by Anna Wang

From May 25 on, I stayed away from the main thoroughfares on the way to work and stuck to the maze-like alleys of the hutongs. At first I just wanted to avoid the chaos on the main streets, but I soon found out that walking in the hutongs was fun in its own right. On the wide expanse of the city’s main boulevards, there was only one possible route, while the labyrinthine alleys provided endless combinations.

The last time I’d cut through here was before the completion of the Second Ring Road. Ancient Beijing was enclosed by city walls. Modern Beijing built upon the notion of enclosure, but exchanged its city walls for freeways. My grandmother’s home was one block west of the outside of the Second Ring. When I was in elementary school, my friends and I often went to Yangmaying Worker’s Club, a theatre deeply tucked inside a hutong. After the Second Ring was built, I needed to cross under the viaduct and wait for pedestrian traffic lights. Though the distance remained the same, the time took longer.

More than ten years later, I worked up the courage to travel the hutongs again and found they’d grown shorter and narrower. Walls began to crack and crumble, and patches of paint peeled off, revealing grey brick underneath. The mortar between the bricks had eroded away here and there, leaving some areas looking rather precarious. There were attempts to perform hasty repairs. Some casually coated the walls with a layer of cement, without even matching the original colour, much less its structural integrity.

I was sad to see this neighbourhood left out of the economic boom. The march of modernity, superficial as it was, had been unable to penetrate their depths. The residents had every right to be angry at the bureaucratic profiteers and join the student protests. But it seemed that they didn’t really care. Though conflict and near civil war roiled uncontrollably just streets away, life inside the hutongs continuing in tranquility and indifference. Every morning on my way to work, elderly masters sat at stone chess boards, moving pieces to and fro, as appreciators nodded, remarked, or cheered on. The hutong was the centre of their universe.

The sky above the hutongs was forever framed in by four brick corners. That rectangular expanse of blue played host to ugly grey utility poles, lush green tree tops, and white pigeons descending and ascending in the air unhurried. Its leisurely atmosphere was intoxicating, and I would sometimes forget all about the barricades, the abandoned buses, the boarded shop-windows, the screaming, the smoke, and the fire on the main roads. One day, as I cut home from work via Xiyangmaying Hutong, the narrow passage unexpectedly opened up to reveal a perfectly square structure ahead. It was the Workers’ Club I’d visited as a kid.

■

It was a week into martial law, but with the military reluctant to open fire, students did as they pleased in the Square. On May 27, the Capital Joint Conference issued a proposition for resolution, advising that students retreat and pursue alternate methods. The document was called the “Ten Declarations,” and was read aloud by Wang Dan at an evening press conference. Declaration Eight suggested students end their occupation of Tiananmen on May 30 with a massive parade, while reserving the right to return on June 20 when the People’s Congress session began. It was promptly rejected by another student leader named Chai Ling, who decried the declarations as phony solutions dreamed up by ivory tower intellectuals.

From May 27 to June 3, depression hit me from time to time. I was in high spirits when the first cry broke out, but without any real improvement, the cry for change became empty noise. Now, when I thought of the protests, the first thing that came to mind was the inconvenience they caused. Transportation systems were paralysed. Groceries were difficult to get. Life was like traveling through an endless tunnel. I had wanted to be elevated out of my mundane life, but now, I fell into something that was worse than mundane existence. I hoped that the chaos would end soon and life would return to normal. Still, I didn’t want the students come out of this empty-handed.

How would these protests end? I observed the situation meticulously but I had no idea what to expect. One moment I was convinced that the students would win, the next I waited nervously for the military to strike. Both were likely. Every so often one side would add an ounce on its scale, only to find another added opposite, restoring balance.

On May 27, the scales of fate continued their cruel dance when Wan Li, the head of the National People’s Congress, broke his silence and declared from Shanghai his support for Beijing’s martial law, shattering the students’ hope. That very evening in Hong Kong, the entertainment world rallied together to stage a massive “Concert for Democracy,” as Jackie Chan, Teresa Teng, Anita Mui, Hou Dejian, Lowell Lo, Roman Tam, and many more performed nonstop for twelve hours, raising thirteen million HKD for the students’ cause. On one side, you had the words of Wan Li, a man of extreme weight in the ranks of Chinese politicians. On the other, the Hong Kong people: accountants, secretaries, salesmen, cashiers, taxi drivers, housewives… They may have been insignificant individually but they numbered in the millions. Could their collective voices somehow outweigh the judgment of a single powerful man?

On the afternoon of May 29, I got a call from Guo Yan.

“I’m back! I just got in yesterday!” he sounded content.

“Your dad let you off the hook?” I was dubious. “I thought you had to wait till everything calmed down over here.”

“Well, I can’t just do everything my dad says. Otherwise, It’d be too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Democracy is just around the corner!” he exclaimed. “Which means freedom of the press. If I don’t act fast, by the time the dust settles, I won’t get a slice of the pie.”

“Wow, wow, what am I hearing?” I replied with no small measure of acrimony. “Are you seriously that opportunistic?”

He realised that his tongue had slipped and quickly tried to backtrack, saying he owed everything to his editor, who’d hired him fresh out of college. With all the events of late, their staff had mostly abandoned their posts, leaving the paper more or less paralysed. He couldn’t sit by in good conscience.

It was a terribly concocted lie. He was so devoted to his editor that he decided to hide at his daddy’s house for over three weeks?

Still, I was interested in why exactly he foresaw the students winning. He answered as if it were the most obvious thing under the sun, “Do you even need to ask? Come on. The people will never side with the Party.”

“I don’t know… Mr. Murata says the opposite.”

“What the hell does some Japanese guy know?” he scoffed.

He told me he was on his way to report on something at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and asked if I wanted to go. Some students of the school were crafting their own version of the Statue of Liberty—the Goddess of Democracy, they called it—and were planning to install it at Tiananmen Square that night. I immediately refused, and not in the kindest manner. He tried to sweet-talk me to change my mind. I heard him out. It never hurts to hear how you’re the best thing that ever happened to someone, even if you know it’s not true. But was it? There might be some truth there. If you listen to a lie long enough, you’ll simply start to believe it. I was half in a daze when suddenly a woman’s voice took over the line. “She has said she doesn’t want to go. Stop wasting your time with her.”

The line clicked dead. Guo Yan had hung up in a haste. I held the receiver in front of my face and stared at it, unable to process what had just happened. Yang, my friend at the front desk, had warned me that Big Brother, or in this case, Big Sister, was eavesdropping on our calls—and he was right.

It took me a few minutes to recover from the shock. Although I’d always hated the police state, I didn’t resent this specific police woman. She sounded just like some idle lady from our neighbourhood, nosy and big-mouthed. Most of the time, she would be simply annoying, but occasionally she might save someone’s day.

■

Still, Guo Yan had piqued my interest. After work, I headed to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, a mile north of Wangfujing, situated in a hutong named Xiaowei. As I got closer to the gates of the school, the mass of people grew more and more impenetrable. Impatient bicyclists rang their bells, attempting to break through the wall of bodies. For the residents of the hutong, the spectacle was yet another unwelcome disturbance from the outside world. They just wanted to get home.

Dusk settled in. Calls of “Excuse me! Excuse me!” rang out. Four flatbed carts slowly wheeled out of the gates with a large cloth covering each vehicle’s payload. Someone from the crowd yanked one off, revealing a snow-white form underneath. The flashes of cameras instantly turned the darkening hutong to broad daylight. I heard someone next to me explain that the statue was over ten meters tall, and no one vehicle was big enough to move it all. The students had to cut it into four pieces to be reassembled on arrival.

The carts carrying the parts of the statue slowly made a turn to another hutong, before making it to Wangfujing Street with a thousand flashbulbs leading the way. With the larger street came a larger crowd, and the four carts crawled forward at a snail’s pace.

From time to time, the cloth covering the statue was ripped away. I tried my best to roll with the agitated mass, catching glimpses of a leg, a torso, a head, and something resembling a torch. The air of the night boiled. Overall the atmosphere was upbeat, but I was struck with an impending sense of doom. I had the feeling that I was in a funeral procession, following the carts on which Lady Liberty was lying, murdered and chopped up. Yet when I looked around, all I could see were ecstatic faces. All I heard were shouts of joy. It was only me in mourning, fighting against my ominous feeling.

■

The Statue of Liberty’s assembly continued through to noon the next day, after which the exhausted creators held a brief ceremony to honour its completion, randomly choosing a man and woman from the crowd to pull the rope that finally unveiled it. The moment the curtain dropped, fearless roars of “Long Live Democracy!” thundered forth from the crowd. The Goddess of Democracy was situated on the invisible central axis of Tiananmen Square, staring straight across Chang’an Avenue at the massive portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Tower.

The sight of the Goddess of Democracy uplifted students’ spirits. At the same time, fundraisers in Hong Kong purchased the protesters a massive number of tents. The students organised them in neat, colour-coded rows throughout the Square. Almost overnight, the former garbage-laden occupation camp turned into a gleaming, multicoloured playground. The spacious tents provided much-needed relief from Beijing’s already scorching May temperatures.

The tents came in just in time. On the night of May 30, fierce winds and rain pummelled Beijing, but with the tents now in place, students fared quite well, frolicking and chatting the night away as if they were at a slumber party. Neither blazing sun nor pouring rain could drive them away.

June 1 was International Children’s Day. Every year, the Party would arrange for each school’s members of the Young Pioneers of China to travel to Tiananmen for a large ceremony during which each would take an “oath.” This year, with the square occupied, the ceremony was cancelled. With no school, parents took their kids to see the new Goddess of Democracy statue, as if on a normal field trip.

■

After Hu Yaobang’s passing in April, it seemed that all palpable changes the Party decreed would be announced on weekends. On Friday, June 2, Mr. Murata grimly predicted that the Party was going to take the Square by force on the weekend. But “force” was too comprehensive a word. Canon’s head office wanted a clear answer to the question: Would the Chinese military turn guns on its own people?

“Personally, I still don’t think they’ll use their guns,” Mr. Murata said calmly. “They’ll probably do what they did during the last mass protests, in 1976. Water hoses and wooden clubs did the trick then. I don’t see why they wouldn’t now.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Mr. Murata knew so much about China’s history.

That afternoon, Ms. Kawashima handed me several boxes of documents for shredding. In and of itself, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Our office shredded documents at regular intervals throughout the year. Still, something felt off, as if she was preparing for the worst. Would Chinese soldiers burst into the hotel and search every foreigner’s office?

The shredder hummed, tearing the documents in its grasp into thin strips. Before long, the trash can overflowed, which meant a trip to the dumpster at the end of the hall. The cavernous hallway made the normally imperceptible sound of my feet audible. Most offices in the hotel had been closed since the week before. If any room showed signs of life, it was likely occupied by foreign reporters.

The last box was filled with the pictures I had taken. All the victories and defeats I had worked so hard to capture, the glimpses of history itself, were to go into the shredder. Unable to accept it, I saved as many as I could and slipped them into my bag when Ms. Kawashima’s back was turned.

That afternoon, Mr. Murata waited until the last possible second to fax his assessment of the situation to the head office in Japan. The machine let out its long, steady tone, and a sigh, as if marking the end of an era it too had grown too weary to endure. Mr. Murata turned to me and said that I wouldn’t need to come in the next day. I wanted to ask about the week after but held my tongue. If I’d learned anything from recent events, it was that I’d deal with tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

■

As I walked past the Square on my way home, I noticed the Monument to the People’s Heroes had again become the focus of attention. A crowd had gathered around a small group of men whose banner read You Leave Us No Choice!

Whenever “You leave us no choice” appears, it means escalation of conflict. But how much further could they go past starving themselves to death? There were rumours of students calling for self-immolation. My heart pumped fiercely.

Many years later, I learnt that historians named the people with the banner “Four Gentlemen.” They were Liu Xiaobo, a teacher from Beijing Normal University; Hou Dejian, a Taiwanese singer; Zhou Duo, a manager at the Stone Group in Beijing; and Gao Xin, the former editor-in-chief of the school newspaper for Beijing Normal University. They had entered Tiananmen Square at four o’clock on the afternoon of June 2, declaring a seventy-two-hour hunger strike.

I was stumbling my way through the crowd toward the monument when one of the men at its base stood and began to sing. I was too far away to see who it was, but through the distorted speakers, I heard a Taiwanese twang to his voice. The song was “Descendants of the Dragon.” The crowd joined in and sang along. The atmosphere was light and uplifting. I breathed a sigh of relief. No one would burn themselves today.

Before long, my attention was drawn to another broadcast. In those days, many speakers positioned throughout the square, each with a limited reach, clashing with each other along their edges. From where I was standing, I could hear two accounts of the state of affairs from two different speakers. Both shouted the same thing: soldiers were on their way.

The military are entering the city by truck or on foot, in uniform or undercover … from all directions…

Now is the time … The last stand.

“By truck or by foot?” “In uniform or undercover?” “From which directions?” These students didn’t make sense. I shrugged in disapproval, and wandered off seeking a calmer speaker. I ended up at the Federation for Workers’ Autonomy:

All students and citizens of Beijing, please report to the Federation tent to collect your weapons. Cleavers, batons, chains, bamboo rods, and other modes of self-defense will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.

They definitely sounded more clear and concise than the students, but if I walked over to their tent, would they really hand me a weapon? How could they be sure I wasn’t an undercover soldier? I started to feel unsafe.

I exited the Square and crossed Chang’an Avenue. At Xinhua Gate, students and citizens gathered in front of the tightly sealed gates, which were guarded by several hundred members of the People’s Liberation Army. Both sides stood in complete silence.

Near Liubukou, I saw a bus-turned-barricade. Several young people who appeared to be college students stood on the roof, screaming through megaphones. They are getting closer. Soldiers have entered the western suburbs. Walking several steps, I saw another bus lie across the road, soot smeared all over it. At a construction site next to Xidan Street, a crowd of people wrenched bricks and rebar free, arming themselves for battle.

Running along Xidan for a short while, I dashed into the first hutong I could find. As always, the hutongs were a world of their own, a world that intended to keep out of the fanning flames of battle. The smell of each family’s signature dishes wafted through the air.

Stone chess boards sat surrounded by players and enthusiasts, each balancing a bowl and chopsticks in one hand, as they moved pieces or expressed their approval. Turning the corner, I was back at the entrance to Xiyangmaying, where my childhood haven, the Workers’ Club, was just steps away. I relaxed. I was only fifteen minutes from home.

I noticed a group of people gathered around a utility pole, each with a look more grave than the next. Clearly something unusual had happened.

I stayed on the perimeter, standing on my tiptoes to catch a glimpse. It was a smashed package of hardtack. There was no brand on the package: this was military issue. Volunteers had canvassed the area for clues, leading them to this location, where they found a mysterious triangle drawn in chalk on the pole. One after another, residents were called forth to claim responsibility, or at least take a guess as to how it got there.

“I didn’t draw that … My kid didn’t either,” one mumbled.

“We don’t even have chalk,” another replied.

“Next in line. Take a look, please,” someone called out, in an attempt to lead the investigation.

People in the front started looking back. My heart jumped. I quickly peeled away and slipped into another hutong.

“Why bother? We all know what it is … some mark from a military scout!” I heard one man shout behind me. “We all need to be vigilant. Who’s seen any strangers here lately?”

I took off running. I needed to go home, and I would stay home the next day, and the day after. I’d been so fierce and defiant, but when history reached a turning point, I just wanted to hole up in my safety.

One of the beauties of living in a metropolis is the gift of anonymity. But martial law had sent Beijing decades back, and degraded a networked major city into isolated feudal strongholds. Hearing the hutong residents calling out warnings of strangers, I got scared. I was a stranger carrying suspicious photos in my backpack. If they searched me, I had no proof of which side I was on.

I ran as fast as my legs would carry me, all the way to the traffic lights under the Second Ring Road. Panting and shaking, I gulped and gasped in an effort to catch my breath.  My grandmother’s home was steps away, right after the intersection.

[Editors’ note: This is an excerpt from the memoir Inconvenient Memories: A Personal Account of the Tiananmen Square Incident and China Before and After. In it, Beijing-born Anna Wang describes what ordinary Beijing people’s lives were like right before the crackdown on the Tiananmen protests of 1989. At the time, the author worked at Canon’s Beijing office. A note on names to avoid confusion: the author’s Japanese bosses are named Mr. Murata and Ms. Kawashima; Guo Yan is a married journalist with whom Wang was having an affair.]

Anna Wang, born and raised in Beijing, received her BA from Peking University and is a full-time writer. She has published nine books in Chinese. These include two short story collections, one essay collection, four novels, and two translations. An English translation of her short stories, Beijing Women: Stories, was published in 2014. Inconvenient Memories is her debut book written in English. Visit her website for more information.