Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘When the funeral is over, we will ask the government to send someone out to receive our petition,’ Ke Xi declared loudly.

‘Where can I go to have a piss?’ Shu Tong asked me, opening his red, swollen eyes. He hated it when Ke Xi started holding forth.

I needed to go as well. ‘The public toilets in Qianmen are too far away,’ I said. ‘Let’s go behind those trees over there.’

‘The science students have managed to collect about three thousand yuan in donations,’ Shen Tong said, ‘so I think we can afford to buy everyone breakfast, don’t you?’

‘Yes, we should sort that out straight away,’ I said. ‘Some of the students are already wandering off to find something to eat. We don’t want the crowd to break up.’

‘Who’s in charge of logistics?’ Shu Tong asked, looking more alert now, and stroking his chin as though there was a beard there to rub.

‘I’ve forgotten,’ I said.

We squeezed through the crowd and walked over to the trees. A banner hanging from the national flagpole read: WE ARE IN THE PRIME OF OUR YOUTH. OUR COUNTRY NEEDS US! Shu Tong smiled when he saw it. ‘Someone climbed twenty metres to hang up that banner,’ he said. ‘That’s quite something.’

I wanted to find Tian Yi. Mimi had told me she was with some students from the Chinese Department. I’d bumped into her before I left the campus. She told me she was going back to her dorm to get some indigestion tablets. She said she often suffered from stomach complaints in the spring.

The students on the steps were beginning to wake up and complain about the cold. A few couples had spent the night huddled up together, with banners wrapped around themselves for warmth. People stood up and skipped about, trying to warm their feet. Pop songs and funeral dirges began blasting from portable cassette players and radios. The group from Tianjin’s Nankai University, who’d been the first to occupy the Square the night before, set off for a morning run around the perimeter. A guy in a red down jacket jumped up and down, trying to hit a ray of morning light with his head. His friends pushed him into the crowd. Everyone laughed. The girls he landed on shrieked, then quickly sat up again and smoothed back their hair. The confusion of noise began to shake the air above the Square, and make our hearts tremble as well.

‘How many Beijing University students do you think we’ve got here?’ Shu Tong asked me. The earth below the trees was steaming with warm urine. I was surrounded by thirty or forty penises, all shooting streams of yellow piss.

‘About four thousand students left the campus. But when I organised everyone into rows a couple of hours ago, there were only about three thousand left. A lot of them must have returned to the campus to sleep. They won’t be able to get back to the Square now, though. Look, the police have blocked off all the roads.’

Changan Avenue, which runs along the north side of the Square, and Tiananmen Gate, which lies beyond it, were completely deserted. It reminded me of the empty forts I’d read about that generals of ancient China used as a ruse to scare their enemies into retreat.

I glanced over at the Monument and saw Liu Gang and Shao Jian draping our banner over the white marble balustrades at the edge of the lower terrace. A large crowd had gathered around to watch.

‘Look at that huge crowd of Qinghua University students,’ I said, spotting them in the background. ‘There must be about five thousand of them, and they’re all sitting in orderly rows.’

‘Yang Tao’s responsible for that. They didn’t have a leader, so he went over and took charge.’ Shu Tong shivered as he zipped up his flies. I wondered where the girls went when they needed to piss.

Xiao Li walked up. He’d been reluctant to come to the Square, but I’d persuaded him. He’d brought over a young man in a blue woollen hat who wanted to speak to Shu Tong. The man shook Shu Tong’s hand and said, ‘We’ve both got a petition to submit, so I thought we should have a talk.’

‘We’ve stuck a copy of our petition on the Monument,’ Shu Tong said with a guarded look on his face. ‘Go and read it, if you want.’ Before the man had a chance to reply, he added, ‘You do your thing and we’ll do ours. It’s best if we come up with different demands.’

‘What I’m saying is, I think we should make our requests specific, like the workers who are demanding a five-mao wage increase.’ He looked like one of those petitioners who travel up from the provinces to lodge complaints with the central authorities. I often came across them when I walked through Beijing. Some would wander around publicising their grievances on cardboard signs hanging around their necks. Others would gather in small groups and make public speeches about the injustices they’d suffered, until the police came and shooed them away. Most of them slept on the streets. A few built themselves makeshift shelters in quiet rubbish depots, pasting their complaints on the surrounding walls. On National Day, the police would round them all up and fling them into detention centres in the suburbs.

I turned to the man and said, ‘Why not go and talk to Ke Xi? He’s the leader of a coordinating group that’s supervising the rally.’

Shu Tong brushed past the man and walked off, clearly wanting nothing more to do with him.

‘I’ve heard that Premier Li Peng has agreed to meet with you…’ the man said, trying to keep up with us. Then someone stood in his way, and we managed to lose him.

The students had converged around the Monument in the centre of the Square, and in front of the Great Hall of the People to the west, but the rest of the vast space was deserted. Occasionally, I saw lines of armoured police in khaki uniforms wriggle like caterpillars through the shade of the trees along the Square’s eastern edge.

‘We must stay vigilant,’ Shu Tong said, glancing back at me. ‘The police have sealed off all the entrances to the Square, so the only people getting through now will be undercover agents. They’ve asked workers and cadres to man the cordons, which is a good way of ensuring they won’t join us. They’re killing two birds with one stone.’

I heard a commotion break out near the Great Hall. The students from Beijing Normal had gone to sit in front of the Qinghua crowd, right inside the twenty-metre exclusion zone. The Beijing University crowd jumped up to see what was going on. I rushed over as fast as I could.

Han Dan and Ke Xi were struggling to persuade everyone to return to their original places. Hai Feng and some of his fellow social science students went over and tried to help them. In the mounting chaos, I lifted my megaphone and shouted: ‘Student marshals, stay where you are!’

Mou Sen struggled to break free from the throng. I tugged him out and said, ‘What are your students up to? We promised the officials we’d keep the road in front of the Great Hall clear. No one’s allowed to sit down there.’

‘They went over to the Monument a while ago to observe a minute of silence. When they returned, they found that their places had been taken, so they pushed through and plonked themselves at the front.’

‘Whoever is commander of the Beijing Normal division, get your troops to move to the back!’ I shouted.

Mou Sen was chairman of Beijing Normal’s Organising Committee. He’d mentioned that the committee members didn’t communicate well with each other. ‘This is too much!’ he said, trying to pick up the white flowers that had been knocked from the wreaths in the crush. ‘I’ve no idea who our commander is.’

‘There’s no point trying to push to the front,’ I said. ‘We asked that the hearse make a circuit of the Square so that we can see Hu Yaobang’s body before it’s taken into the Hall, but it will probably drive in through a back entrance, in which case we won’t see a thing.’