by Liao Yiwu
A while ago, I published a dozen “reactionary” essays online. The Ministry of Public Security’s National Security Office gave me thirty-two days of criminal detention for incitement to overthrow the government. After I was released and had a few days to rest, I took a bus to visit Yu Dongyue’s family, who live about forty miles from the Liuyang County seat.
He had been out of jail for a while and was calmer. He no longer knelt down when he saw someone, but his eyes were still as blank. You couldn’t speak loudly or he would start trembling all over and then kneel down. His family was always trying to help him get his memory back. They were always talking about this or that person from his past and about the names of their next-door neighbors. For a moment it would seem that he had remembered he was Yu Dongyue, but he would soon forget it again, just like the people in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, who all lived in their own fabricated worlds. Yu Dongyue had strongly recommended that novel. He had never imagined that he would live in such a world himself.
How do you support yourself now that you are married?
I don’t know. We don’t have a home of our own, and I don’t have any insurance or retirement pension. I’ll just have to depend on luck. These days our main source of income is home tutoring. The number of students fluctuates all the time. Our average monthly income is less than 1,000 yuan.
Would you like to go abroad?
What would I do if I went abroad?
You would be free. This is a country of bandits.
But even so, it’s the country where I was born and raised. Even if I wanted to leave, I couldn’t bear to part from it. Who can take away my inner freedom? At home, there are a few unavoidable small conflicts. But love, family ties, and friendship are the perpetual theme of life. One just has to learn gradually to adjust to changes in society. We’re all small people who must resign ourselves to adversity. But compared with other ordinary little people, we have a June Fourth obsession that will never go away, that enables us to confront political fear and feel the impulse to challenge it.
I can’t see what future there could still be for this nation and this society. The price we paid, the passion we had for this country—in the end was it just insignificant, even laughable? Our efforts to make people in the future remember may just be wishful thinking. In the end, our very existence may make honorable people, successful people—the ones who manage to make it in any era—feel uncomfortable. So forget it. I’ll just have to be content with what I have. Thinking about it too much just gives me a headache.
Do you want to have children?
It would be hard to support them. I’m not thinking about it for the time being.
The Massacre Painter
In the spring of 1989, Wu Wenjian, a nineteen-year-old cook and an aspiring painter who admired Van Gogh and Gauguin, was moved to act after witnessing government troops move into Beijing. For making a speech on June 5 denouncing the bloodshed, he was branded a “violent criminal” and sentenced to seven years in prison.
I first met Wu on a sunny day in 2005 in Beijing’s 798 Art District, a thriving colony of studios and art galleries converted from old factories and warehouses. We quickly moved to a nearby restaurant serving northeastern food. I didn’t have to do much to get him started. Dressed in a blazing red shirt and apparently in high spirits, Wu talked for several hours nonstop against the cacophony in the restaurant, as though well prepared for what he would say. He barely lifted his chopsticks to touch the food.
“Volumes have been written by and about the ‘Tiananmen elite,’ ” said Wu. “But who is there to speak for the June Fourth ‘thugs’? They have no place in history, no voice in society. Nobody has come out to defend them. All their suffering has been in vain.” After dinner we moved to a quieter location, where Wu continued to talk until well past midnight. When we finally parted at a street corner, I had photographs of his oil paintings depicting the massacre in my backpack. He has been turning out these nightmarish paintings for years and never yet exhibited one. “They can wait,” he said.
* * *
Let’s start from before June Fourth. Your family? Your profession?
Wu Wenjian: I was born into a family of industrial workers—tried- and-true proletarian pedigree by Communist standards. There are two large state-run enterprises in Beijing: one is Capital Steel and the other is [Beijing] Yanshan Petrochemical Corporation, which is part of Sinopec and employs several hundred thousand workers in Fangshan District. Both of my parents worked for Yanshan. My brother and I went to Yanshan company schools.
Going back further, my paternal grandfather secretly joined the Communist Party while attending a technical school in the 1930s. He later attended a military college set up by the Communists during the War of Resistance against the Japanese, and died a hero on the battlefield in 1941. My maternal grandfather also joined the Communist Party in the 1940s. He was arrested once by the Japanese and severely tortured. They burned his back with a branding iron.
My father, his brother, and my mother’s two brothers were all also Communist Party members. I was indoctrinated with the traditional revolutionary ideology from early childhood: I was taught to work hard and live simply, to devote my life to the Communist cause and to the liberation of humankind.
Although my family had such a long tradition of supporting the Communist Party, both of my parents earned an honest living as factory workers. I followed in their footsteps. After I graduated from high school, I was assigned to the Yanshan Petrochemical Corporation’s general services department to train as a cook. I was young and not at all happy with the assignment, but my father advised me to do whatever the Party asked of me. By 1989, I was nineteen and had worked at the cafeteria for two years.
At that time, I became obsessed with oil painting and started taking lessons from an art teacher. I spent my days studying how to paint. Even while I was cooking at the cafeteria, my mind was drifting to the works of Van Gogh and Gauguin. I didn’t know that the student movement had started. I wasn’t at all sensitive to the political climate. A few days after former Party secretary Hu Yaobang died, I took a bus downtown to see an exhibition at the National Art Museum of China. Afterward, as I strolled around downtown, I saw students marching. They were carrying Hu’s portrait. I stood watching on the sidewalk for a while and even dropped 1 yuan into a donation bucket.
You were still just an observer. When exactly did you get involved?
I was a nobody, just a sesame seed in a big pot of soup. It would be too presumptuous to say that I was “involved.” There still weren’t that many people in Tiananmen Square at the time. All the action was centered around the Wangfujing shopping district. And I was this kid dreaming of being a painter, who hated going to work. I got into the habit of running downtown whenever I got a chance. Everything I heard down there was so refreshing.
Ordinary Beijingers like me didn’t join the students until May 20, when that idiot Li Peng declared martial law and troops were preparing to march into the city from several directions. On that day, workers at my factory orchestrated a large-scale demonstration to support the students. We first gathered in front of the Beijing train station. All of Chang’an Avenue and Tiananmen Square were packed with people. I stayed with my factory contingent, caught up in the excitement but without any real political motive. Many people were simpleminded like me, just being patriotic and supporting the students.
How many demonstrations did you join?
I would say four. When things heated up in Tiananmen Square, it was thrilling. Sometimes I stayed downtown overnight, sleeping on the grass. After the May 20 demonstration, my coworkers wanted to do more to help the students. They dispatched me to the Tiananmen student command center to seek an assignment. Young hothead that I was, I rushed into it without a second thought. The students had set up six or seven strict checkpoints in Tiananmen Square. I had my work ID with me, and each time the student guards stopped me, I went on and on, explaining why I wa
s there. It took quite some effort to finally pass through the last checkpoint and get a glimpse of the command center, which had been set up in a tent at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Several student leaders were wrapped in shabby grayish coats and looked unshaven and unkempt. I stood there unable to figure out who was who, so I just yelled out: “We are workers from the Yanshan Petrochemical Company. Do you need help? We have a big contingent.” The students surrounded me and started sizing me up, then one of them said: “Let us think about it.”
I waited there for several minutes and was just about to leave, when someone passed me a piece of paper with a note: “Please go to the northeast corner of Tiananmen Square and help keep order.”
With that note, about a hundred of us from Yanshan Petrochemical occupied the northeast corner and kept order there for a whole night. Tiananmen Square was chaotic. Rumors were floating around, speculations about the government’s next move, but Beijingers, rather than being intimidated, sprang into action. To use old Chairman Mao’s words: The great masses had finally been mobilized.
It was a sea of people. Who could have counted? I was about to collapse from exhaustion, but the nobility of the human spirit around me kept me going. Many people showed up at the square to volunteer. They distributed food and water. An old man in his seventies elbowed his way into the square with the help of his daughter-in-law and handed me two big bags. His daughter-in-law explained: “We wouldn’t let Dad come, but he insisted on bringing you food. Nobody could stop him.” I was moved to tears. Sadly, that kind of pure humanity is long gone.
So did you stay in Tiananmen Square?
No, we were there for two days and then we went back. Over the next couple of weeks, I only went downtown once. I spent my time painting at home. On the night of June 3, I was painting with my TV on, when suddenly all regular programming stopped. There was an announcement saying something to the effect that people were not allowed on the street and that the government was taking action. I became very anxious. I couldn’t sleep at all that night.
First thing the following morning I rushed downtown, prepared to die. I had been brainwashed by the Party since childhood about the army and the people being as close as “fish and water.” Not even in my worst nightmare could I have imagined that the soldiers would open fire on people. I couldn’t stop myself from going to Tiananmen to see for myself, secretly hoping that none of it was true.
The bus stopped at Tianqiao. I got off and walked to the square. Along the way, pools of blood were everywhere. One of my paintings depicts the scene from that day.
Were you able to enter the square?
No. The troops and tanks were clearing it out. I couldn’t get in. I could only see smoke from a distance. But people could get through from the side streets. It was chaos: piles of debris here, sporadic gunfire in the air. When I got near Qianmen, I suddenly saw People’s Liberation Army soldiers wielding body-length wooden sticks. I ran over to see what was going on.
You had a death wish?
I’m a pacifist. I may have been only nineteen, but I disliked extremist acts like throwing bricks and smashing bottles. I still clung to the belief that the soldiers wouldn’t lose their cool if they weren’t provoked. But as I moved closer, someone jumped out from a side street and threw bricks at them from behind my back. I [turned and] quickly waved my hands and yelled: “Stop! Stop! Don’t provoke a conflict!”
The guy who threw the bricks ran away. Since I hadn’t done anything, I just stood there with the courage of my convictions until a soldier standing opposite me shouted: “He’s the one who did it! He’s the one yelling!” I instinctively turned around. A sea of green uniforms was moving toward me with sticks raised above their heads. My body went numb and I started running.
Most peasant soldiers have short legs. Hard as they may train, they’re no match for my long legs. More importantly, I was running for my life. At one point my legs started weakening and the iron tip of a stick came down on me, scraping my back. My adrenaline shot up, and I bounded forward.
I’m a Beijing native and knew my way around. I turned into a small lane. The soldiers got scared and stopped following me. But I ended up with a big purplish-black bruise on my back, which didn’t go away for over two weeks.
How many people were running after you?
I was scared out of my mind. Do you think I was counting? I guess there must have been a few hundred of them. It was like they were chasing after a flock of ducks. I could feel that there were people all around me running away from the soldiers. A young guy only a few steps behind me got hit and fell down. He was immediately covered by a green-clad mass of soldiers raining sticks down on him.
By then I had dashed into a small lane near the old Beijing train station. When I saw the soldiers give up on me, I hid behind a broken wall to watch. [The guy who fell] was less than two hundred feet away. I could see very clearly. Only after the soldiers left him for dead did I dare come out to help him with several people who were hidden inside the train station. I took his head in my arms. He was still breathing, but his smashed head had changed shape.
There was no blood, but his head didn’t look like a head anymore. It looked like a head painted by that foreign painter—what’s his name? Bacon. I asked him, “Where are you from?” He responded, “Capital Steel.” We intercepted a flatbed three-wheeled cart, put him on it, and rushed him to Tongren Hospital. The hospital corridors were packed with wounded people. We handed him over to two nurses who were covered with blood and we left. I was seized by grief and anger. My mind was in turmoil.
How many people were lying wounded or dead in that hospital?
I really don’t know. We were not allowed to go in. The nurses were receiving patients at the entrance to the corridor. When I went back to the street, the tears were just streaming down my face. It was getting late.
June 4, 1989—that date has been etched into my mind and into my bones. All night I was preoccupied by big questions like “Where is this country going?” and “What am I going to do?” I found an empty bus near the Qianmen No. 5 bus terminal. Over a dozen distressed people were already inside—students, locals, workers, people both from Beijing and from out of town.
I waited until dawn to catch an early bus and didn’t get home until noon. My blood was still boiling. I found a T-shirt and wrote on it with a paintbrush: “Give me democracy. Give me freedom.” On the back of it I put the famous quotation by Dr. Sun Yat-sen: “The Revolution has not yet succeeded. Comrades, you must carry on!”
I put the T-shirt on and wandered around the Yanshan Petrochemical complex, telling everyone I ran into about downtown. Before long, a crowd had gathered around me at a crossroads, blocking traffic. A bus couldn’t get through and all the passengers got off. The crowd asked me to give a speech, and before I had the chance to agree, they pushed and shoved, then lifted me on top of the bus. But people didn’t think that was high enough, so they led me to a nearby scaffolding.
I was a kid, still totally inexperienced: What kind of eloquence could I summon up? I shouted a bunch of slogans: “Down with Deng Xiao-ping! Down with Premier Li Peng! Workers, strike! Businesses, strike! Oppose the government crackdown!” I whirled around like a grindstone, showing people what I had written on my T-shirt. All this later showed up in my indictment.
I assume there were a lot of plainclothes policemen in the crowd.
The crowd was all workers [whose families] had been with the company for two or three generations. We grew up together. Everyone was out of their minds that day—more than a thousand people. After a while they were all shouting slogans on their own. Some people even suggested we drive a bus downtown to fight the army. At that moment my father rushed over. People at the public security bureau had alerted him: “Your second-oldest son is staging a rebellion.” He came as fast as he could, seized me as I was coming down from the scaffolding, and yelled: “You bastard!”
I stopped his hand in midair and shouted back like a hero
: “Don’t hit me!”
A bunch of students from the Second Institute of the Petrochemical Industry happened to be in the crowd. They didn’t know my father. When they saw that someone was trying to slap their “hero,” they went over to grab my dad and tried to beat him up. I promptly interceded, yelling: “Don’t hit him. He’s my dad.”
After that, events took their course. The passion and excitement died down by that evening. My dad was really strong and wouldn’t let go of me for anything. He dragged me all the way home. There was such a gulf between us. My belief in the forever glorious, forever correct, forever great Communist Party, its government and its soldiers, had been turned upside down, but my dad wouldn’t agree with me. He was a real macho man. In my memory he had only ever showed vulnerability once, when my mother passed away, but this time he did it again. When we got in the house, he didn’t try to beat me. Instead he said: “You went downtown on June 4 without even telling me. Do you know how chaotic it was there? You didn’t come back at night. I hardly slept a wink. Each time I heard the wind blowing outside, I woke up and went to check your room. Your mom died young. If anything were to happen to you, it would be all my fault.” He stopped and the tears came out.
With my father’s rebuke, my whole mood came down. “I don’t think I can undo anything,” I said. “I’m sure they will arrest me. Why don’t I find a place to hide for a little while? A significant movement like this won’t be over soon. I suspect that the crackdown could trigger a civil war.”
My dad didn’t want to hear my analysis. “Don’t make trouble again or I’ll kill myself,” he said. I couldn’t argue with him. He still supported the Party, and he was my dad, after all. So I packed up some of my stuff and fled overnight to his native village in Hebei Province. My grandma was still alive then. I stayed with her. I was arrested on June 20, 1989.