Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Now they were reunited, and all the bad feeling had vanished. Her mother was beaming with a happiness rare for her, and looked genuinely appreciative of their visit. How sad that her father had died, otherwise he and her uncle could have become good friends, Tianyi thought.

Her aunt and uncle had planned to visit the Old Summer Palace the next day, then the Lama Temple the following day, then on the fourth day, go to the Great Wall or the Forbidden City, they had not decided yet which.

But in the event, there was no fourth day for the old couple. On the night of the third day, their longed-for trip back to the mainland was cut short, and was never resumed. By the time, some years later, Tianyi went with a tour group to Taiwan, her aunt had died, and her uncle had dementia and was in an old people’s home. When Tianyi visited him, he was beyond recognizing her.

Tianyi’s foolhardy behaviour that afternoon amazed the residents of the entire university campus. After the cataclysmic events of the night before, Beijing had an air of desolation. Tianyi got out her old bicycle and, pedalling furiously, headed through the city streets to her mother’s house. At first, she did not notice anything odd. Her mother’s home was in the northern outskirts, and as yet no one there had heard the news. It was only as she rode down Weigongcun Street past the universities that she suddenly felt a wave of panic.

Niuniu, then four years old, sat in a bamboo seat secured over the rear wheel of her bike. Relegated to this position behind her, Niuniu was always leaning to one side so he could see ahead. Just as she reached People’s University — Tianyi would never forget this — he suddenly pointed off to the side: ‘Mum! What that?’ All those ‘What that?’ (never ‘What’s that?’), along with the endless repetitions of ‘Why?’, were usually just irritating, but this time his question made Tianyi’s heart pound with fear. He was pointing to a blood-soaked shirt, hanging conspicuously from the main entrance gate to the university, next to an upturned car that belched black smoke. Something terrible’s happened! The blood rushed to Tianyi’s head. Her first thought was: Zheng! Where was Zheng? Was he in danger!

Tianyi knew Zheng better than anyone. They had talked on the phone the day before. He had been acutely aware then of the looming danger. ‘Where are you?’ she had asked. ‘I’ll join you.’ But he said: ‘No, don’t.’ ‘Why?’ There was a long silence at the other end, then he answered: ‘I don’t want you to get dragged into this.’ As the years went by, the import of those words ‘I don’t want you to get dragged into this’ gradually became clear. Then Tianyi knew that Zheng had loved her, loved her more than he loved himself.

One month earlier, towards the end of May, Zheng and Peng had turned up at her house one day. Zheng’s first words were: ‘Tianyi, have any of the detainees been given the death sentence?’ Tianyi felt as if she had been stabbed in the heart. Ignoring Lian, she spoke directly to Zheng: ‘You’d better go to Shenzhen. It’s near Hong Kong. I’ve got a good friend there who can fix things for you.’ Zheng looked intensely at her, and she felt as if there was no one else in the room but the two of them. His eyes gradually brightened and she saw in them the resurgence of something she had thought gone forever. His gaze was tender, piercing and beautiful.

‘What a stupid idea,’ Lian snapped. ‘The situation in Shenzhen’s even hotter than here.’ This, it transpired, was a lie, although at the time he sounded genuinely concerned. Lian was much smarter than she imagined.

Just now, Tianyi’s arrival at the Mingda University campus with her son behind her, caused quite a stir. The crowd of people who gathered around her she had known since childhood, had grown up with, and, looking at their appalled expressions, it dawned on her how serious the situation was. Xian, a shopping basket over her arm, pushed in and confronted Tianyi. ‘How could you be so stupid as to come here with Niuniu?’ she said severely. ‘Go home, right now! This afternoon, there’s a curfew in Haidian. If you don’t go now, you won’t be able to!’

Xian sounded completely different from her normal placid self, but Tianyi was calm. So it’s happened, she thought, there’s no going back. What will be, will be. She thanked them all for their concern, but stubbornly got back on her bicycle, pushed through the crowd and headed back to the shabby old apartment where she had been born. When Lian was in a good mood, he used to compliment her for the way she kept her head in a crisis. And it was true. The bigger the crisis, the more decisive she was. For instance, during the catastrophic Tangshan earthquake of 1976, she had roused everyone in the street where they were then living. Then she had guided each member of her family to safety, one after another, before going to help the neighbours.

Today, everyone in the house — her aunt and uncle, her mother, Tianke and Xiaolan — looked traumatized. Tianyi went and boiled water for tea, feeling they were making too much of a fuss. All the same, she could not help feeling sorry that the disturbances had coincided with her aunt and uncle’s long-awaited visit home. ‘Life’s not really like this,’ she wanted to say, ‘It’s sheer bad luck that it’s happened now, we’re normally fine.’ Then Niuniu announced loudly: ‘We saw a luddy shirt at the school gates.’ Luckily the old folks did not understand him, and Tianyi was able to steer the conversation into other channels.

What was really worrying her was her aunt and uncle’s return to Taiwan. They did not want to stay a moment longer. They had lived through wartime and they understood far better than the younger generation how serious this was. Lian came around in the evening, and they all put their heads together to figure out how to get the old couple out of Beijing. The problem was not their plane tickets but the fact that, overnight, all the taxis seemed to have disappeared. It was at least 50 kilometres from the university to the airport and they could hardly be expected to walk.

It was the night of 5th June 1989. They talked until half past ten at night, when Xiaolan went to bed. The rest of them went on talking until, at eleven o’clock, they suddenly discovered that Tianyi was no longer with them. In these extraordinary times, they were in no doubt that she had sneaked off for a reason, and there was panic in the room.

It was close to midnight by the time Tianyi pushed her bike into the army compound. Security had been tightened and there were two extra gates now. As she went through the first gate, she heard the sentry pull back the bolt of his rifle with a clatter, but Tianyi ignored him. If Tianyi had looked up at the guard, no doubt she would have been scared witless by his watchful stare. In fact, she never even gave the sentry a glance. He shouted a loud question, she gave an indifferent, unhurried answer: she was going to the night school to see a friend. This was a prestigious night school and everyone knew they rented rooms at the army academy, at a cost of 700,000 yuan a year.

She followed his directions to Reception to fill in a visitor’s form. She really did have a friend at the night school and some of the teachers really did have accommodation here. What mattered now however, was that her relaxed, unhurried manner made the keen-eyed sentry relax his guard.

By the time she had passed through the three security gates, Tianyi’s collar was soaked in cold sweat. Next, she had to cross the garden with its bamboo fencing. Tianyi had on a red silk T-shirt top, a deep yellow fishtail skirt and matching shoes, and wore her hair bobbed. She dressed with style and had a nice figure to go with it. When her top snagged on the bamboo as she went into the garden, she fingered the pulled thread with a pang of regret, but there was no time to dwell on it. She knocked on the door of apartment A10, and waited. There was no sound from inside.