Breakfast in Tiananmen

23 years since the crackdown. 23 years since tanks and soldiers crushed students and workers in Beijing.

Time flies.  

Has it really been 13 years since my Beijing Scene Summer?

Again, Time flies.   

I'm busy at work on my Malaysian book for Lonely Planet, planning the move to LA, and about six other things ranging from too personal to too tedious to mention.

I was reminded of the anniversary today after watching this film made a few years back by Human Rights Watch, appropriately titled "Tiananmen: China's Unhealed Wound" commemorating this, probably the most toxic event in Chinese history.

If my blog was unblocked in China before, it won't be for long. So,

同志好！你们好！

I don't really have anything to add except for this short essay I wrote after the 10th anniversary. Some backstory:

I'd been working for Beijing Scene a few months.

The day before print-day the staff would generally pull an all nighter,  all of us jacked up on coffee and some of us on other substances. Proofreading, editing, doing page layout, all the other tasks that go into putting out a newspaper.

On this morning I was beyond exhaustion, caffeine jittery and more than just a little stoned.

The sun was just coming up over Beijing when whoever was in charge that night announced the issue was good to go.

Unable to sleep, I grabbed my Flying Pigeon bicycle and headed out to watch the flag raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square, something I had not yet done.

I must have locked my bike outside of the square. I was probably walking when the story below occurred.

I still wonder what happened to the woman.

~ JSB, 
Taipei, Taiwan
June 4, 2012

Breakfast in Tiananmen

You asked me to describe Tiananmen on this, the dawn of the new millennium, ten years after “the disturbance of 1989.”

“Were there ghosts, evil vibes or other bad Juju floating around?” you had written.  There is, and more telling than the dead are those still living.

It is the fourteenth of July, and I am riding out to pre-dawn Tiananmen Square to watch the elaborate flag raising ceremony that takes place every morning.  It is dark when I leave my apartment in the diplomatic compound, but I ride quickly lest I miss the ceremony.  The sun rises early and quickly here, yet another reminder that Beijing is built on the edge of a giant desert.

Tiananmen Square is not a comfortable gathering place; Neither grass nor weeds poke through the cement tiles that extend in all directions.  There is probably a metaphor in this.  Although it is not yet dawn, there are already many people filing through the metal gate surrounding the square, milling around along with the many soldiers who are busy scanning the crowd, for who or what I am not sure. I sit down on the cold stone ground and wait for the pre-ordained time when the ceremony will begin. The first light of dawn is filtering through the haze, and the streetlights all go off as the lights in the politburo are switched on.

I am contemplating the synergy of this - how it is that the switch from man made light to natural light can be made so seamlessly, when I hear shouting coming from the eastern corner of the square. A woman is screaming the same sentence over and over, a question.

“Wéishénme shā wŏ érzi?? Wéishénme nímén shā ta?”

Why did you kill my child? Why did you kill him?

The woman is perhaps fifty, though it’s hard to tell in the early dim that separates day from night. Her wide brimmed hat, to urbane Beijing eyes, would mark her as farmer – a country bumpkin.

Why did you tear out my womb? Why did you kill my child?

A few people turn to look at her, but most chose to remain safely oblivious. Soon, soldiers have moved in, forming a kind of half circle around her. If the woman is frightened, she does not show it. She only cries louder.

Everyone is watching now! You don’t dare hurt me!

I want so much to try to extricate this woman from this situation, believing (and perhaps not falsely) that the presence of a foreign guest might be enough to convince the soldiers to just let her walk away. The soldiers themselves look like they’d prefer an easier, softer way.

Come on mama, I want to go and tell her, nodding politely to the soldiers as I pull her away, just another dumb untouchable foreigner behaving inexplicably, come home and eat breakfast.

But I am frozen, gazing forward like the giant portrait of Chairman Mao overhead.

Soon more soldiers arrive, and the woman is quickly surrounded and hustled into the tunnel that runs underneath Chang An road, from Tiananmen square into the Forbidden city. The national anthem begins playing over crackling speakers, and as the red flag of China rises with the sun I begin weeping. I turn away from the rising flag and begin a quick march away, towards the metal fence.

~

Breakfast in Tiananmen Published simultaneously in the Taipei Times & the Colorado Daily, 1999