get very excited. I had long legs, so I ran to the market to buy brushes, ink, and cloth. Yu Dongyue immediately started to dash off a banner. He wrote in giant characters: “Let’s March to Beijing,” “Down with Deng Xiaoping! Support Zhao Ziyang!” At the bottom of the banners he wrote, “Hunan Petition Team.”
We occupied the square in front of the Changsha train station, put up our banners, and took turns speaking. The speeches were about the most popular topics of this movement: fighting corruption, stopping official profiteering, changing the political system, amending the constitution, and opposing the system of one-party dictatorship. Yu Dongyue had one of those scarce high-quality Japanese-made cameras, which he used for interviews as a journalist for the Liuyang Daily, so he was in charge of documenting it all in photos. I never thought the photographic masterpieces he so painstakingly made would end up being used against him in court as evidence of his counterrevolutionary propaganda and crimes of incitement.
The crowd in the square by the station was huge. Though I was just an average rural elementary school teacher and it was my very first time doing what the authorities later called “counterrevolutionary incitement” in front of a big crowd, I spoke very well and was very effective. Everybody got excited and started throwing money into our collection box. Some threw in dimes, some 2-yuan bills, and some even the new 10-yuan bill. I was very moved. That was the biggest bill then; they weren’t making 100-yuan bills yet. I remember to this day a man stuffing two whole handfuls of bills into our collection box. We stirred things up for just a few hours and the box was full; we had collected over 3,000 yuan. Some Hunan students, forty or fifty people, joined our petition group on the spot. They all wanted to go to Beijing to support the student movement.
Tickets in hand, we poured onto the train, which was crammed with patriots pressing against each other in the crowded passageway. When the conductor who came to check our tickets heard that we were a Hunan petition group going to support the movement in Beijing, he called for the train crew captain, who told us he completely and totally supported us and wanted to put us into the lounge car usually reserved for railway personnel.
The next day we arrived at the station in Beijing. As soon as we got off the train, we attracted a lot of attention when we raised our banner, which was half as long as a railway car. Our group marched together yelling slogans as we walked toward Tiananmen. When I stole a look behind us after a while, I saw that coming up behind us was a crowd of hundreds, mostly students from various places who had just gotten off the train but couldn’t find their own groups. Strength in numbers took our enthusiasm to new heights. We shouted slogans like “Return Hu Yaobang to us! Down with Deng Xiaoping! Support Zhao Ziyang! We want freedom, we want democracy, we want human rights, the Chinese people want to stand up.” Our yells were louder and came faster and more furious than the drumbeats in country operas, drawing even more of a crowd. About forty or fifty minutes later we saw the famous Tiananmen gate tower, which before we had seen only in newspapers.
We were just about to plunge into the boundless sea of people, when a person who seemed to be a student leader asked us where we were from. We answered in unison: “We are the Hunan Petition Group and we have come to support the student movement.” “Very good,” he said several times, but added: “Your slogans are somewhat inappropriate and too extreme. People on the square are not just shouting whatever comes to mind.”
Over the next two days, the Hunan University students who had come with us gradually dispersed to their own groups and organizations, so the so-called Hunan Petition Team gradually dissolved. All that remained were the three of us: Yu Dongyue, Lu Decheng, and myself, the core members who didn’t belong anywhere else, exposing the true nature of our isolation.
We got to Beijing on May 18 and landed in trouble on May 23. We had five or six days of excitement in all. We participated in some student and citizen marches and made some speeches calling for the end of one-party dictatorship and for complete Westernization. We hardly slept those days. At night, when we were simply too tired, we would find an underground passageway or a street corner, put down some plastic sheeting, wrap ourselves in military jackets, and doze off. I remember one morning when I woke up there was a female university student lying on top of me. It was a very romantic scene.
Three things stood out for me. The first was an extra-large banner hung on the Great Hall of the People proclaiming the “Emergency Meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.” It made people fantasize that the democratic utopia was about to appear before our very eyes.
The second was that many military helicopters were flying over Tiananmen. Sometimes they flew very low, nearly brushing the top of the gate tower. They were always dropping propaganda leaflets addressed to the “hoodwinked masses” and calling on us to surrender. All kinds of plausible but false rumors spread across the square, making people nervous.
The third thing that made a deep impression on me was the speeches of student leaders like Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, and Chai Ling. Nonsense like “Maintain order as strictly as possible on the square.” Nonsense such as “City people and workers, return to work as normal.” Chai Ling even talked like she was an entertainer, saying things like “Thank you, thank you everyone for your support!” It was as if the university students were God’s chosen ones, as if they were the only ones with the right to be true patriots. Other social forces, they apparently thought, were just clueless idiots stirring up trouble. Well, fuck that. If it weren’t for everybody’s support—if it all depended upon the students—could it have lasted that long? The Communist Party would have long since put an end to them. At the time I was disgusted by what they said. The martial law troops were already in the Beijing suburbs. What good would all the internal strife, bickering, panic, and standoffs within
the student leadership do? What use was it pretending to be calm? Were all those fully armed troops vegetarians? What would happen if they started shooting?
How could such a broad-based democracy movement supported by tens of millions of people be handled smoothly by a few little kids? Bloodshed was looming before our eyes and they were still obsessed with all their empty talk. People like us, grassroots, from the provinces, couldn’t join the conversation. We tried several times to get past the guards so that we could talk with the student leaders. Every time the students disciplinary patrol saw what a mess I was, they absolutely refused to let us enter the Tiananmen Square command post, much less see the leaders of the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students. Things weren’t going well, so what could we do? We left a written recommendation and tried to persuade the student disciplinary patrol to pass it on at least as a “document for reference.”
First, we recommended that the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students proclaim, in the name of all the Chinese people, that the Chinese Communist government was an illegal government. Second, we called for a general strike of all workers in Beijing and the entire country, as well as a strike by all shopkeepers. Third, there was something about a disciplinary patrol of workers and students; I can’t remember it exactly right now. We never heard a word about any of it. Things were chaotic; maybe our suggestions were never passed on at all.