by Liao Yiwu
“A death sentence with a stay of execution is not the same as a death sentence,” the head judge explained. “If the accused repents and makes a fresh start, and works hard to remake himself, then after two years the sentence can be reduced to life imprisonment. If you align yourself with the government and continue to behave well, life imprisonment can be further reduced to a definite term of imprisonment. You are still young and have a long way to go. You stumbled and fell, but you can pick yourself up again and one day return to society.”
On August 30, I was transferred to Beijing Municipal No. 1 Prison. Later on I found out how hard it had been to save my life. My parents had been running all over the city, spending money begging people to use any special connections. Several of the leaders in my work unit had made special visits to the public security bureau to intercede for me, trying hard to convince the government that I was a good person and not someone who would commit a crime with premeditation. You find out who your real friends are over time, when something like this tests them.
And your wife?
She divorced me long ago. We hoped for the first few years that us June Fourth people would be politically rehabilitated after three or maybe five years. Later, by the time my sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, society had changed a great deal as well. People didn’t care about their country anymore, only money. She gave up hope and asked for a divorce. Naturally, I understood. It was difficult for a single mother to take care of a child. When I went to prison, my daughter was just three years old. Now she’s twenty-one.
I did all kinds of work in prison. I sewed clothes, I made bags, I packed chopsticks. I processed latex gloves that were exported to the United States. I even did farmwork. The old-time armor in Zhang Yimou’s film Curse of the Golden Flower was all made by us by hand in prison. The prison, like everywhere else, responded to the Party’s call to make money.
The work before 1995 was hard, especially processing the latex gloves. We would be blowing air into the gloves day after day and after a while our tongues would go numb, since it was poisonous. For a while we had to knit five sweaters a day. Strong young men doing women’s work. There was a lot of poor-quality work that had to be redone. We would start from six in the morning and go until two or three a.m. the following day and still we couldn’t finish the work. We would return to our cells to lie down to rest for a little while and then it was time to get up and go to work again.
Did you make any money for working yourself to death?
At the year-end account settlement, we would be given a bonus of 10 yuan or so. The money wasn’t important. The most important reward was a reduction in sentence. We would skin ourselves alive—do anything—for our freedom. That I got out after seventeen years, two months, and twenty-one days in prison was the result of my excruciating hard work and the reform-through-labor “work points” that I had accumulated.
On the outside, like Zhang Maosheng, I looked for work many times, but as soon as people heard that I’d been released from reform through labor, they didn’t want to hire me.
Human hearts are not what they were in the old days. If one of the people who got out before you would invite you to dinner upon your release, then you weren’t doing too badly. The most money I ever got from anyone was 5,000 yuan from my teacher Jiang Qisheng. I hadn’t wanted it, because this was money he had earned writing articles, something that he had thrown all his energy into doing, but he insisted: “Take it, take it. I can always write more articles and earn more money. You are in a worse situation than I am. Of all the people involved in June Fourth, you so-called rioters were the ones who have paid the highest price.”
That made me cry. Liao, will you blame me for talking about this? How can an able-bodied person accept charity? We were a group that passionately supported the student movement, but after a few years Chinese people forgot all about us. Even the June Fourth elites in China and abroad rarely took our situation seriously or just pretended not to know anything.
A few days ago an old friend came to take me to the bird and flower market. We met a few guys who were taking their birds out for a stroll. One of them made a big fuss as he introduced me, saying, “This is Dong. He was one of the heroes who blocked the military vehicles on June Fourth. He was just released.” To our surprise they started to jeer, saying, “Don’t play jokes on us. June Fourth was so long ago, the people involved in that were all released ages ago! Then my friend made a great effort to explain, saying, “No, that isn’t true. There are still many people in jail.” They were astonished, saying, “Oh, then that story about Dong having been in jail is true! Everybody thought that you were trying to kid us!”
Have a drink, Dong. That will make you feel better.
I can’t drink. I have to get home. You know, my daughter told me that now there’s a popular saying going around on the Internet. “Don’t miss out on the most important things in life: the last bus and the last person who loves you.” Every night, my mother won’t go to sleep until she sees me.
* * *
Shortly after eleven p.m., we left the restaurant. The north wind howled fiercely as if it were going to peel a layer off the earth. Dong Shengkun put on his quilted jacket and pants and his face mask, leaving only his eyes exposed. He rode away on his bicycle. We tucked in our necks and hurried toward the subway station. On the way we stopped for a moment with Qianmen in the background to take a picture. Before this, both Dong and Zhang had politely refused to have their pictures taken. I understood their situation, so I took a few shots of our empty chairs and a table brimming with picked-over dishes, with a towering bottle of erguotou in the foreground, looking toward the sky.
As we stomped our feet and chatted away, Zhang Maosheng mentioned he was in a Christian house church, thinking it would be a good place to meet people. I strongly supported that. “Give it a try. Maybe God will be more dependable than the democracy movement.” But Wu Wenjian disagreed: “We should stick together and depend on one another.”
I felt a warm feeling running through me, but we are men and can’t hold each other’s hands and express the closeness we feel. Before going down into the subway station, I patted Zhang Maosheng on the shoulder but didn’t say anything.
Wu Wenjian was busy cracking a vulgar joke: “Hey, buddy, does yours still work down there?”
Zhang Maosheng, an honest man, laughed as he replied: “I haven’t had a chance to give it a try.”
Wu kept at it: “After I got out, mine stayed soft down there for a year or two. If you don’t use it for a long while, even if you really want to, it goes soft before going into battle.”
“It’s that way for everyone who goes to prison for a long while,” said Zhang. “Let’s go. We could talk about that all night and still not be finished.”
The passageway was empty. I couldn’t help turning around. Zhang Maosheng was still at the top of the subway entrance, glimmering in the whistling wind. In an instant he was gone. He had gone off by himself, walking home.
The last train rumbled into the station. Wu and I were the only two passengers. Would I ever see Dong or Zhang again in this life?
The Captain
Solid as a stone tower, Liu Yi extended his huge, pincerlike hand and clamped it around mine. Wu Wenjian and I had switched buses several times and contended with the vicious winds of a winter night before we made it to the neighborhood food market where Liu was finishing up his shift.
At six p.m. it was already completely dark. The wind whistled around the ghostly streetlights. Our legs were stiff after just a few steps. Liu said the aboveground restaurants couldn’t stand up to the wind and suggested we find an underground one. Soon we were walking straight into a little hole in the ground with an entrance like a mine and dashing down two flights of stairs. Down in those crowded cavities there were people coming and going from a mah-jongg parlor and there were nondescript young women in groups of twos and threes showing off at a karaoke bar. We hesitated just for an instant at the threshold
of a restaurant, which looked no larger than a single private room at most other restaurants.
We sat down at a greasy table under a gloomy mineshaft light, just like four peasants from the Northeast having a little spree on payday. We ordered a big pot of bone soup. As soon as the fire beneath the pot was lit, the oil on the soup’s surface began to spread. Liu picked up a bone and took a long suck at the marrow. I hurried to get the notebook and recorder out of my bag. “Liao,” begged Wu, “can’t we eat for ten minutes before we talk about all those heartbreaking things?”
We didn’t finish talking until eleven, and there were still many bones left in the pot.
* * *
Liu Yi: First of all, I want to state my own personal views. I have opinions about this society, but I don’t want to subvert it. Just the opposite. I am a patriot.
My family has been in Beijing for several generations. My father, an old Party member in the Ministry of Railways, went through all the political campaigns. I’m the fifth of six children. Except for my younger sister, all of us children had a rough time. My eldest brother was a businessman and was sent to Yanqing. My second brother, who served in the Ministry of Aerospace Industry, was sent to Baoji. My third and fourth sisters were among the educated youths “sent down” to the countryside, one to the Northeast and the other to Henan. I also spent a year in a work brigade at Daxing, in the Beijing suburbs. Mao alone decided the fate of several hundred million people.
When Mao died in 1976, I was finishing my work among the last group of educated youth who were sent down to the countryside. I came back to the city and went to work in the Ministry of Aerospace Industry. I worked there for a full four years. I got tired of it and tired of being victimized by the state enterprise system, so I decided to get out. I became a businessman working on my own. At first I sold chewing gum. I got up early every day and ran around the Wangfujing and Xidan districts of central Beijing with my backpack. In those days, chewing gum was very popular and easy to sell.
So you were a pioneer of the economic reform policies?
Far from it. In those days everybody thought that individual businessmen were all loafers and bullies or had an exploiter-class family background. Later, society opened up a little and I was able to move from being an itinerant chewing gum salesman to selling fruit at a fixed spot. I made money and became fairly well-off, so I was able to help support my younger brothers and sisters for a while.
You had been brave and resourceful in the business world, so why did you get involved in politics?
No choice. If you were keeping up with things back in those “good times,” that short-lived “thaw” in the eighties, you couldn’t avoid getting mixed up in politics.
Wu Wenjian says you were thirty-three years old when you got involved in June Fourth.
I was unsophisticated. I even participated in the April 1989 Muslim street demonstration [despite not being Muslim].
Why?
Because government policies were discriminating against people on the basis of their ethnicity.
And the student protests?
I got into it unexpectedly. After Hu Yaobang’s death, I would often walk past the Tiananmen gate tower. That was before the big demonstrations started and many hooligans took advantage of that to stir up trouble. The student demonstrations, the kneeling and the presenting of petitions, the intellectuals supporting them, and the authorities ignoring them—all that came later. Ordinary citizens like us were moved by the actions of the students. They supported the country and the people; they opposed corrupt officials and official profiteering. They were not out for anything for themselves. Even the thieves in the city went on a three-day strike from thievery. People got excited and organized themselves into groups with people they had never met before. They chose some representatives to help keep order in the square. At first it was a group of thirty to fifty people. Later it grew to over 200 people.
Who called it the Tiananmen Square Disciplinary Patrol Team? I heard that you were the captain.
I gave away the entire 2,000-plus yuan that I had saved selling fruit. That’s why I was elected the leader. The job also required somebody both bright and passionate. The Disciplinary Patrol Team was actually set up before what became main organizations on the square: the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students and the Workers’ Autonomous Federation. We were also the first ones to put up tents on Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Liao, may I ask you a few questions? Who gave that first order? Who fired the first shot? Who burned the first army truck? Weren’t the rifles that the crowd destroyed all worthless items about to be discarded, purposely sent there by the government?
I don’t know.
That’s right. You weren’t there, so you wouldn’t understand. On the evening of June 4, when two lines of martial law troops drove their tanks from either side into the square, they were going well over 60 miles an hour. Completely insane. At the time, there were still 20,000, 30,000 people or more who hadn’t left the square. I left with the last group.
The density of bullets flying was like the screen in a sieve. Many people flattened themselves on the ground and didn’t dare get up. Those fuckers! No other invaders shot down ordinary people in the streets with guns and cannons—not the Western powers during the Boxer Rebellion, not the Japanese devils, no one! But those People’s Liberation Army soldiers, who claim to serve the people, slaughtered them in broad daylight.
I don’t know how many got away. I don’t know how many braved the rain of bullets to pull out the wounded. There was nothing wrong with running for your life, so how could there be anything wrong with risking your life to save others? Later, near the Workers’ Cultural Palace, the first tank was set on fire. A division commander was inside it. At 4:45 a.m., all the lights in the square were turned off, as usual. Before dawn, troops in camouflage entered the square. Realizing that the situation was beyond our control, I quickly gathered all the rosters, including the Disciplinary Patrol Team meeting minutes, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire. That was probably the first flame lit on Tiananmen Square that night.
Many people gathered on the eastern side of the Monument to the People’s Heroes hand in hand, singing the national anthem. A voice on the loudspeaker said, “Fellow students! Do not withdraw. We aren’t doing anything wrong. Long live the students! Long live the people of Beijing! Down with bureaucracy! Down with corruption!” Later the speaker was shot and the loudspeaker went silent. One unlucky person was injured by a bullet and fell at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, where he was losing blood fast. A dense mass of troops started taking down the tents and, as if herding prisoners of war, surrounded us. The area around the monument was in complete disarray.
Finally, with rows of gun barrels aimed at us from both sides, those of us in the Disciplinary Patrol Team finally left the square with tears in our eyes. When we had gotten as far as the eastern side of the Great Hall of the People, a few students suddenly came running toward us from the other side. The soldiers pursuing them shouted, “Halt! Don’t run!” No sooner were these words spoken than I heard the sound of a bullet sweeping the ground. Startled, I must have jumped six feet in the air when I heard that bullet. You’re shocked? That’s how our people’s army killed defenseless civilians! The fuckers . . . the bastards . . .
How many people did you see shot down?
Five, including one female student, who covered her stomach as her intestines spilled out. Blood, moaning and screaming. Who would have thought that patriotism could lead to this? Our group withdrew but did not disperse. A dozen or so of us were left.
Where did you hide?
First I went to a friend’s home. Nobody dared go outside or use the phone. That friend was very loyal. Ten or more people gathered at his place. We all ate and slept together there, but he didn’t complain. On June 7, I noticed that there were suspicious characters wandering around nearby. I immediately led the group to another location, a large farmhouse that be
longed to a farmer in Fengtai District, where we stayed for another ten days or so. We didn’t have much money among us, so we couldn’t go far and we had to go back to our friend’s house. So we were found out.
There’s nothing to say about it, really. In an instant, my friend’s house was completely encircled, caught like in a vise. The police knocked on the door, came in, shouted some orders, and began the roll call. Each time a name was called, a person was handcuffed. When it came to me, they called my name three times. I didn’t answer. A local police officer from the precinct station slapped my face and said, “Why aren’t you talking now? You’re the one we want.”
We were sent to the Beijing Municipal No. 7 Detention Center, where fifty-one of us were crammed into a cell designed for about ten. Except for seven or eight ordinary criminals, we were all June Fourth rioters. Forty-seven of us were in leg irons. We were packed so tightly in the cell, there was no way to lie down. We were beaten and interrogated. I spent nearly a year at the No. 7 Detention Center. It was a miracle I didn’t become a cripple. Later I was transferred to Paoju Prison [in Dongcheng District, Beijing] and then to Qincheng Prison [in Changping District]. There we ate stewed eggplant every day.
I ate stewed pumpkins for several years in prison. To this day I’m allergic to pumpkin.
I used to be as solid as a bull, but after a half year in prison, I lost over twenty pounds and became just skin and bones. Even worse, there was nowhere in that human-flesh warehouse to wash. We all got scabies. In the middle of the night, the sound of dozens of pairs of hands scratching was like muffled thunder. Did you ever see a scabies bite as big as an egg? The pain was excruciating when the pustule broke and you rubbed it with your fingers. Still, the itching never stopped. I remember when I was at Paoju, we needed to get permission from the group leader to go to the latrine pit. We had to go with another prisoner and the two men would squat down butt to butt. Sometimes, just as we were urinating, we would suddenly be ordered to stand up. If we reacted too slowly, we would be drenched by a hose. That wasn’t too bad during the summer, but it was awful in the winter.