by Liao Yiwu
You didn’t agree with them and you couldn’t work with them. You could have just dusted yourselves off and left.
We couldn’t do that. We had come such a long way to Beijing. We had to take responsibility for what was happening. Yu Dongyue was depressed, inconsolable. He suggested that we self-immolate together. We planned many different ways of doing it, like going up on the Jinshui Bridge, dousing ourselves with gasoline, and lighting ourselves up, which would have made quite an impression. But what would we achieve? Should we publish a “Self-Immolation Declaration” beforehand? Who should we send to tell the whole country that we had given our lives for democracy, for freedom, to resist tyranny, and to wake everyone up? The situation was desperate. If we didn’t do it properly, people wouldn’t understand why we had done it, and the regime might even use our deaths to slander the democracy movement.
There was just no point. I made an alternate proposal to attack the famous portrait of Mao Zedong on the Tiananmen gate tower, symbolically declaring an end to Communist tyranny. Yu Dongyue and Lu Decheng agreed right away. From midnight until dawn on May 22, we discussed our plan. We thought of climbing up onto the tower and taking down Mao’s portrait. It didn’t look like we would have to climb very far, but when we saw how well guarded it was, the climb up the wall looked harder than climbing up to heaven. The next morning, all red-eyed from lack of sleep and looking like feverish patients, we racked our brains and managed to get a ladder and carry it to the doorway under Mao’s portrait. Even with a ladder the height of several men, we still couldn’t reach that damn tyrant, already dead for many years, who had stomped all over us while he was alive!
We took turns studying the situation from below, examining the area around the gate. Finally we saw that the nails that held the Mao portrait to the gate were as thick as my arm. That meant that even if we got a high-enough ladder and risked being cut to smithereens, we still might not be able to knock the emperor off his horse.
Didn’t anyone notice you?
Nobody paid any attention to anyone else. Very often the center of a movement is like the eye of a hurricane. People are relaxed, marginalized, and isolated. Naturally, people who are at the center of world attention are a different matter.
So that’s when you thought of treating the tyrant to some rotten eggs? At that time I was still at home in my Sichuan mountain town of Fuling watching the live television broadcast. So I witnessed your brave act, and I was shocked. I remember the voice of the announcer at the scene, the white-haired Chen Duo of the Central People’s Broadcasting Station, trembling with anger.
When we realized we wouldn’t be able to take down Old Mao, we had to go to plan C. We went to the department store in Wangfujing and bought twenty eggs. At first we thought we’d just eyeball the distance and throw the eggs right at Mao’s portrait. But then we thought about how the color of those eggs wouldn’t be dark enough or make a very visible splatter. Fortunately, Yu Dongyue likes painting. He said that it would work if we bought some oil paints, mixed the colors to a dark gray, and filled the eggs with that.
Preparations took a long time, and we were quite serious about it. We bought some calligraphy paper, brushes, black ink, oil paint, paint thinner, and glue, and then rushed to the post office to mail our last words to our families back home. I forget what I wrote. I seem to have quoted a lot of Byron’s poems. Lu Decheng put a lot of thought into his. He was full of emotions. He was an only child. I heard later that his parents fainted on the spot when they saw the live broadcast. I still remember some of the things that Yu Dongyue wrote. He had five sworn blood brothers back in Liuyang, so he bent over and wrote letter after letter. Something about how we should learn from Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills and the famous line about how “the wind howls across the cold Yi River water; the warriors are gone, never to return.” A poet, he wrote lots of stuff like that, with soaring elegance.
I still remember this bit of doggerel he created. “There are a thousand reasons why you walk on this side of the street. There are a thousand and one reasons why you cross the street and walk over to the other side of the street!”
The impulse to cross a line. Of course, you did cross to the other side.
After finishing up our wills, we were hungry. We took those twenty eggs to cook at a small food stand by the north side of the Jinshui Bridge. In a flat wok we spread a thin layer of flour batter, beat in the eggs, and sprinkled some chopped green onion. That day we stuffed ourselves with too many of those thin jianbing pancakes that are a specialty of northern China. For a while the bright golden-yellow pancakes smelled great and were tasty. We had never had them before in Hunan. After eating too many of them, we couldn’t eat any more. We nearly vomited.
Then we gathered the egg shells and took them to the entrance of Zhongshan Park on the left side of the Tiananmen gate tower. We spread a plastic sheet on the ground and sat down on it to begin making Mao-smashing eggs. We filled the egg shells with oil paint mixed to a dark gray color and then sealed them one by one.
Then we put down a sheet of high-quality art paper, four feet by about two and a half feet, and thought carefully about an appropriate couplet. It had to be the best couplet written since 1949. I suggested a phrase and Yu Dongyue, filled with emotion, wrote it down in one stroke. “Five thousand years of tyranny ends here. No more personality cults starting now.” And across the top: “Freedom is mighty.”
The arrow was now ready in the quiver. Yu Dongyue got out his camera and took a picture so that the couplet would be “preserved forever.” Lu Decheng and I also took advantage of this to have our photo taken at the gate entrance to mark the occasion. Now all those things are sealed in the criminal records of the public security organs.
You didn’t give these “revolutionary relics” to some dependable person?
In that sea of people we had no idea who might be reliable. Then we decided on a simple division of labor. I was tall and had the longest arms, so I would block the river of people flowing beneath the gate and announce that the Mao-smashing action had begun. Yu Dongyue and Lu Decheng were responsible for pasting up the couplet and throwing the eggs. So everyone took up their tasks. I started by running to the central gate under the tower and stretching out my arms to block passersby. “Excuse me, excuse me! Please everyone stop for a minute,” I yelled a few times. Nobody had the slightest idea what was going on. Fortunately, a few students pushed their way forward to help, and so we were able to stop the stream of people. They thought we were with them, since Lu Decheng and I were just twenty-five or twenty-six and Yu Dongyue was twenty-two, a boy wonder who had graduated from college at eighteen.
The two of them quickly posted the couplets on either side of the central gate—not quite straight, given how nervous they were. Then they rushed back to get into the best position and started throwing the eggs. Originally we thought twenty paint-filled eggs would be enough to ruin that portrait of Mao, but we didn’t imagine that those two idiots would be so useless with their egg tossing, all the eggs either overshooting or coming up short, or coming in too slanted, or not thrown hard enough, so that the eggs fell to the ground before reaching their target. I watched helplessly and cursed them. What the hell were they doing? Luckily, they were not totally shameful. Out of the twenty eggs, three hit the portrait. The tyrant’s double chin got some pockmarks.
It all happened in just five or six minutes. Smashing the eggs on the portrait took about two or three minutes. It was like a dream. The people in the square didn’t react. They were numb, horrified, or blindly applauded—and by the time they woke up, it was already over. Several layers of people suddenly surrounded us and yelled “Criminals!” and someone scolded us accusingly: “What are you doing?” “Where are you from?” “Who told you to do that?”
The disciplinary patrol of the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students came and pushed back the crowd. I was at the edge then; I could only see the heads of the other two. I could faintly hear some accusatory
voices: “You have evil intentions. You want to destroy us all. You want to ruin this patriotic movement.” Lu Decheng, who had paints of different colors all over him from the broken eggs, argued hard right back at them. “We are right to punish Mao Zedong. It’s legal. We didn’t do anything wrong.” I also applauded and cheered from a distance: “What you’re saying is true!” The students next to me were very stern. They pointed at me and said, “It’s none of your business. Shut up!”
“Of course it’s my business,” I said. “I’m with them!” And by saying that, I was caught, too. I was seized by the students and taken to the headquarters in the square. That’s how we finally got to the base of the monument—the very same student movement center we had racked our brains trying to get into but had failed to reach. How we got there, though, wasn’t very honorable. The three of us sat there, dejected, with our heads hung low, waiting for what would come next. Off to one side the student leaders were having a discussion. They took a long time. Finally, plainclothes policemen appeared. They went round and round and then entered headquarters asking for us. The student leaders politely refused to hand us over.
At that moment a woman quietly came over and whispered in my ear to say, “The situation doesn’t look good for you. You had best look for your chance and sneak away fast.” I immediately shook my head, saying, “All three of us will stick together, life or death. I can’t just run away all by myself.” She pondered for a moment and then said, “I’ll give you my telephone number. If you need help, just call me.” I promised that I would. I was young then, with a good memory. She said it to me once and I remembered it. I didn’t ask who she was, but from the expression on her face I could see that she really did want to help me. Later I forgot both her and her telephone number. I think that now if I saw her again, I wouldn’t recognize her.
Ultimately, they handed us over. The standing committee of the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students at the headquarters had voted, we learned, and decided that we should be taken to Dongcheng District Public Security Bureau’s Tiananmen security office. They argued about it for a long time, but in the end we got into a police car in the pouring rain. They handcuffed us. From the time the event occurred at 2:30 in the afternoon until the evening when we were in the hands of the police, I certainly had chances to escape. I don’t know about the other two. But why would we want to sneak away? We had long before mentally prepared ourselves to accept the consequences.
We were locked up in the Nanchizi police station for the night. The next morning we were transferred to a holding pen opposite the Beijing Municipality Dongcheng District Detention Center. The whole place was deserted. Besides me, there was only a habitual thief from Beijing in the cell. That guy really had a life of ease. If he didn’t have to get up, he would just lie around, smoking and sleeping and then sleeping and smoking. He even asked me to bring him water to drink. I couldn’t help it. Loneliness is hard to take. People who were poles apart happened to be thrown together and started chatting casually. I really wanted to continue paying attention to the development of the movement, but now I was isolated. One could say that the Beijing prosecutorial system was half-paralyzed. Even the detention center wardens only rarely appeared. I suppose they were watching and waiting to see which way the scales would tip within the internal Party center power struggle.
For about two weeks on either side of June Fourth there weren’t any interrogations or even any questions put to us. Every day, besides eating, drinking, and shitting, we just lay around and slept. My bones ached from sleeping so much. Fortunately, I’m a naturally lazy person, so I learned early on the art of falling into a deep sleep. I didn’t worry much about what might happen. If the world is destined to end but in your wishful thinking you hope that it won’t, you’re just wasting your time.
You had almost reached Zhuangzi’s state of mind.
That lasted until midnight on the night of June 3. Suddenly there was gunfire outside the detention center. It sounded like spattering peas in a wok, startling me awake from my dreams. So they were finally shooting, those motherfuckers. This is what they mean when they say political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. This was how the Communists had come to power. How could students and educated people win out over old political hacks capable of murdering without blinking an eye? I didn’t get any sleep that night. I paced back and forth inside my cell until dawn. All over my body my muscles twitched uncontrollably. The thief admonished me kindly: the country is in chaos; you won’t solve anything by worrying about it.
Early on the morning of June Fourth, the first group came in. They were all hot-blooded young people and university students. Their average age was about twenty. More and more kept coming in through June 5. Our empty detention center overflowed in the blink of an eye. When the cell couldn’t fit any more people, they continued to cram people inside. Fortunately, people’s bodies are made of flesh and so are flexible.
According to regulations, there should be no more than fourteen or fifteen people in a cell like that, but there were more than thirty people in that cell. There wasn’t even enough room to stand. We were formally arrested on June 15. The once-paralyzed prosecutorial system woke up, just like we had, as if from a dream. In an instant it resumed its usual cruel, high-speed operation. Arrest orders flew out. Checkpoints were set up everywhere to arrest people. That Red Terror was like in 2003, when China was hit by SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] and you hardly saw anyone on the streets. Ideological disinfection and bodily disinfection are a lot alike.
During the state of emergency, the authorities did not trust the Beijing police. The soldiers who took over the detention center were mostly brainwashed brutes. They were beasts with sharp teeth and claws who knew no laws. They brutalized the detainees. Students and ordinary people alike were nearly beaten to death. When we were arrested and transferred to the detention center, a soldier lifted me up as if he were lifting a live chicken and threw me toward the jeep about three feet away. That wasn’t enough to vent his anger. He raised his automatic rifle and smashed its butt against my face. Immediately, fresh blood spewed from my mouth. Liao, do you see the fake tooth in my mouth? That was put in to replace the real tooth that was knocked out.
I was held in the notorious detention center Turtle Mansion, but I wasn’t officially considered a thug. Because I wasn’t in time to set fires and block military vehicles, I was simply labeled a scoundrel who had violated the Great Leader. We spent five weeks stewing in block seven of Turtle Mansion. On July 10 we were taken to a secret hearing in a Beijing Municipal Intermediate People’s Court basement.
Fuck, according to the regular rules, our crime was obvious and we made no defense. The whole thing took less than two hours. The most interesting statement of course was Yu Dongyue’s, arguing that we didn’t have any political goal. He said it was performance art, the most outstanding piece of performance art of the century. And that people would only understand what it really meant several years later.
I was sentenced to life in prison, and I ended up doing eleven years and six months. Lu Decheng was sentenced to fifteen years; he actually served eight years and eight months. Yu Dongyue was sentenced to twenty years and served sixteen years and nine months. He was the last of us to be released. We didn’t appeal: that would have been looking for trouble. We were sent back to Hunan at the end of 1989 to be locked up in Hengyang Prison [Hunan Provincial Prison No. 2].
When I first arrived and still didn’t understand how things worked there, I told everybody how many people were killed on June Fourth, how cruel and tyrannical the Communist Party was. I kept talking. I wouldn’t work. I was very enthusiastic about discussing with the other political prisoners how things were changing. That got me many warnings from the prison authorities. I didn’t pay any attention, so I was declared a prisoner subject to close supervision. I was beaten up five or six times. One time, as two policemen held me, I was beaten with two electric prods. I tried to resist but soon colla
psed. After that, fists and steel-toe shoes rained down on me. I rolled all over the floor. My good clothes went missing after that beating. I lay on the ground stark naked. None of my bones were broken. They had a little mercy after all. Hunan prisons are generally barbaric.
Later, I learned to go along. I stopped being so goddamn stubborn. I still insisted that I was a political prisoner and shouldn’t have to do reform through labor. Then they assigned a more experienced prisoner to mentor me and establish a so-called teacher-student relationship. Later still, I was transferred to Hunan Provincial Prison No. 3, also called the Yongzhou Prison. Yu Dongyue was transferred to Prison No. 1, where political prisoners were held, widely known to be the most barbaric prison in Hunan Province.
Around 1992 I read in the newspaper about Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour” speech. After thinking carefully about it, I decided that China was entering a long, dull, and dark “Brezhnev period,” like in the former Soviet Union. My spirits sank with that recognition and I fell into a long period of depression.
In light of that, I needed first of all to survive. So I told the prison authorities that I was a skilled teacher and they transferred me from the metalworking shop to the education department, where I taught classes for the other prisoners.
Of us three, Lu Decheng was the luckiest. He snuck across the border into Thailand, although he was nearly repatriated back to China from there. Yu Dongyue had the worst luck. The day he was released from prison, I asked some good friends from the democracy movement to go meet him. To my great surprise, he was like a block of misshapen wood, completely different from the witty, high-spirited Yu Dongyue that I had known. I said to him over and over, “Dongyue, my old friend, what are you doing? Don’t you even recognize me?” He didn’t react. When he did react, he suddenly knelt down and grabbed my two legs, yelling out loud, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me.” I felt a knife run through my heart. June Fourth is too enormous. I’ll leave it to the historians and the political scientists to evaluate the whole thing. The problem that I couldn’t stop thinking about was only Yu Dongyue. I felt that I had destroyed him. He doesn’t know who he is. If you ask him, “Who is Yu Dongyue?” he’ll just look at you blankly, with no idea at all.