by Liao Yiwu
I got my indictment about six months after I went to prison. You had to plead guilty. There was no way out. They were going to beat you to death and condemn you one way or another. The crime was organizing a mob for an armed counterrevolutionary rebellion. I was also charged with (1) creating an illegal organization, (2) arson—though I wasn’t personally involved in any—and (3) blocking military vehicles. I was sentenced to eight years in prison for this combination of offenses.
I spent time at Beijing Municipal No. 1 Prison and Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison. Mostly I sewed overcoats, skirts, and shoulder bags. I remember for a while we worked day and night, doing extra shifts to make latex gloves for export to the United States. After a week of doing that, my fingers got bent out of shape. Look, after all these years my fingers still haven’t gone back to normal. Naturally, if you had money, you could bribe the guards so that you didn’t have to work.
When my prison sentence was finished, my elder brother and younger sister came to take me home from prison. We wept in each other’s arms at the main gate of the prison and then the three of us walked in silence toward the bus stop just outside the wall.
By then all the revolutionary ardor had blown away like a cloud of smoke, hadn’t it?
While I was on the inside, I thought that people involved in June Fourth would be quickly rehabilitated. But first one and two, then three and four, then five, six, seven, eight years went by and not a word. It was fine with me that nothing happened. We didn’t expect to be greeted with fresh flowers or applause. What enraged me, though, was the way we were discriminated against when we returned to society. I remember how, when I got on the bus, the ticket seller gave me a hard shove. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “This is not a place where people like you should be standing,” he answered. Anger roared up in me. I couldn’t understand what had happened to people’s memories in those years. How did ordinary people become a bunch of demons with bared teeth and such snarling faces? Even if I had murdered someone or committed arson and had now been released from reform through labor, he had no right to insult me. Fortunately, my brother and sister calmed me down. I unclenched my fists and said, “Little brother, I just got out of prison today, so it’s supposed to be a happy day for me. But I’m not afraid of going back to prison. I caution you not to get yourself all bloodied up because of a trifling insult.”
The ticket seller fell silent. The other passengers gave me a look as strange as the freedom I just regained. The bus shook as it made its many twists and turns. It’s been eight years, I thought to myself. Didn’t the bus routes stay the same? Route 9 goes past Qianmen; we’re on Route 10, which should go past Tiananmen and the Chang’an Avenue stop, and then we’ll be home. Suddenly the bus turned without even nearing the edge of Tiananmen Square. I was so anxious I started yelling, “That’s the wrong way! Where are you taking me?”
“It’s no mistake,” my elder brother answered. “Our mother has moved to Wukesong.”
“Why does she live there?” I asked, now in a whisper. Then I suddenly understood. My brother and younger sister were being careful to avoid Tiananmen Square. My memories of that place were just too painful.
The bus circled around to Gongzhufen, where we got off. We got on another bus. We wasted a lot of time going that way, but finally we made it home. My younger sister knocked on the door. My mother asked through the door, “Who is it?” It was the thin voice of my mother, which I had heard since childhood! The voice I had dreamed of for so long! I wanted to answer her, but it felt like a big rock was blocking my throat.
At that moment, when mother and child met, my ears were roaring like a passing train. Amid that roar, I cried out loud, “Mother!” and knelt down at the door. Eight years. On one end of the measuring stick of time, my mother had a full head of dark hair and was strong and healthy. Now, on this end, my mother’s hair was snowy white, and she trembled and tottered. She helped me up and into the room, mother and child hand in hand, both crying. My mother could only keep repeating, “My child, my child, it’s so good you’ve come back!” Over and over. “Mother . . . Mother . . . ,” I said, “these years have been very hard on you, waiting for my return. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll be a good son. I won’t be so hot-blooded and impulsive, and I won’t waste my time trying to do something for this broken country.”
My family all wept together. My mother and my elder brother’s wife went to the kitchen to make dumplings, and I sat listening to their chatter. “My fifth-born loves my dumplings. Today I’ll make dumplings for him with my own hands. Look how thin he’s gotten over these years! Maybe he’s even forgotten the taste of dumplings!”
I was a grown man, but tears streamed down my face again. When the dumplings were put on the table and everyone gathered round, I still felt an awful tightness in my chest, I couldn’t eat a single bite. Mother sat pressed in very close to me. She kept trying to pick up a dumpling to put on my plate, but her hands were trembling and the dumpling kept slipping away. Finally she managed to pick one up and raise it to my mouth. “Fifth-born, at least just eat one and make your mother happy. Such is life. Look on the bright side, okay?” I managed a smile and bit down on the dumpling, then tried to swallow it without chewing, and I choked on it.
That night, during the reunion dinner, even as the dumplings got cold, none of my family ate much. It grew dark and soon all the streetlights along all three miles of Chang’an Avenue, the Street of Eternal Peace, were twinkling brightly. “Fifth-born, there’s something that we’ve been keeping from you,” said my brother when he saw that I’d calmed down a little. “Our father is dead. Just before he died, he kept calling your name. He said that he couldn’t die without seeing you.”
The news hit me like a thunderclap. I knelt down again. I looked through the windows to the sky outside and kowtowed three times to my faraway father. I said inwardly, Father, although you were worried about me, the one you were thinking of most is Mother. I know why you kept calling for me. Rest assured. He had died the year before I got out of prison, from late-stage lung cancer, a few days after going to the hospital.
It was only after a year or two that I was able to adjust, with a great deal of difficulty, to the changes in society. Once when I went to a gathering of classmates, one of them was shocked by my appearance. He looked me up and down. “Are you really Liu Yi? You aren’t someone pretending to be him?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Weren’t you shot and killed by the martial law troops?” he asked. “We all thought you died a long time ago.”
“You could try pinching me to see if I’m a ghost,” I said, and then he actually pinched me before confirming I was alive. Everybody laughed a very complicated laugh, full of regrets for all that had happened. In people’s minds, I had been dead for many years. Now they saw me alive and appearing in public. Wouldn’t that be disturbing?
How did you make a living after that?
Our old house had been torn down. I built a plastic shed nearby. On a low patch of ground, I laid a brick foundation just over three feet high, then made a small shop there. All year, in all seasons, I would eat, drink, and shit in that primitive shed.
You lived like a migrant worker.
That’s right. The urban management officials kept coming to check up on my shop, and every time they came I would kneel down in front of the leader of the urban management team and call him whatever made him happy, even “Daddy,” so long as he allowed me that small space to survive in. Later the street committee did a study and had me move to a different location, so I built a new shed there and opened for business. I worked from dawn to dusk for another year. Business gradually got better.
Weren’t you like the great majority of Chinese people, brainwashed by daily life?
I was depressed. Nobody could stand to listen to what had happened back then. I could only go by myself to stroll around Tiananmen. Somehow or other I came to that spot beneath the flagpole, at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, where the ten
ts of our Tiananmen Square Disciplinary Patrol Team had been pitched near the June Fourth headquarters. These days, crowds of people, several layers deep, gather to watch the raising and the lowering of the flag. Many people come from outside Beijing to watch with reverence and with hot tears in their eyes, listening to the national anthem and looking out at the marching soldiers. But I stand far away, puffing on cigarette after cigarette. I go through a whole pack each time. I think about how Chinese people are all like that fucking Ah Q, in the famous story by Lu Xun. They can’t wake up. It makes me think that June Fourth was in vain.
In vain? It’s hard to say.
I wrote about my feelings in a few articles, but I haven’t found anywhere to send them. Later the police started paying special attention to me, sometimes visiting me several times a day, knocking on my door at night.
Everything I wrote was confiscated. I still remember one fragment of it. “With a clear conscience, I return to society. It is my fate to endure hardship. But what I see are people who have changed! What I smell is the stinking air of decay! What I run into is one corrupt official after another! I want to stand up and call out to the future, just as I did in the past, call out to my trampled compatriots to wake up and see their lives for what they are—a paralyzed present, worse than the life of a pig or a dog.”
Then the police set a trap for me. They took advantage of a time when I was going to the Xijiao food market to ask for repayment of a 2,000-yuan debt to arrest me without explanation. After a quick trial, they framed me for burglary and sentenced me to four years in prison. Unbeknownst to me, they had set up a twenty-four-hour monitoring device on my small shop.
You were worth the trouble for them? How did demanding repayment for a debt turn into burglary?
I’d made arrangements to meet someone at his house. When I entered, it was completely quiet. I had just called out twice when I realized I’d been trapped: I’ve been had! I’ve been had!
That second time going back to “the palace” sounds like what happened to Lin Chong in the classic novel Water Margin, unsuspectingly entering White Tiger Hall and being framed there. Many June Fourth rioters weren’t even out of jail at that point.
That happened in 2000. I was in Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison for a year. Then I was transferred to the Chadian farm, where I joined a group of small-time crooks. That was a miserable and frustrating experience that I would rather not talk about. I sewed leather balls at Municipal No. 2 Prison and planted cotton at Chadian. Because I had skills, I was the in-house chiropractor for the officials in charge of discipline and education. They cut my sentence by half a year for that.
That time, when I got out, I had to go home by myself. Fuck, being sent away for burglary, I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to come and get me. I was flat broke. Even my clothes were a gift from one of the “team leaders” in prison. The prison gave me 40 yuan for traveling expenses, so I got on a bus and went back to Beijing. Besides family, I’d become distant from everyone else, so for a while I didn’t know where to turn. I went back to Tiananmen again and sat smoking beneath the Monument to the People’s Heroes. It was completely dark by the time I finished my pack of cigarettes. Tears rolled down my face. I felt like a stray dog yearning for his old home, the place where he’d pissed many years ago, always remembering the smell of urine in that spot ever since.
I walked around all night, stopping here and there, and didn’t return to the western suburbs until the next day. When I finally reached home, I nervously went upstairs and knocked on the door. After a long time the door opened. My mother stared at me blankly until she said: “Fifth-born, you’ve come back! This time, even if you are a beggar, your mother will go with you.”
Your family didn’t know you were getting out of prison?
They should have known. I suppose they were just having an argument behind closed doors when I arrived. The faces of my elder brother and his wife looked darker than storm clouds. I forced a smile and went in to greet them, asking how the family was. “We’re doing all right,” my elder brother said. “Let’s eat.” We all sat around the table eating and fuming. I don’t remember exactly why; maybe because my brother said something about my returning at a bad time. We exploded, pounding on the table and the bench. “It would be better just to leave,” said my mother.
When my elder brother’s wife in the kitchen heard that, she threw the pots and smashed the dishes, yelling, “Do you want to go? Then leave right now! Nobody’s begging you to stay here.”
“Come on now, sister-in-law,” I said, “does that sound like something a decent person would say? I know what you mean. I’ve been in and out of prison twice and don’t have a penny to my name. I’m also getting older. Are you afraid that poverty has destroyed my ambition, and that I’ll just want to hang around here all the time to get free room and board? You would be ashamed even to have me as a neighbor. God knows, I only came here to see my mother for a moment. As long as she’s well, I’ll be at peace, even if I have the rotten luck to die in the street and be buried in some random place.”
“If you two are so attached to each other,” my sister-in-law said with a laugh, “then I’ll do you a favor and let you be together.”
What did your elder brother say?
He just hid off to the side. I went inside, helping my mother gather up some basic items and rolling them into a bundle. When the two of us left, mother and child, it was already past eleven p.m. All the shops had closed and the buses had stopped running. The once busy and noisy streets were now empty.
My mother was seventy-eight; she was used to what life might bring. And I had gotten used to the undependability of human relationships. I had fallen out with my friends and with my family. I’d gotten used to all that in the ten or so years since June Fourth. That night I had only 27 yuan in my pocket. My mother was having trouble with her asthma as she walked. I really didn’t know where to turn.
You can’t take an old person to go sleep in the open.
I looked all over for a public phone. When we got to Wukesong, I saw a small shop that was still open. By then it was past midnight. I thought of an old buddy I’d been on very good terms with for twenty years—from before June Fourth to just before I went to prison for the second time. Full of confidence, I called him up. The call went through. He was driving a cab.
“This is Liu Yi,” I said, “and I don’t have anywhere to stay. Where are you?”
“On the road, taking a customer somewhere,” he said. “When did you get out, buddy? Why didn’t you call? At the very least I could treat you to a meal.”
“I just got out,” I said, feeling a wave of warmth inside me, and then I told him everything that had just happened. Could he come and pick us up and give us a place to stay for one night?
He promised to do it. I hung up the phone. Twenty minutes passed. I saw my mother leaning against a wall. She could no longer stand up, so I put down her bundle and had her sit down. I called again and got through. “I’m on a long trip,” my buddy said. “We won’t get there for at least another ten minutes. Even if I drive pretty fast, it’ll still take me another forty minutes to get to Wukesong to pick you up.”
In those years, when people despised poverty but not immorality, as they say, your buddy’s life wasn’t easy, either.
After an hour had gone by, I called him again. He picked up the phone and apologized again and again: “On the way back, I picked up a short-distance customer, a woman. She hadn’t been able to catch a cab, so I picked her up out of a feeling of professional responsibility.”
“I can wait until the end of the world,” I answered, “but my old mother is very sleepy.”
“I’m sorry to let your mother down,” he said. “Wait another ten minutes! This is the last ten minutes. I’ll be on time!”
He wasn’t going to come.
After another twenty minutes I called for the last time. His phone was off. Even the boss of the small shop couldn’t help laughing bitterly. “You’re really
having some rotten luck. Take good care of your mother. I have to close.”
My heart felt cold, very cold. It was past two a.m. I’d never thought this could happen. Still, I had to act as if nothing had happened. I helped my mother get up and said in a loud voice, “Let’s go!”
We kept walking, I don’t know for how long. The streets were completely empty now. We didn’t see anybody else. A car passed by maybe once every ten minutes. The traffic lights blinked continually. Mother walked and walked until she was so tired and weak that she slid down to the ground like a slippery noodle. I quickly put her on my back and ran, covering two bus stops’ distance to a small hotel near Gongzhufen.
The clock on the wall read 3:50 a.m. This hotel had been open for over ten years, and I used to go there often. Seeing an old man on duty, I put on a big smile and tried to charm him. “Is General Manager Liu here?”
“He isn’t here.”
“How about Mr. Qu?”
“Not here, either.”
“Since none of my old friends are here,” I said to him, “I want to discuss something with you. My mother and I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight. As you can see, it’s nearly dawn. Could you let my mother sit here for a while?”
“Did the precinct station give you a certificate?” he asked.
“We just had an argument at home and we haven’t had a chance to go to the precinct station yet.”
“I can’t do that. If you don’t have a certificate, then how do I know who you are?” he replied.
“May I use the phone?” I asked.
“What if you use the phone to commit a crime?”