by Ding Zilin, translated from the Chinese by Kevin Carrico

His son was killed. In the months that followed, to show the “correct” political viewpoint, he condemned himself and his lost son in endless study groups: “I didn’t raise him well,” he said.

Her husband was killed. When she heard the news, she wanted to go out and kill one of the soldiers on the street. 

Her son’s son was killed. Her five-year-old granddaughter was left fatherless, and she did all that she could for them to struggle through each day. 

It just so happened that they were all from the same family, having lost one man: a son, husband, and father. 

I had heard my fair share of stories about this father who bolstered the government’s campaign to whitewash the massacre that had killed his own son. His last name was Wang, and, like me, he worked at Renmin University, as a cadre in the school’s Disciplinary Inspection Committee. His cold-blooded celebrations of the “suppression of the counterrevolutionary rebellion” left most colleagues in shock. A cadre from our university’s Youth League once commented: “everyone else approaches this rectification campaign halfheartedly. But he’s different. He won’t let anyone off the hook, dead or alive. And his dedication is unwavering. What could his superiors be giving him to act like this?” Soon, I saw his picture on a board outside the faculty cafeteria: he was being recognised as one of the city’s “exemplary Party members.”

I have never had much of an interest in meeting with such people. They make me sick. However, I never forgot that his son was a victim: a young man with great ambition and a strong conscience, I had been told.

Zhang Xianling, it just so happens, introduced me to this victim’s mother, caring full time for a granddaughter who lost her father far too young. But when we tried to talk with her about what happened to her son, she refused any contact with us. We asked her to help us contact her daughter-in-law, but she kept evading our requests.

Then, one day, I just so happened to meet a widow by the name of Zhang. She was a primary school teacher who lived near my university. Zhang was very frank. She told me that her husband, Wang Yifei, had originally worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was employed at a company in Zhongguancun at the time of his death. 

Both she and her husband wholeheartedly supported the democracy movement and frequently visited Tiananmen Square that spring. On the evening of June 3rd, they were heading out together toward Muxidi. But before long, her husband began worrying about leaving their daughter at home alone: go home and stay with her, he urged her. As she turned away, it never crossed her mind that this would be their final goodbye. Soon thereafter, Wang was shot and killed near Muxidi.  She lost a husband; her daughter lost a father. 

When we first met, Zhang told me the story of a neighbour who had lived next door to them for years. After June 4th, this formerly friendly neighbour suddenly began treating her family very differently, jumping at any chance to bully her and her daughter, jeering that her husband had “died choking on the barrel of a gun.” Unable to take it any longer, Zhang eventually punched her in the face, fracturing her nose. Although she had to cover her medical expenses, she told me she had no regrets. 

One day, out of the blue, Zhang asked, “Professor Ding, do you know who I am? Do you know who is in my family?” She revealed: “I am the daughter-in-law of  Vice Secretary Wang of the Renmin University Disciplinary Inspection Committee. I’m sure you know that old leftist. He’s my father-in-law.” Her mother-in-law was the mother who refused to engage with us. Why hadn’t I asked earlier? It turned out that these three individuals all came from the same family, and were dealing with the same unbearable loss in very different ways.

Zhang told me that it had been her father-in-law’s “resolute standpoint and excellent conduct” that had earned him the promotion to vice secretary. And her mother-in-law, while never celebrating the “suppression of the counterrevolutionary rebellion,” had nevertheless refused to put us in contact, to avoid “making trouble.”

We live in complicated times, and one should never make assumptions about people based on their public face: this is especially true in China, a nation trapped in an endless political tragedy. Zhang revealed to me another, unknown side of her father-in-law. While this assistant secretary of the Commission for Discipline Inspection was a “good cadre” and “good Party member” lauded for his work, he often sat at home with his head bowed in complete silence every evening. He would sit and listen, as his daughter-in-law criticised him. Every day, he would also take great care in tending to a pot of lilies that his son had planted before his death.

He also kept his son’s ashes at home, and had arranged a final resting place for him, his wife, and their son in their home province of Shaanxi.

Such stories troubled me deeply. My feelings of disgust faded away, replaced by nothing but a bottomless pity for the life that this father felt forced to lead. This world is simply too cruel: decades of slaughter, decades of “education” meant to deceive the masses, and decades of the warping of human nature have all led to the bifurcation of people’s personalities, splitting one person in two. Kindness, empathy, and love, all of mankind’s most beautiful attributes, can only be manifest in the most twisted, veiled, or even perverse of manners, and only in private settings. In public, one can only act blindly according to designated codes, without any sense of right or wrong, or even any sense of a mind of one’s own. This is the tragedy of today’s China.

Zhang’s mother-in-law suffered a heart attack and died a few months after we met. Zhang remarried and moved abroad with her daughter to start over. As for her father in law, all of the “honors” bestowed on this “good cadre” and “exemplary Party member” are now long gone, as are his son’s lilies, and his family. All that he has left are memories of which he cannot speak in public.

17 December 2004

Ding Zilin (author) is a retired Professor of philosophy at Renmin University and a co-founder of the Tiananmen Mothers. Ding’s son Jiang Jielian was killed by the PLA in Muxidi on 3 June 3 1989, at the age of 17. Together with Zhang Xianling, whose son was also killed that night, Ding established the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of family members of victims of the Tiananmen Massacre. Tiananmen Mothers document the victims of the state violence of 1989, as well as calling on the regime to release political prisoners, end political persecution, and allow an open and transparent investigation into the state violence of June 1989.

Kevin Carrico (translator) is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University. He is the author of The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today and the translator of Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-immolations against Chinese Rule. He is currently completing a manuscript on ethnic thought and independence sentiment in contemporary Hong Kong.