Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

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At the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, Ai-ming lay on the concrete, looking up at a sky grey with smoke. Despite the humidity, someone’s thin blanket covered her feet, and another was draped over her shoulders. Dishevelled, hysterical students kept arriving, crying out that the army was shooting in Muxidi, that the hospitals in the west of the city, from Fuxing to Tongren, were overrun with the dead, that the wounded numbered in the thousands. Street by street, no matter how many Beijing residents stood on the road, the People’s Liberation Army was forcing its way into the centre. She pulled Yiwen closer to her. “We have to leave before it’s too late. Please.”

Yiwen stroked Ai-ming’s hair in a listless daze. “It’s already too late,” she said. She was no longer crying, it was as if she had already gone away. “Hours ago, it was already too late.”

Rumours kept circulating as the minutes dragged on. Dead at Fengtai, at Muxidi, at Xidan. The loudspeakers jolted into life again, only now it wasn’t the student broadcasters but the government who had control: For many days the PLA has maintained the highest degree of restraint, but it is now determined to deal resolutely with the counter-revolutionary riot ….She closed her eyes. How could it be so humid and cold at the same time? An air of unreality pervaded everything she saw. Citizens and students must evacuate the Square immediately. We cannot guarantee the safety of violators, who will be solely responsible for any consequences….The concrete shook as if from a disturbance directly below them. “What time is it?” Ai-ming said to no one, and a handful of voices answered. Three o’clock, two minutes after, almost three . She had not seen the fire in the northwest corner begin, but now it rushed high into the night, scattering light on the waiting soldiers. The fire consumed the ransacked tents, the makeshift tables and all the papers of the independent workers’ union. “I hope they burned their lists,” Ai-ming said. “I hope they remembered to make all the names disappear.” Rioters have savagely attacked soldiers of the PLA. Cooperate with the PLA to protect the Constitution and to safeguard the security of the country ….

A boy with an enormous rifle was dragged screaming out of a tent. The boy wept that the soldiers had shot his older brother in the back. “My brother is dead!” he shouted. “He’s dead, he’s dead! I’ll kill them! Let me kill them!” A student marshal smashed the rifle again and again on the concrete until it snapped. “Do you want to get us killed, too?” he said. Another put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and pulled him away.

What could anyone say? Yiwen’s fingers in her hair moved slowly, as if winding down.

Now the army had them surrounded. A professor, Liu Xiaobo, and the musician, Hou Dejian, had been on hunger strike in support of the students, and now they hurried from their tents, running back and forth to the regiment of soldiers a few hundred feet away. They were trying to negotiate a retreat. Clusters of people followed them, broke away, rejoined. Meanwhile, leaders gave speeches about the necessity of non-violence and the purity of sacrifice. “I am not afraid,” Yiwen kept whispering, her entire body trembling. In a burst of shouting, soldiers who had been hiding in the National Museum now marched out, thousands of them, the long bayonets on their rifles lifted in a glittering parade. Around the perimeter of the Square, Ai-ming could see tanks. She felt almost grateful when the lamps in the Square clattered off, the loudspeakers were cut, and this new quiet surrounded them like a tunnel. It was too late to leave, too late to turn around.

The students huddled up on the first tier of the Monument were in chaos, shouting through their loudspeakers, trying to organize a vote in the darkness.

“Who is determined to stay and who wishes to leave?”

Hou Dejian managed to get hold of a loudspeaker. “Students, a peaceful evacuation is still possible.” He said that the army had agreed to open a corridor and let them exit through the southeast corner of the Square. They would not be harmed.

“Shame! Shame, cowards!” The hissing around Ai-ming nearly drowned him out.

A few voices shouted that a rebel army, led by Zhao Ziyang, was on its way to rescue them.

A student beside Ai-ming stood up. “We have to hold out until 6 a.m. The United States Army is going to intervene.”

“Hou Dejian, shame! Shame!”

“We must stay. Out of our sacrifice will be born a new China!”

At the northern perimeter of the Square, the soldiers began shooting into the sky. The cracking of hundreds of rifles made it seem as if the air itself was exploding. A lamp above them was blown out. A boy beside Ai-ming was so terrified he fainted. He was shaken roughly back into the present.

The vote began. Each person called out, simultaneously, their vote. She herself shouted, “Leave!” and beside her, Yiwen countered, “Stay!”

The voices died down. She heard the buzzing of the lamps, already dark but still burning out, and Yiwen’s exhausted, almost inaudible voice, “Stand firm, stand firm. How can we let it end like this?”

The soldiers were moving quickly. She saw the rustling of their lines rising towards them.

“We’re leaving!” a girl ahead shouted. “They voted to leave.”

Her words were met with rage. “It’s not true!” “We want to stay!” “More people voted to stay!”

Yiwen stumbled to her feet. “Other people died for us!” she cried. “Now we’re going to collaborate with their murderers? Have we no shame?” Others called out similar words, but the shouting mutated into exhausted crying. They had been in the Square more than five hours, and only now did Ai-ming find herself breaking down, thinking of the promise she had made to her father, unable to comprehend how Yiwen was ready give up her life and the lives of others. For what? To hold Tiananmen Square, which had never belonged to them.

“Line up, line up in rows often…”

“Get in your battalions! Lock arms!”

She joined arms with Yiwen and with a tiny girl beside her. There were thousands, perhaps several thousand, students still here. University banners were awkwardly raised, they shook as if already falling. Yiwen and Ai-ming were displaced and found themselves walking under the flag of Beida. This is the first and only time, Ai-ming thought, that I will belong to Beijing University. The achievements she had once wanted for herself seemed a lifetime away, they were the aspirations of a completely different person.

Tanks were entering the Square, they made a shattering vibration. People around her began screaming and Ai-ming turned and saw the place where the Goddess of Democracy had been standing. The statue was light, almost constructed of air. The army, she thought numbly, did not need tanks to push her over. They could have done it with their bare hands. The shaking of tanks and helicopters continued, as if the concrete itself was being ripped apart. Would they have a parade now? she wondered. Now the soldiers were pressing in from both sides, funnelling the students between a narrow corridor of bodies. She saw a soldier strike a boy ahead of her with his baton. Behind him, a girl turned and spat in the soldier’s face. But still the procession kept pushing inexorably forward. The people around her were weeping. At the front, the student leaders began to sing the Internationale .

Arise, slaves, arise!

Do not say that we have nothing.

We shall be the masters of the world!

The soldiers stared.

The students left the Square. She and Yiwen broke off from the procession and walked home. In a daze, they scrambled down side streets, avoiding the sound of gunfire. By the time they arrived back in the alleyway, the sun had risen and the sky was white.