An excerpt from "Tiananmen Moon"
The night is young, but a crowded campus is full of
curious eyes. I suggest to Bright we go out, somewhere, mentioning that Cui
Jian, a mutual friend, had invited me to see his new place near the Lama Temple.
She agrees and the two of us go out to Xinwai Road in search of a taxi. The
wait for a car could be anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour or more,
but we didn’t mind. The spring weather was pleasant enough and we had a lot of
catching up to do.
Bright asks me about my
trip to London. Cui Jian had also been there, where he had performed in an
Asian music festival. For his debut in the Royal Albert Hall, Cui Jian had
walked on stage, guitar slung over shoulder, to face a polite British audience
wearing a red headband over his eyes. He sang with rough-voiced passion and
angst, while his musical partner Liu Yuan provided soaring, jazzy counterpoint
on flute and suona. The two of them were
experimenting with rock, but both had been classically-trained on the trumpet
and saxophone respectively. Bright and I first met the amiable troubadours when
they played the Beijing college circuit in the mid-1980’s, providing
entertainment for impromptu parties in foreign student dorms. After the
grassroots success of their hit ballad Nothing to My Name, they became fixtures on the Beijing party circuit and
we had seen them play at diplomatic enclaves such as the International Club, an
outdoor restaurant in Ritan Park, and at various embassy parties.
Cui Jian and Liu Yuan had
quit their iron-rice bowl jobs as musicians on the state payroll, only to go
freelance before anyone knew what freelance was. For years, the best they could
aspire to was the dorm, bar and hotel party circuit. It’s not that Chinese
youth didn’t like the new music, --a concert in Beijing’s Workers Stadium in
1986 had been a success— but the anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign put the lid
on rock music after that; it was clear that certain party elders were not
amused.
Disarmingly subdued but
ever alert; Cui Jian had a natural instinct for restraint and caution that
helped the band navigate the changing times. The constant cat-and-mouse game of
evading communist party cultural crackdowns and spurious business controls had
so far prevented them from getting the big bucks and big heads associated with
rock stars in the West, but there was no shortage of talent and creativity
between them and they had good backup in the band from two young diplomats,
with Kassai, a Hungarian on base, and Eddie, a guitarist from Madagascar.
State media coverage was a
non-starter, so their band, which was called “Ado,” played where the playing
was good, mainly the foreign circuit. International students, diplomats, and
expatriate businessmen were an important fan base for nascent Chinese artists
in the 1980’s. Like their counterparts in film and art, the sheer originality
of their hybrid art transcended easy boundaries. But the foreign influences and
disproportionate media recognition overseas made nascent rock musicians easy targets
for party hacks and envious contemporaries who liked to belittle people by
citing foreign connections.
And so it went. Cui Jian
could play the Royal Albert Hall in London, but had trouble finding a bar to
play in Beijing.
Still not a taxi in sight.
Bright and I start wondering if we should have gone by bike when at last a
southbound taxi pulls over. Our conversation about London continues in the car.
“What about Da-wei?”
“You mean Hinton, Dave?”
“He is funny.”
“Pi-jiu is still the only word he knows in Chinese. He likes
his beer. But I introduced him to a nice woman from the Central Conservatory of
Music, so maybe that will change.”
In London I had stayed
with David Hinton, a British wit and film director who I had first met in
Beijing in 1986 working on the behind-the-scenes documentary Bertolucci: The
Last Emperor. He and I became fast friends
after a bout of adventurous, unauthorized travel in south China that led to us
being arrested, interrogated and threatened with deportation for entering an
area “not open to foreigners.” Our
travel objective was innocent enough, we had ventured to a rural film set near
the Lao border at the invitation of film director Chen Kaige who was there with
cameraman Gu Changwei, working on the film, King of Children.
Hinton and I attended the
London debut of Cui Jian and Liu Yuan and afterwards hosted a party for them.
In the days that followed, we took the musicians to see the sights of London,
from bustling Brixton Market and the riverfront of the South Bank to Soho and
Chinatown. We wined and dined with Zhang Yimou, Zhang Tielin and other budding
Chinese artists who were beginning to travel abroad and get a taste of
Western-style celebrity.
While thus engaged in fun,
cross-cultural outreach with Chinese musicians, actors and artists in London,
the first stirrings of Beijing Spring had started to manifest themselves. Fang
Lizhi, an outspoken scientist who had been kicked out of the party for his
involvement in a brief bout of student activism in the winter of 1986-87, was
again in the news after calling for the release of political prisoner Wei
Jingsheng. The Fang Lizhi case, and the associated unrest in 1987, effectively
ended the career of Communist Party Secretary Hu Yaobang. In March, a
diplomatic contretemps erupted when Chinese authorities physically barred
astrophysicist Fang, who had reinvented himself as a convener of “democracy
salons” at Beijing University, from attending a banquet with visiting President
George Bush. And then, on April 15, Hu Yaobang died unexpectedly and within
days, students ventured to Tiananmen Square to pay their respects to the only
leader who had ever shown any sign of really caring about them.
Bright tells the driver to
let us off at the Lama Temple and we go on foot from there. State taxi drivers
were big talkers and liked to pry into your private life, so it wasn’t always
prudent to specify one’s exact destination. We dart across the nearly vacant
automobile and bicycle lanes of Second Ring Road and come upon a nondescript
housing project. Cui Jian’s apartment would have been impossible to find had I
not been through the maze of identical buildings before to visit him when he
lived with his parents upstairs. His new flat, close to the entrance, was more
than just another room on the bottom of an anonymous socialist high-rise. It
was more like the lair of an American suburban kid who had decked out a music
cave as an asylum from the world.
The walls are draped with
bolts of decorative cloth and posters of Stevie Wonder and Sting. Two guitars
lay against a boxy stereo speaker, while the soul table is occupied with
cassette players, tape reels, and a sound mixing board.
We all sit down on a bed
draped in Indian-patterned cloth while our host pops a tape in the cassette
recorder. The first song is Fake Monk,
from his brand-new album that he playfully dubs the “Long March” of rock.
With the dim lights, colorful decor and drone-like music
playing, it was easy to forget the deficiencies of being in a bleak Beijing
housing block.
As we drink tea, Cui Jian
and Bright fall into speaking in the rapid-fire Beijing dialect that I could
admire but not master. He seems more stressed and serious than he had been in
London, so I ask him if the student unrest and recent political tensions were
having any effect on his ability to record and perform.
“Not really,” he answers,
measuring his words. “But I’ve got to be careful. I am being watched very
closely.”
“Yeah, what a drag. But
you’re making progress; look, you’ve got your own pad now. At least you got some
privacy.”
It didn’t seem like the
time to ask him if his room was bugged, but it had to be considered a remote
possibility. My first room in the Insider Guest House had been bugged, but I
later “graduated” to an unwired room, in order that the bright corner room with
the good acoustics could be made available for a new honorable guest.
“Hey, this is a pretty
nice place. Only last year you were still with your parents.”
“It’s okay,” he mutters.
After a pause, as if weighing whether or not to confide, he launches into a
quiet tirade about taxes. “You know the government is on my back about taxes.
I’m gonna have to spend mother-effing May Fourth at the tax bureau.”
Ah, the taxman. Cui Jian
was already suffering the financial woes of rock and roll’s rich and famous,
though he was only half famous and not at all rich.
As we listen to It’s
Not that I Don’t Understand, a bouncy song
that Bright liked, the conversation turns back to music. He had recently
finished recording some new material and asks if we would like to listen to it.
He puts on a demo tape.
“Jin,” he says, using my
Chinese name in a natural way, “Tell me what you think of this…it’s something
new.”
“Kind of cool,” I say, as
the song fades out. “I like more
melody, though. I mean, that’s what I really like about Nothing to my Name. But this one has a good repetitive guitar riff.”
We listen to more music
from his debut album and sip more tea while he takes a long phone call from his
band manager. When he puts down the phone he explains he has just been invited
to meet some people at the Jianguo Hotel, something about a music executive
visiting from Taiwan, and asks us if we would like to come along. That could be
interesting; it was only very recently that people from Taiwan were even
permitted to visit the mainland.
Better yet, Cui Jian’s band manager is on his way
over in a private car, so we wouldn’t have to endure an interminable wait for a
taxi.
A short time later, the
manager pulls up to the back door of the housing block in a beat-up jalopy. We
all squeeze in, and with a puff of smoke, a shiver of adventure and just a bit
of foreboding we are off. The car reeks of gas fumes and vibrates violently, as
if ready to explode or fall apart, but it is such a novelty to be on wheels not
under government control that we pretend not to notice. The jalopy ride
reflects an old conundrum; one often had to choose between seamless convenience
under state watch or rough it in anonymous discomfort.
After a hair-raising ride
across town, the car pulls into a small, circular driveway. It sure feels good
to be on solid ground again. We enter the Jianguo Hotel through revolving
doors, stepping into an intimate, modern lobby where foreign businessmen and
reporters liked to congregate. Low-rise and modest in scale, it was one of the
nicer overpriced hotels designated for foreigners, but it was said to be
“slipping” since it had recently been turned over to Chinese management. It was
built on the model of a California roadside Holiday Inn, and even boasted
lounge music, but instead of an over-the-hill crooner there was a gowned
pianist from the Central Conservatory of Music tickling the keys, playing
Chopin and other classical works.
A focal point for
expatriate life since the early 80’s, the Jianguo was the first Beijing hotel
that allowed Chinese visitors to enter the premises without signing in, but the
freedom came at the price. Due to the unique registration-free policy, hotel
management agreed to accept the presence of plainclothes agents, some of them
quite obvious, like those jokers who sat around all day chain-smoking in the
corner, whose job it was to monitor Chinese-foreign interactions.
Whether or not we are
being watched with suspicion as we shuffle into the lobby is hard to say,
because we don’t linger. Cui Jian’s manager gives the guard a name and a room
number and we are all waved upstairs without further question. After a knock on
the guest room door, we are greeted by a handsome, avuncular man, the record
producer from Taiwan. Cui Jian explains that Lao Ni is the manager of the
29-year old Taiwanese rocker named Chyi Chin, whose rousing ballad “Wolf,” with
its vivid imagery of loneliness and desperation in north China, had been a sort
of underground hit on mainland campuses.
The manager from Taiwan
ushers us into a plain hotel room that had been transformed into something of a
smoky cultural salon. Our arrival goes almost unnoticed as a passionate
alcohol-enhanced discussion is in progress under a thick fog of cigarette
smoke. Bright, Cui Jian, and I are invited to sit on a bed whose previous
occupant is roused to make room for the guests. Several overlapping
conversations, intense and intelligent, are going on at once, but there are
also some guys, for some reason they reminded me of drivers, just lazing and
lounging about, comfortably slouched in chairs and on the carpet with an almost
comical lack of concern for appearances.
Lao Ni strikes me as a
charming character. He speaks Chinese the way I learned in the classroom, his
crystal-clear Mandarin softened by just a touch of Taiwan’s southerly accent.
He could speak some Japanese as well, and his English was excellent. When he
learns that I spent some time in Tokyo, he gets asking me about the Japan pop
music scene, something I knew very little about. He has a distinguished
bearing, but is soft-spoken and free of pretension. He starts telling me about
how he wanted to arrange a swap by which Chyi Chin would tour the mainland
while Cui Jian would tour Taiwan. That such a thing could even be considered
was a testament to how much China had liberalized since 1983, when Taiwan pop
music and rock music had been banned and denounced as spiritual pollution.
The TV, which had been
left on in the background, suddenly becomes the focus of attention when a news
bulletin is announced. Someone near the set jacks up the sound and all eyes
turn to a long-faced Beijing government spokesman spouting the party line on
the flickering screen. The speaker is Yuan Mu and his gnarled statement is
received with a long string of boos and hisses.
The TV then shows Yuan Mu
talking to a small group of students and journalists in what was being billed
as “dialogue,” presumably a public relations gesture by the government to show
that the Communist Party of China was both reasonable and responsive, willing
to meet disgruntled young people halfway. Those around me, however, seem less
than convinced.
“Dialogue? Dialogue my
ass,” cries one of the guests with a thick Beijing accent.
“Those wimpy students,
just look at ’em! What a joke! Definitely hand-picked by the government,” adds
a fast-tongued man nicknamed Black Horse. “Just look at those goody two-shoes!”
“And if you ask me, Yuan
Mu looks like a fox. Look at that face, what a liar!”
“He’s so condescending,
the words just drool out of his mouth. . .”
When the news bulletin is
over, Black Horse finds new targets for his loquacious wit, getting up to do
some impersonations. First off, he does a comical rendition of former party
chief Hu Yaobang, whose death sparked the first tentative student
demonstrations in late April. But Black Horse shows none of the reverence, real
or manufactured, that student activists exhibited for the dear dead leader,
even though Hu had famously clashed with reactionary party leaders in the name
of reform. Rather, he brings the humble Hu to life, repeating his malapropisms,
making playful jokes about the man’s tendency to go off script and ignore party
line, such as the absurd statement that all Chinese should eat with forks or
his open invitation for everyone in Japan to come study in China. Hu was liked
more than feared, which makes the playful pantomime easy to take. “And did you
hear the one about Hu Yaobang and Li Peng?”
“More, more!” we cry. To
hear political taboos being popped like balloons was such a thrill that the
comic is egged on for an encore. With the seeming impunity of a court jester,
he dared to say things weren’t supposed to be said.
Black Horse then boldly
launches into a caustic imitation of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. He
skillfully mimics Deng’s speech patterns down to the regional accent, but it
was his defiant irreverence for the most powerful man in China that really put
the room on edge.
A few minutes later, just
at the point when Black Horse has everybody buckled over with nervous laughter,
he pauses to take a drink and then suddenly his face turns serious. He scans
the ceiling, as if looking for hidden microphones, and then says, “I hope none
of you work for Public Security or I’m finished.”
The room is stunned into
silence. Then he flashes a wicked smile and continues, “And this man, why this
old man Deng, he is supposed to be the leader of a country of one billion, and
look at him, he is so short! Why, he looked like a little kid standing next to
Reagan!”
Black Horse had a wit so
irrepressible, he could hardly help himself, and we are grateful for his
indiscretions. His political humor set the mood and pretty soon everyone is
talking politics. There is much conjecture about the sudden spate of unrest and
doubts about the feasibility of a mass student rally scheduled for the next
morning. Keeping students off the streets was the point of Yuan Mu’s
announcement.
“What do you think will
happen?’ someone asks.
“Only one way to find
out,” says Black Horse. “Anyone want to take a ride to Beida?”
The Beijing University
campus was clear across town, a long way out of the way, even by car. At first
it seemed like this was another one of his jokes, but pretty soon he’s counting
hands for a wild ride into the deep of the night.
Bright looks at her watch.
Almost twelve. Campus dorms long since locked, she elects to go home to her
parents’ compound in central Beijing, promising to meet me on campus in the
morning. I see her off in front of the hotel where she climbs into a waiting
taxi, ignoring several not-so-subtle invitations from some inebriated men near the door.
It’s midnight by the time
I join Cui Jian, Lao Ni, Black Horse and two others in the beat-up sedan for a
speedy ride. We bounce and bump our way north and then west in near-total
darkness, traversing empty boulevards and deserted ring roads until we get to
the outlying district of Haidian where many of China’s top universities are
located. The ride is cramped, exhilarating and scary, given that the stink of
alcohol emanating from the driver is as at least as potent as the stink of gas
fumes from the exhaust.
“During the Cultural
Revolution, if you wanted to know what was happening in the country, you had to
read the wall posters,” starts Black Horse, who just can’t seem to stop
talking. “So when we get to campus, let’s go read the big character posters;
that way we can figure out what’s really going on.”
“Yeah, you mean like with,
ah, Wang Guangmei? She went to the Tsinghua campus at midnight to read posters,
to find out the fate of her husband Liu Shaoqi,” I venture, laboring to edge my
way into a fascinating but fast-paced conversation. I was drawing on book
knowledge, but at least I could at least say that I had met Wang Guangmei’s
daughters, Pingping and Tinging, in New York, which made the remote but
haunting incident seem a little more personal and real.
“That’s right, Jin. Well,
we’ll also be arriving about midnight, so whose fate do we want to know about?”
asks Black Horse, almost maliciously, as if he thrived on tension.
“I don’t know if this is
such a good idea,” says Cui Jian, in a low, gruff voice. The faster we race
towards our destination, the queasier we all start to feel about it.
“Yeah, I have to go back
to Taiwan tomorrow night,” adds Lao Ni, in a melodious baritone. “I don’t want
to be accused as a Taiwan spy and end up in some Beijing slammer.” He looks and
sounds genuinely worried.
“What are you, anyway? Are
you some kind of specially-trained agent?” Black Horse asks, needling Lao Ni
mercilessly. “How else do you explain your perfect Beijing accent?”
“My parents were
originally from Beijing,” Lao Ni explains defensively. “You know what? My
father even went to college in Beijing. He went to Shida.”
“Beijing Normal?” The
revelation surprises me.
“Yes. Before the
revolution.”
“Really? Wow. Like way
back in the 1940’s?”
“Yeah. Hey, you are living
there now, right?” he asks, turning to me. “Would you be willing to show me
around before I leave tomorrow?”
I thought it took a
certain amount of cultural humility for a Chinese from Taiwan to ask a laowai to be his tour guide in China, so I appreciated the
request. In a way Lao Ni and I shared a need to firm up unstable identities.
Hanging out with me served to bring out his non-Chinese side, while playing
tour guide helped me to shore up my tenuous link to China, a place that had
long since branded me an outsider. The mutually complimentary pairing reminded
me of the time I interpreted for Chinese-American television personality Connie
Chung while filming the “Changing China” special with NBC television news. Everyone assumed she was my
interpreter and guide, even though it was the other way around.
Black Horse hits the brake
hard when we reach the university gate. After a cursory inspection, a uniformed
guard waves us in, although none of us had Beida ID, or a legitimate reason to
be on campus. Once inside, we are free to explore the rambling grounds of the
leafy, landscaped compound as we wish. After several wrong turns down
poorly-lit roads and narrow dirt paths, we finally arrive at the campus
crossroads known as Sanjiaodi. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was the
community corner, the place to congregate, not unlike the busy walkway at Shida
wedged between the women’s dorm and the Insider Guest House.
As late as it is, and it
is now well past midnight, there are still many students milling about,
strolling in small groups, pausing to read freshly painted big character
posters. We park stealthily in the shadows not far from the “democracy wall”
signboards. I open the door and bust out of the car, as much for fresh air as
anything else, but no one follows. I wait, but no one gets out. That’s weird. I
thought that the whole point of coming was to look around. I ask who’s coming,
but there are no takers. Why were they so unwilling to budge from the car? Did
they know something I didn’t? What was it, police? I scan the Sanjiaodi
triangle, but can’t see anything out of the ordinary, other than the fact that
it’s much, much too busy for this time of night. On the notice boards hang a
plethora of big character posters and hand-scribbled circulars. Since that’s
what we have ostensibly come for, I decide to give the signboards a quick
look-see, even if I have to do it alone. Fortunately, most of the big notices are
easy to read.
A STUDENT STRIKE HAS BEEN
DECLARED.
MEET AT NOON FOR THE
UPCOMING RALLY
MAY FOURTH MARCH TO THE
SQUARE.
I scan various posters,
big character and small, while the rest of the gang lingers in the car. Of all
of them, I figured Cui Jian had his reasons; in the eyes of authorities he was
already something of a rebel and word of his presence would get around quickly.
And to be fair, Lao Ni had every right to worry about being mistaken for a spy.
The one whose reticence surprises me most is Black Horse, whose ability to talk
seemed to exceed his willingness to walk.
When I return to the car,
Lao Ni pumps me for information, but I can only tell him so much, and at last
his curiosity gets the better of him. He exits the rickety vehicle as gingerly
as an astronaut first stepping foot on an alien planet, as if checking to see
if the radical environment had a breathable atmosphere.
“Xiao Jin—Phil? If anyone
comes up, talk to me in Japanese, okay?” Lao Ni entreats in a sober whisper,
“Say anything, whatever, even ohaiyo gozaimasu or any other words you know. If someone talks to us, you do the
talking. Just whatever happens, I don’t want anyone to know I am from Taiwan.
They might accuse me, suspect me, and I’ll end up in big trouble.”
A group of Chinese men,
teachers perhaps, approach, shooting curious glances our way. Were they
watching us? As soon as the men come into earshot, I play along with Ni’s ploy,
testing the limits of my Japanese.
“Ah so nan desuka,
genki? Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo ichiban .
. .”
“Hai, hai.” Lao Ni nods attentively, as if listening.
It was a clumsy ruse, but
it had its desired effect, if indeed anyone had been paying attention at all.
The suspicious strangers, or should I say the strangers we were suspicious of,
moved on without scrutinizing us further.
For Lao Ni to pretend he
was Japanese seemed a humiliating pretense, but communist-style surveillance
had that effect on people. After all, look at rock rebel Cui Jian—he wouldn’t
even get out of the car!
Given the caution of the
others, was I perhaps naïve in not seeing the obvious peril of the situation?
Living in a world of surveillance meant one had to perpetually consider the
possibility that one was being watched, that much was a given, but it did not
necessarily mean one was actually being watched, or always being watched. Then
again, those more in the know seemed more paranoid than those less in the know,
so there might be a lot more going on than met the eye.
Lao Ni stays close to my
side as we examine the signboards. Though we fear being listened in on, we
don’t hesitate to eavesdrop on others, especially when an argument breaks out;
apparently not everyone in earshot thinks the students should go on strike.
We linger till about two
in the morning, straining to read the ink-brushed posters and pen-scribbled
messages under the erratic light of random streetlamps. It occurs to me that
some students might be out for the night, locked out of a padlocked dorm, just
like I was. If Beida was the vanguard campus, Shida was probably a close
second. Though the tableau of skinny, unkempt, bespectacled young men standing
around in the middle of the night reading posters was at once odd and
endearing, it was not without a sinister side. Who knows who might be watching
from the shadows? We pack it up.
Cui Jian was a musical
rebel, but he chose his battles carefully. The situation at Sanjiaodi was a
reminder that celebrity came at a price. He sang songs exactly the way he liked
to, which ruffled officials the wrong way and made life difficult in little
ways, but he had no desire to push things to the point that he would be banned
or forced into silence or exile. If he wanted to sing the blues he also had to
pay the dues of living in the People’s Republic, which meant more than paying
taxes, but also knowing when to hold and when to fold in the face of shifting
political winds.
On the way back to the
Jianguo Hotel, wind whistling through the rolled down window that I insisted on
keeping open, Cui Jian is slumped in a meditative silence, while Lao Ni talks
to me about how much he would like to visit Shida. The Taiwan producer had two
reasons to visit the historic campus—it was his father’s alma mater, after
all—but he also wanted to get a glimpse of the planned antigovernment rally.
Neither of us had failed to take note of the hand-painted notice at Sanjiaodi
announcing that Shida would be the staging ground for students from other
colleges planning to join the long march to Tiananmen.
Wow. Think of it. Tiananmen. What were the chances they could pull it
off? Hadn’t Deng thrown down the gauntlet with last week’s editorial about
“fomenting chaos?”
As the car careens down
stark empty roads, Lao Ni and I quietly work out a plan to visit campus at the
crack of dawn. He and I share the secure curiosity of outsiders; we want to see
what’s going on, but from a distance. We don’t really feel enough a part of
things to worry about whether the demonstration will be a success or not, we
just want to see what happens.
I end up spending the
night, what little was left of it, across the street from the Jianguo Hotel at
a modest inn called the Railway Hostel, thanks to an introduction from Black
Horse. The hostel was the sort of Chinese-only no-frills facility that few
foreigners were “lucky” enough to get a look inside of.
When I enter the room that
Black Horse had so kindly booked for me, I discover that not a single light
worked except for one low-watt bulb in the bathroom. The hot water thermos had
no water, hot or cold; the tile flooring was chipped and badly stained and the
shower was broken. The minute I settle into the musty bed, however, I fall
right asleep; so the substandard amenities hardly mattered.
