In March of 1989, my own students at the Nanjing Agricultural University fired me. Nothing personal, for they had fired all their instructors so they could join the city-wide student boycott of classes and the hunger strike. Thus they joined in solidarity with the democracy protesters in Beijing. Every day my students joined with other students from Nanjing's eight universities and institutes, and marched in the streets alongside of doctors, technicians, engineers, botanists, booksellers, and every variety of intelligentsia in the city. They carried banners with messages of the movement in organized marches that stopped traffic cold all day; they chanted slogans over bullhorns; and they flashed insolent grins and smashed bottles on the cobblestones--the words "little bottle" in Chinese are a pun on Deng Xiao Ping's name.
I moved in with my friends in the community of foreign teachers and students downtown, and went back to Nanjing Agricultural University a couple of times a week to visit my students and to give them informal English practice sessions in their dorms. Very informal. I always bought the beer, for their stipends were only 20 yuan a month, about the equivalent of US $3. We went to the walls of the university, and they translated the rows and rows of posted handbills, white butcher paper hand-lettered with large slogans ("We welcome to you, Mr. Democracy!" "The hands that hold our bread are filthy! Join the Hunger Strikers!") and neatly written essays about democracy, free speech, fair government, and the end of corruption. We talked about the movement, and about the new era of freedom they planned to usher in. Some of them decided to start a Democracy March to Beijing. I bought a few of them shoes, and wished them well.
Downtown there were no classes either, and the atmosphere was one, long, giddy party as we watched the students challenge every corrupt principle in China. We danced to reggae and West African music in the foreigner's cafeterias every night with the doors thrown open to the Chinese dorms, and the Chinese students came and learned to boogie.
On June 4th, 1989, our friend Paul had to go back to Canada. The night before he stayed up late with us, knowing he wouldn't see most of us again. Hey, Jesus' friends fell asleep on him, but we were not going to fall asleep on Paul, by God. Alain, Habib and some of the other guys from Mali got us rocking and nervous on boiled and sugared Royal Gunpowder Tea. Michael and Steffi from Germany collected every Eric Clapton tape they could find in Nanjing University, Stefano the-businessman-from-Italy-who-lived-in-the- grand-Jinling-hotel brought over a huge stash of chocolate from Shanghai, I gave backrubs until my hands cramped into claws, and we were all of good fellowship through the night and morning.
Around six-thirty in the morning, we dropped by the cafeteria for a breakfast of rice gruel, youtiao doughnuts, and pickles, put Paul into a pedicab for the train station, and wearily went to our beds. Some of the Chinese students out early practicing Taijichuan by the cabbages excitedly left their exercise to follow me down the path, trying to get me to help them practice English. I stayed a few minutes, but was so tired, I had to excuse myself. I got on my "Flying Horse" one-speed cast-iron bike, and pedaled out to Hohai University to my room in the African dorm.
My boyfriend Phineas Sichoongwe the Zambian (also known as Chairman) woke me around one in the afternoon in his deep, bass voice: "Morrisa, sweet Professah, the time for sleeping is over. The Party is running over the students in Beijing with tanks. They have turned the guns on their own children, and therefore what respect can they have for the children of our mothers? We got to get out of this country, girl!"
Our friend Hamase had called from Beijing around eleven. He was there trying to reach his embassy, and had seen much that morning. He was calling from under his bed, for the Army had broken into Beijing University and they were firing on the dormitories and the foreigner compounds. The body of a child that had been killed in the square had been thrown over the wall into the foreigner's compound of Beijing University as an example. Hamase told us to remember what he had seen, that they were burning thousands of the bodies in the streets in piles, and that it was not yet noon.
I managed to get an international call through to my parents. They were able to see what was going on because they had television. My mother was trying to stay reasonable, but my father was weeping for me to come home. I told them I'd try to leave as soon as I could sell some of my artwork and get a flight. I told them I'd call every day. I wasn't able to place another international call until I reached Hong Kong a week later.
I heard from other students at Nanjing Agricultural University that the People's Army Police had caught up with the students who had begun the march to Beijing and had "dispersed" them. When I asked where they were, I found out that being "dispersed" meant they were beaten and taken to prison. We wouldn't see them again.
I was not in Tian'An Men on the 4th, so I did not see the images that so terrified my parents, the one, lone man standing in front of the line of tanks, the waves and waves of wrecked bodies that had been the best minds in China. I saw these things later, on television, after I returned to America. What I saw on June 4th, 1989 was the loss of a generation of heroes reflected in the eyes of Nanjing. I saw the bereaved wearing white armbands and headbands, walking quietly in the streets, never holding still, lest they be arrested for blocking the sidewalk, hundreds of thousands of people, pressed body to body, all along People's Road, angry, sad, disbelieving. They carried big, colorful, wheel-shaped arrangements of paper flowers for the dead and laid them under the flagpole on the big traffic circle in front of the Jinling Hotel. Beneath the Great Flag of China, a second flag flew, a white sheet painted with the character that meant "Mourning."
On every wall where the butcher-paper signs hung, a huge character that looked like a coffin with an open lid was slashed in dripping red paint across every sign: xue, the character for blood. As far as the eye could see down the wall-lined streets the handbills cried "Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!" On and on.
And on and on. Four years later I can still see the handbills weeping red for all those young human beings, all that beauty and hope and brilliance, shot, broken, dead, and burnt in the streets in Beijing.
I want you to remember too.
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