MCLC: the tanks and the people

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
Subject: the tanks and the people
***********************************************************

Source: NY Review of Books (6/3/14):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/03/tanks-people-tiananmen-squ
are/

The Tanks and the People
Liao Yiwu

Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me:
“Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.”

My father knew what he was talking about. His courage had been broken, by
countless political campaigns. Right after the 1949 “liberation,” in his
hometown Yanting [in Sichuan] they executed dozens of “despotic
landowners” in a few minutes. That wasn’t enough fun for some people. They
came with swords, severed those broken skulls, and kicked them down the
river bank. And so the heads were floating away two or three at a time,
just like time, or like the setting sun always waiting for fresh heads at
the next ferry point. My father left my grandfather, who had made money
through hard work, and fled in the night.

Afterward he never said a bad word about the Communist Party. Even at the
time of the Great Leap famine, when almost forty million people starved to
death, and when I, his little son, almost died. He did not say anything.
It was hell on earth. People ate grass and bark. They ate some kind of
stinking clay; it was called Guanyin Soil [after the Buddhist Goddess of
Mercy]. If they were very lucky, they would catch an earthworm; that was a
rare delicacy. Many people died bloated from Guanyin Soil.

My grandmother also died; she was just skin and bones. Grandfather carried
her under his arm to the next slope, dug a small pit, and buried her. But
Mao Zedong, the great deliverer of the Chinese people, would never admit a
mistake. He just said it was the fault of the Soviet Union. And so the
wretched people all hated the Soviet Union. Just because of their
goddamned Revisionism [the label Chinese Communists used for Soviet
ideology after the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s], the Soviets had
called back their experts and their aid for China!

Mao’s second-in-command Liu Shaoqi couldn’t stand it any longer and
mumbled, “So many people have starved to death. History will record this.”
For this slip he paid dearly. During the Cultural Revolution they let him
starve to death in a secret prison. We have a saying: “Illness enters at
the mouth, peril comes out at the mouth.”

But twenty-five years later, Mao had died long ago. I was barely thirty
and didn’t heed my father’s warning. I admired the American Beat
Generation, their spirit and their actions. I was “on the road.” All
through China, in dozens of cities, dozens of millions of protesters
marched on the roads. Most of them were younger than I was, they would
never heed their parents’ warnings. Especially the “Pride of Heaven,” as
they were called, the university students in the capital, who had occupied
Tiananmen square for weeks, under the eyes of the world, heady with
drugs—freedom and democracy!

But my father’s words came true, the Communist Party opened fire. When the
tanks bore down, in a thousand terrors, I recited and recorded my poem
“Massacre,” in a small town in Sichuan:

<<Shoot through their skulls! Scorch them! Let their juice burst out. Let
their souls burst out. Squirt it on the traffic bridges, on the tower, on
the railings! Let it splatter on the road! Shoot it into the sky and make
stars! The stars are running away! The stars are growing legs, running
away! Heaven and earth turning around. All humanity wearing shiny hats.
Shiny, shiny steel helmets. An army group storming out of the moon! Shoot!
Strafe! Shoot! This is great! People and stars falling together. Running
together. Don’t know each other. Chase them into the clouds! Chase them
until the earth opens, shoot and shoot into their flesh! Make another hole
for the soul! Another hole for the stars! …>>

Not everything in my father’s words came true. After 1949, the Communist
Party had caused almost 100 million unnatural deaths. But this time,
people didn’t just rejoice if they survived, though humiliated. Some
people fought back, although recording those acts was strictly forbidden,
and so with time no-one remembered. But people finally fought back.

In the fall of 2012, I published my book Bullets and Opium in Taiwan and
in Germany. It is about the fates of more than a dozen “violent criminals”
of June 4, 1989. These were people who fought back against the troops
enforcing martial law. Their weapons were rocks, sticks, and fire—primeval
man against the equipment of the regular army. In this unfair
confrontation, Tank Man appeared—Wang Weilin, as he was called. The
pictures of his heroic stand went around the world.

On the night of June 4, there were almost a million unarmed “violent
criminals“ trying to stop the army. At first, tanks and armored vehicles
broke through the barriers. And then they opened fire, and everybody was
screaming. Every shot drew blood; people were mowed down like weeds. One
“violent criminal” who was jailed for nearly twenty years told me:

<<People in the West only know Tank Man because he stood all alone on a
big road and stopped the tanks. It was a long column, spouting smoke, like
so many farting bugs! Left and right they tried to detour around him, but
he stopped them again. You are made of steel, I am flesh and blood, come
on down, shithead! This scene has entered history, because there happened
to be foreign reporters shooting it. I heard even old President Bush in
America cried when he saw the footage. That night, there were countless
people like the tank man, Wang Weilin, but there is no footage of them.>>

Tank Man was not one of the student leaders, he was no intellectual,
nobody had ever heard of him. He left behind this short scene, an
indelible historical icon, and then some people led him away by the arm.
No one knows what became of him. More than 100,000 Chinese people went
into exile after June 4. “Operation Yellowbird” in Hong Kong went on for
years, helping people escape. But none of their lists included Wang
Weilin. Even the people in my book who were given heavy prison
sentences—none of them ever heard about Tank Man in their jails and prison
camps.

My father died in the fall of 2002. At the last hour, he couldn’t speak
any more, but he would fix his eyes on me, his son, the political
prisoner. The police had searched me and taken me away in front of him
many times. He died worried about me. Maybe in his last moments, when he
couldn’t speak anymore, he still wanted to tell me not to provoke the
Communist Party. Tank Man vanished into thin air—another proof my father
was right.

Twenty-five years have gone by, we have all grown old. But Tank Man in
these pictures is still so young. From far away, his white shirt looks
like a lily in summer, pure and unblemished. Tanks stopping in front of a
lily. A historical moment, a poetic moment. And on the other side of that
moment, maybe three thousand lives were taken away, to be forgotten. For
my book Bullets and Opium, I checked the lists made by Professor Ding
Zilin and many other Tiananmen Mothers.

Lü Peng was only nine; she woke in the middle of the night from the shots,
sneaked outside, and was hit by a stray bullet. Xia Zhilei was twenty-two,
a university student from the south. A little past four in the morning of
June 4, she was retreating from the square with the other students. They
were already at Dongdan Street. Shots burst forth, and she stumbled and
said: “Faster! Faster! Look for a place to take a break. I think I’ve been
hit.” She grabbed her chest, but the blood gushed out under her fingers.
Her girlfriends tore down her blouse and found the bullet wound under her
left breast. The blood could not be stopped. It was still dark, and the
troops were closing in from all sides. They didn’t know what to do, so
they held her arms while she fainted, and on they walked, on and on.
Minutes later, she suddenly woke up. Speaking to her friends, she made her
last self-deprecating joke:

<<Students! My blooming season is gone. My name is Xia Zhilei, “summer’s
bloom.” Those flowers of summer don’t last very long.>>

Twenty-five years have gone by, the sounds of bullets are far away, the
blood has dried. But the world still remembers June 4, 1989. It’s like a
person who is always daydreaming—he or she is weary, has forgotten, maybe
even has doubts, but the events have become part of the memory trove of
mankind. Because 1989 is a frontier in world history. The Communist bloc
began to crumble with the massacre in China. And so there are records of
June 4 in all the archives in Europe and America.

But who would have thought that this May, in the capital of China, there
would be another outbreak of arrests because of June 4, 1989. In the
apartment of Beijing Film Academy professor Hao Jian, over a dozen
intellectuals had gathered for a discussion. Everyone was arrested, and
five are still being held, because of the “severity” of their crimes:
civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, social science researcher Xu Youyu, house
church activist and former political prisoner Hu Shigen, blogger Liu Di
(she was born in the 1980s), and Professor Hao Jian, whose cousin was
killed in 1989.

These arrests were discussed around the world. To commemorate 1989 in a
private home, and maybe also keep a counter-revolutionary diary: if such
crimes are “provoking unrest,” then we have returned to the thought-police
of the Mao era.

A few days ago, while being interviewed in Poland, I thought of the
following story:

<<A married couple was in the act of making love at home. The husband
wanted to prolong their pleasure, and so he thought of shouting “Long live
Chairman Mao!” to keep himself in check. He shouted louder and louder,
hundreds of times. It worked fine, they went on and on. But the walls had
ears, neighbors called the police. The police came running and broke in
the door. They were caught in the act, beaten severely, and treated with
prison-camp “education” for four years, because of “spreading
counter-revolutionary propaganda.”>>

My translator and the reporter snickered. But then they both thought we
should not joke, in light of the dead of 1989 and of the people who have
been arrested recently.

The reporter asked: “Mr. Liao, I guess your story was just a rumor?“

I said: “To commemorate a historical event in your own home, and be
arrested for ‘provoking unrest,’ that sounds to me even more like a rumor.”

The reporter asked again: “Mr. Liao, do you think China has made progress,
or has it fallen behind?”

I said: “No progress or falling behind, China has ‘soared into the sky
like a thundering dragon.’”

The reporter said: “I understand. But Tank Man and the people in your
book, they cannot soar into the air and fly away so quickly.”

—Translated by Martin Winter
June 3, 2014, 11 p.m