by Liao Yiwu
I had never been in prison. I didn’t realize how powerful the dictatorship of the proletariat was. When I got near our door, my mother also asked me about everything that had happened. Then she told me to go hide right away. But I was just a temporary worker. First, I had no connections; second, I had no experience in society; and third, I’d never traveled far before. Where would I go, even if I did run away? I said I would just have to accept my fate. What must be must be. If it’s a calamity, I won’t be able to get away; if I can get away, that means it wasn’t such a calamity after all. Then I went to bed, but I lay awake all night.
On the day of June 4, everyone was jittery. According to a rumor going around, anyone who had anything to do with the armored car had been arrested. I secretly rejoiced that I had somehow escaped in time, because many people had climbed on the armored car both before and after me, blowing off steam. Some threw bricks at it, others hit it with crowbars or even with belts. Many more spat, punched, or cursed at it.
They arrested me on June 12. Somehow I felt ill at ease all day. My left eye was twitching and I was anxious. I managed to work until noon. The electric machinery in the workshop had broken down and the foreman said that we would be working extra shifts. I said, “I can’t do that.” I said, “I’m having trouble concentrating today.” Just then the factory party secretary poked his head inside and called out, “Wang Lianhui!” It was very strange. There were three heads at the door, like three big heads of fruit, but none of them came in. This is it, I thought to myself, but I made a perfunctory response, saying, “Let me change my clothes first.” “No need for that, just come,” said the party secretary. I was led out like a zombie. I took off my dirty work gloves and followed. When I came out, I looked around. There were six or seven policemen with rifles lined up like a wall. The handcuffs clicked twice.
I was in a daze when we got to a detention center in Daxing County, where several hundred people were being held. We awaited trial in our cells, first getting a violent beating and then waiting to be interrogated. Later I found out that there were sixteen other June Fourth rioters like me held in that detention center. We were all given the same indictment and bundled together as accomplices even though we didn’t know one another. They decided to selectively prosecute people who had done actual harm to the armored vehicle, including those who had thrown bricks at it or attacked it with crowbars.
(Wu Wenjian cut in, referring to similar cases: “There were also people who didn’t do anything but still got heavy sentences for things like hitting a tank with his belt, creating a bad influence, then leaving the scene. Or eating roast chicken off an army truck.”)
Yes, the eldest among my group of accomplices was a man in his early sixties named Li Zexi. He was just making noise. He didn’t have much strength to do anything else, so he just cracked a joke in front of the crowd: “Too bad this armored car isn’t made of plastic. We wouldn’t have to hit it. We could just light it up, and it would all be over.” Wasn’t he just talking nonsense? Who could have guessed, though, that the old guy would get a sentence of fifteen years for a “counterrevolutionary nonsense crime”?
Compared with people who burned army vehicles, set up roadblocks, and fought the armed police, what I did wasn’t too extreme. Several hundred army trucks were burned in Beijing.
Several dozen trucks were burned in Chengdu, too.
That army truck in Daxing was the only one, and it didn’t even burn. Still, my crime was considered the most serious. It was simply a matter of picking up a group of people and killing one of us.
Do you know why I’m still alive? Because of my clean family background. When they investigated my case, they found that I came from several generations of poor, long-suffering peasants who still nursed deep hatreds. As for myself, I was an honest kid who had been born in the new China and grown up under the red flag. I was a hard worker and my political record was unblemished. So they decided that I didn’t fall into the category of idle people who should be punished quickly and severely.
The situation was very tense, Brother. Several dozen people were shot within a few days. Especially when I was transferred to the higher-level Beijing Municipal No. 7 Detention Center, namely the famous K building, where I thought I was just waiting to be executed.
Later, on December 26, 1989, Mao Zedong’s birthday, a very cold day, I got my verdict. I was dumbstruck when I saw that I had gotten a life sentence. I spent eight months at Beijing Municipal No. 1 Prison until we were transferred as a group to Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison. That was a so-called modern prison, with electronic monitoring and controls. It was built on top of an old graveyard. For a while just after we arrived, we would often kick up the bones of the dead as we walked around.
I was beaten up. Whenever you come to a new place, you always get beaten up. If you’re young and from a poor background, as long as you’re not so badly beaten that you’re crippled, you can usually recover eventually. During the first two or three years, I still hoped that the June Fourth people would be rehabilitated. From time to time we would get together to pass along some uplifting little bits of news. Year after year we endured. Four, five, six years passed and the power of the Communist Party looked more solid than ever. Discouraged, we decided that we might as well steel ourselves and serve out our sentences.
I didn’t have any special talents. I could only work as hard as possible and hope to earn some reduction in my sentence. No matter how tough, tiring, and dirty the work was, I could handle that, but the food was exactly the same every day. It was as monotonous as our days in prison. Cornmeal, noodles turning black, poor-quality flour mixed with various kinds of chaff. The same kind of thing, over and over.
Newspapers from outside revealed that heartless grain merchants took expired, mildewy old flour, added some chemicals to make it turn white, and then took it to the market to sell wholesale. That kind of spoiled food was the staple for us reform-through-labor prisoners. The food crumbled easily. Once pulled apart, it wouldn’t stick together again. Strangely enough, none of the prisoners ever died from food poisoning.
As far as vegetables went, we had rotten potatoes and rotting cabbage bought at the lowest prices, including food swept up from the vegetable market at the end of the day. It would not be fair to them to say that they didn’t wash the food. But their so-called washing was hitting it with water from a giant hose. Then they would cut it up into big chunks with a big knife and dump it all into a big pot on a stove, stir it with a large spatula, and drop in a few globs of grease and two or three handfuls of salt. That’s what we ate for long periods of time. I don’t think pigs would eat that today. Pigs these days don’t even touch used cooking oil.
Prison life is hard to describe in just a few words. I finally got out in February 2005. I had been in jail for sixteen years and four months. It was a nightmare. At the age of thirty-eight, I had nothing to my name and I was completely cut off from society. I was trash. A burden to my family.
My father had died in 1990. My mother had died in 2002. I wasn’t able to do my filial duty or say goodbye to them. [While I was in prison] I didn’t even know if they were still alive. When I went home, I faced the portraits of my dead parents and cried for a while. My family became my elder brother and elder sister, as well as my younger brother and younger sister. I was the bachelor in the middle. At first I alternated meals at their various homes. My parents left our old home to me and my younger brother, divided equally between us. But my younger brother occupied it. All I could do was spend 300 yuan and rent a room nearby.
Society had changed very rapidly over that decade or so. When I was growing up there were eighteen production brigades in Jiugong. Now that whole system was gone. The commune and brigade enterprises were long gone. All the farmland had been sold off by the officials. The old way of living off the land, inherited from our ancestors, was gone. All the peasants had to find some other way to make a living.
Now I pick up and remove trash for Jiugong Township. Thes
e days, like they say, people despise poverty but not immorality. Doesn’t everybody want to drive a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz? People will be jealous of a whore, even if she is as worn-out as a public bus everyone has ridden, if they see her driving a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz. We June Fourth rioters missed out on a lot. My neighbors on the street say, “Lianhui, you are a good man. You didn’t rob or steal. You didn’t swindle anyone. It’s nothing that you’ve been in jail. People know this full well in their hearts.”
Do you think the people sent to prison because of June Fourth will be rehabilitated?
I don’t expect it. Now I have a wife and kid. Stability is what I need most in life. History is too abstract; I don’t pay any attention to it. In the future, if anyone says that they are going to get justice for me, I’ll just tell them to get lost. I usually don’t go to reunions of June Fourth rioters. It’s too humiliating. I don’t have the confidence to get together, with everyone asking one another what they’re up to. What do I have to say? That I collect trash? That I rent the place where I live? That I’m supporting my family on 1,000 yuan a month? It’s the humiliation. But I can’t complain about being poor. No matter how poor I am, I’ll carry on. It’s for my kid, and if it’s for your kid, there’s no complaining.
The Hooligan
“We work two men to a shift,” said Li Hongqi, standing next to a metal-frame bunk bed in his pitch-black bedroom. He was changing out of his security guard uniform while Wu Wenjian and I waited. “The guy who sleeps there was also born in 1968, and he’s from Xinxiang County in Henan Province. But during June Fourth he was with the army, serving in an armored division of the martial law force.”
“Did he kill anyone?” asked Wu.
“No. The people persuaded him not to,” replied Li. “He turned against the troops he was with, climbed off the truck, and ran away. That’s how he came to be so miserable, having to scrape by with rioters like me.”
We went to a nearby restaurant and ordered erguotou, and soon time was flying backward. Sympathetic shafts of sunlight fell through the windows where we sat.
* * *
Li Hongqi: I was a ticket seller on the long-distance public bus that went from the exhibition hall to Mentougou. Normally each trip took two or three hours. When I got on the last bus on June 3, at first I didn’t know what was going on. After a while I started hearing the passengers getting on and off the bus talking about where the fires had been, where the shooting was, the vandalism. I was puzzled. Then I saw over a hundred army trucks with their lights on, rumbling by, full of soldiers with live ammunition. Our bus had to stop on the side of the road to let the army trucks go by. We were delayed for a long time. Everyone was cursing but didn’t dare curse out loud. Were those bloodthirsty bastards really going to fire into the crowd?
I think it must have been the first time that anyone in Beijing, young or old, had seen such a thing. So when I got off work at eleven p.m. and headed back to the bus company dormitory, I saw that many of my colleagues had gathered together, all in a high state of excitement, and they were saying that even back when we were fighting the Japanese devils, the Communist Party hadn’t sent this many troops into the fight.
In those days the Communists were still guerrilla fighters.
The company phoned to tell us that employees in the suburbs should not go back into the city for the time being. They said that there were shootings in the city and the streets were flowing with blood. If anything happened, the company would not assume responsibility. But we wanted to get back home and we were worried that something had happened to our families. The company leadership couldn’t say anything to that, so they sent a special bus to pick everybody up.
At first it was quiet, but later, as we neared the city, the atmosphere grew tenser. Near Pingguoyuan, both sides of the road were filled with burned-out armored cars. When we got to Xitaipingzhuang, the street was full of bricks and blood, and there were even more burned-out tanks and armored cars scattered along our way. Our bus turned this way and that, as if playing hide-and-seek on a battlefield, until finally, with great difficulty, we approached the intersection near where I lived. As soon as I got off the bus, three of my coworkers dragged me along to Tiananmen Square to go see what was happening. “I can’t go,” I said. “I’m afraid my younger brother might get into trouble.”
“There’s no way your younger brother is at home,” said my coworker. “At this critical moment, none of us can stay home.”
Were all three of you bus ticket sellers?
Yes, and all of us were about the same age. We got on our bicycles and reached an intersection where we saw a large group of university students waving flags, shouting slogans, and crying, saying that the soldiers kept shooting and were out of control. The scene filled everyone there with rage. I felt it, too. We continued on our bicycles to Xisishitiao Road. We could see a big crowd in the distance. The three of us went up on the bridge there for a closer look. Three soldiers lay on the ground, unconscious and bloody. I couldn’t tell whether they were dead or unconscious. It was my first time seeing a body in the street like that.
As we pressed forward, the sight of bodies sprawled out in the street and burning vehicles became more and more frequent. When we got to Muxidi, we suddenly heard a loud bang. It was a soldier who had popped up out of an armored car and thrown a hand grenade into the crowd. It was a smoke bomb, and it released an eruption of poisonous smoke when it exploded.
We were furious. We began throwing bricks as we rubbed our eyes. Taking advantage of the chaos, the soldier quickly jumped out of the vehicle and ran. The crowd picked up bricks and gave chase. I was in the crowd. It was a chaotic scene. In an instant, my two coworkers and I got separated. I couldn’t find them, so I just wandered around aimlessly. I ended up at the entrance to Fuxing Hospital. Many people were rushing in and out of the hospital. They all said that they had come to see the dead. I went in with them, too. Many Beijingers took out cameras and snapped pictures. The dead were covered in white cloth soaked with patches of blood. Someone brave lifted up the cloth, exposing dead bodies bearing student IDs, employee IDs, personal IDs, and military veteran IDs. They had been shot in the head, in the chest, in the stomach, or in the crotch. Their blood had congealed. Their faces were unrecognizable. It was horrifying. One of the students had half of his face blown away.
I saw more than ten dead bodies just in the passageway of the hospital parking lot. There were even more in the sickrooms. I felt nauseous, so I didn’t continue inside but followed the stream of people out of the hospital, numbed and despondent like a zombie. I don’t know how long I had been wandering, when I saw something like a thousand Beijingers surrounding and attacking the soldiers. The soldiers looked miserable, too, and they were arguing that they had no idea what the hell was going on. The army had trained them in isolation and forbidden them to watch television or read the newspapers. Before their emergency departure they were told that they were participating in an exercise. To be honest, I thought that the soldiers were to be pitied, too. They had no idea that they were being sent to confront the people.
Just then, not far from me, I saw several men with big iron picks taking apart an armored car, saying that they wanted to get some parts for souvenirs. I went up to them and said, “Something this bloody deserves to be smashed!” So I took one of their big iron picks and smashed the four mirrors on the front. Then I took the machine guns by the hatch off the roof. One mischievous man carried a military sack with many smoke bombs that he had found, took one out, pulled the string, and threw it inside the armored car. Smoke immediately erupted from the truck. I was intrigued, so I grabbed one, too, and pulled the string. I felt panicked, as if my whole body had caught on fire, as I hurriedly tossed it into the armored car. That, too, would later become one of the “charges” against me. I was charged with stealing machine guns, throwing smoke bombs, injuring several people, damaging army property, and so on.
There were many abandoned armored cars all around with lar
ge-caliber machine-gun bullets scattered both inside and outside the vehicles. Everybody was picking them up. I filled two pockets with ammunition from a plastic bucket. I also got a steel helmet. Many people picked up brand-new steel helmets. They joked, saying that they would bring them home to cook with, since the quality would certainly be better than ordinary aluminum pots.
It was about 10:30 by the time I got home. I had quite a haul. A steel helmet, ammunition, and tear gas bombs. A few days after June 4, on a whim I took out my souvenirs to show them off. My father said immediately, “Do you want to get yourself killed? Throw those things in the trash immediately!” The old man was a veteran of many political movements. He knew how terrible the settling of scores afterward would be. I was young and inexperienced. I went to work as usual and didn’t take his words to heart. I thought that even if they detained street wanderers like me, it would only be for a few days, to teach us a lesson.
I was arrested on June 13. We reached the precinct station and ran into someone from the Joint Defense Command. “Let’s settle dark scores in the dark for a little while,” he said, closing the door. I became a football that many people kicked around. Before I even had a chance to scream twice, they stuffed two toothpaste tubes into my swelling cheeks, then a plastic medicine bottle, then they sealed my bulging face with tape. Blood and saliva dripped out. They took off all my clothes. No, they tore them all off.
An instinctive sense of shame made me want to cover myself and dodge their blows. I kept begging for mercy, but no sound came out. Exhausted from torturing me, they ordered me to kneel. As they kicked my private parts, they said, “Let’s see you burn a military vehicle!” and “Let’s see you kill a PLA [People’s Liberation Army] soldier!” I had no mouth and no voice to defend myself with. I could only scrunch down as low as I could to protect the vital spot between my legs. Then they used iron clubs and rifle butts on me. After being hit a few times, I blacked out. They woke me up with a bucket of cold water and my nightmare continued.