Chapter 24
With the frightful hurdle now removed, Bing, like a culprit who had escaped punishment, was able to lead a normal university life. To imagine that he and Fang had almost created a new life, and that this new life would grow as big as him, and possibly do the similar odd things just as what he had been doing! And now, for no reason but the tiniest amount of luck, that life hadn’t materialized, as it could have equally done!
He kept dating Fang, shedding his excessive energy into her, in whatever little privacy they could find. Sometimes in a corner of the park, under the cover of dusk, sometimes in his room when others were out, especially on weekends. They had also learnt a method of birth-control, though, to him, having sex with a condom felt false and unnatural, and, actually, not overly different from masturbation. The little layer of rubber, that in fact separates the couple in the process, was like a nasty unwelcome intruder, however necessary as it must have to be.
His pastime, when alone without Fang or Kang, was again spent on his guitar, and to lesser extent on books. As his guitar reputation spread, he began to receive more and more invitations either from within Shangwai, or from other universities. He went a number of times to Fudan and Shanghai Normal University to perform, asked firstly by his country-fellows, and then by other party organizers who had heard of his guitar skills. His popularity had earned him quite a number of love letters from girls. Every time he was informed of a letter addressed him, his roommates and even the guard of his building, the woman whose hands never stopped knitting, would grin at him curiously but knowingly, for it was not as if anyone else would write him letters. Nowadays, his scarce communication with his home, was all done by phone calls or a line or two of remarks in the money remittence his dad sent to him. Therefore, his letters were always from his admirers. And, out of vanity and curiosity, he had replied to two letters and made appointments to see them, one from Shangwai and the other the Shanghai Normal University, but neither lived up to what he could have wished.
Vivian had never written to him; maybe nice and beautiful girls do not write, instead, they receive!
Fang began complaining, complaining to him that he only thought of her when he was hungry, and that he was selfish and heartless and uncaring. He couldn’t say or protest against her reproach, for what she had said might be true. It was not his nature to pretend, to argue, or hurt a girl by telling her something he was not able to fathom himself. Did he like her, love her, or simply want her? What was the difference ? So, without working out the puzzle, he maintained cruelly indifferent to her discontent, upsetting her ever more.
Then, less and less, he willed to seek her comfort, and more and more Vivian’s charm piqued his youthhood. He was not sure exactly when his relationship with Fang was finished, for they had never declared a formal ending. However, when, one evening in a classroom, he spotted her sitting intimately with another guy, he supposed that was the end of their story.
Then, the Tiananmen ‘incident’ came to disrupt the campuses all over the country. Banners were billowing; posters, in big characters, written by individuals or self-appointed groups, plastered the walls and noticeboards. The news, or mere rumours, were quickly passing on; in the air, an excitement began to stir, gaining momentum in a matter of hours.
Students, especially more enthusiastic ones from Fudan and Tongji, went on the streets to outspeak their minds of bettering a society. Their expressed their ardent views on politics; they begged the government to give them freedom, to reform the system, to stem and eradicate corruption, to put inflation under control, to redress the wrongs done to certain leaders, to demand face-to-face dialogues with the authorities, who seemed to have held many serious rounds of indoor meetings, but still at a loss as how to put out a sweeping fire across the country, so sudden and rebellious.
On the fourth of May, Bing, together with Kang and other roommates, joined the mass of demonstrators, feeling the first time in his life the kind of hilarious, revolutionary thrill. The flags, or simply rags from used clothes or sacks, were tied up to the bamboo poles, possibly torn from the bunk beds. The undulating shouts, after one or two unknown leaders’ weak and distant voices, were explosive, shocking the humans, as well as the little sparrows in the street.
The traffic was chaotic; the trolley-buses, with their uplifted tails propping the power lines, halted dead in the road, blocking the pedestrians and bicycle riders. However, on encountering such blockages, the lengthy parade would change its shape like a gigantic snake, evading the obstacles to continue towards the Square, where the municipal government was located.
The onlookers were swarming both sidewalks of streets. Their expressions varied from being very stern to very merry. Some of them were there rocking their babies in their arms, while others might outstretch their hands to place money in the donation box, carried by the collectors rushing back and forth beside the main procession. Now and then the spectators might also surprise the crowd with their sudden shrill utterance, adding more a sense of heroism into the students’ hearts that had already been swelled by the unprecedented deluge of youthful passion.
As a tiny part of the massive movement, Bing was feeling as excited and, to larger extent, amused as everyone else beside him. For the moment, he was drowned into a sort of intoxication, which was not stimulated by the rice-wine or beer with a substance, but by the collective spell liberated all at once from the enormous human congregation.
Arriving at the destination, the orderly marching troop was, beginning from the head, dissolved like a river entering a sea of people on the Square. Active organizers with their megaphones were trying to attract the attention of dispersing students, who, previously moving as a vital part of well-organised demonstration, seemed to have suddenly lost their collective identity, and begun to wander about like empty-minded strollers in a flea market.
Soon afterwards, Bing and Kang were the only two who still stuck together.
‘Look there,’ Kang said, pointing, ‘Someone is about to make speech.’
Not as tall as Kang, Bing had to strain his neck to check in the direction, and noticed , not far away, a circle was forming.
‘Let’s get closer,’ said Kang.
The circle was thickening, inside which a banner for the News Department of Fudan University was erected. Two female students looked amazingly small. One of them, in a coarsened and whitewashed denim shirt and pants, had a little round face, with a short and thick hair capping her head. But her dark eyebrows, and her tight, grim lips were determined to defy her childish appearance. For the moment, she was holding high a loud-hailer, that was chained down to a microphone in the hand of a second girl, who had already begun reading a piece of paper, demanding the municipal authority to hold an immediate dialogue with the student representatives. The reader’s spectacles were enormous, its black rims covering a good potion of her innocent cheeks. And her eyes, in her concentration on the paper, rarely looked up, but her vehemence was really serious, even if, her overall appearance was more like a rebellious adolescent addressing her inexorable parents.
After the speech, Bing and Kang lingered a bit longer in the crowd, treading cautiously to avoid the feet and legs of the people sitting on the ground. Then, they listened to another speech, now given by an old man with snow-white moustache and beard, whose hand was waving passionately with his words to support the students’ campaign.
However, by this time, the excitement and the heroic feeling that had previously pervaded Bing, had already abated. And, the messy ground was now looking even worse than the marketplace in his village. They wanted to leave, but decided to pay a trip to the nearby Bund.
The Fuzhou Road was full of people, strolling in a leisure for a pleasant holiday. The passing bicycles, most of them old and rusty, bearing one or two or three people, were swerving carelessly through the crowd. By now, Bing’s fancy for bicycles had long gone, for he had seen heaps of them moving everywhere, taking up inches at the foot of every building. No more was it a rare, desirable type of goods, even if he had not yet owned any of them.
As expected, the Bund was plagued by as many people as anywhere else. Leaning over the rail, Bing, with his habitual water-inspired contemplation, watched or stared at Huangpu River. It was yellowish and opaque; it had never stopped its flow, to which destination he didn’t know. Compared to the pungent Black River by the side of his university, it was at least without an acrid odour that would drive him away.
Oh, this water, he mused, has been flowing for hundreds if not thousands of years, whilst the human affairs has also been taking place, constantly and actively on its banks. But one thing is certain, the muddy water won’t possibly turn crystal clear, like that running in his village streams, nor will it swell over the bank, to reach and drown the robust-looking, none-Chinese buildings on the side of the Bund. And seventy years ago, on the same day, young Chinese were also on the streets, showing off their fervent minds and spirits; most of them have already perished in time, the rest no longer strong enough clinging to the Earth. But the river has kept its coolness and indifference, doing its quiet, dutiful job in cleansing, at every moment, the debris and filth and shit of human beings, of sordid and hideous souls, of rotten and corrupted officials, of fat and lazy pigs, of vicious and snarling dogs, of any movable or immovable creatures, which may live a base and pathetic life, digest a type of food, breathe a breath of oxygen, and shout a noise of freedom, by worming, fighting, and prostrating, until the nature exerts its magic to quieten a casually living struggle…
He lifted his head, casting his glance to the other side of the river. The eastern side of it, Pudong, was but a flatness on the horizon, misty, gloomy, and hopeless.
Not much fun, he suggested going back home, well, not back to his Sichuan home. Shanghai was his new home, at least for the time being. And that was his first public demonstration.
The following weeks, the news from Beijing kept updating, and the heat of China’s largest industrial city was echoing well to the latest development from the capital and other cities. The students were straying, passing their free time in their own right. Teachers persuaded them to stay in classes, but no one was really expected to study, when the whole of China was being cooked, and broiled by the cries and the posters, by the surging souls and the roaring speakers.
Since then, Bing went a few more times to the street; the demonstrations were teeming with similar flood of people, with similar looks and excitement, yet with more creative and radical slogans.
One night, the guy from Yunnan province said: ‘My friend told me that forty student leaders from all the universities in Shanghai had a secret meeting yesterday.’
‘Really? Forty?’
‘Is your friend one of the leaders?’
‘No, he is just a friend of a leader. Guess where they had the meeting?’
‘Fudan, or Tongji, I would think.’
‘No, they gathered just next door.’
‘Are you kidding, next door?’ Bing asked in surprise, thinking he meant the next room.
‘No, no, it was in a dorm of the Financial and Economic University, post-graduate campus, our next door.’
‘Oh...’
‘What was it about?’
‘They had a plan to block all the traffic in the city today.’
‘It couldn’t be true, the traffic is not much worse than yesterday.’
‘That is what I have been wondering, maybe it was cancelled afterwards.’
‘Well, I guess they, famous people, were watched and followed closely by authorities, and might have already been arrested.’
…
More gossip was exchanged. One mentioned that he had a friend who, while marching in the street, spotted a pretty girl, and followed her, and reached her, and accosted her, and eventually made her acquaintance.
‘Was he successful in the end?’
‘Yes, she is his girl friend now.’
‘Haha, I hope I can have such luck.’
‘Why don’t we try the same thing next time?’
…
They laughed and cackled, until late in the night.
Towards the end of the month, the situation escalated from bad to worse; everyone wondered about what the next development was going to be. The students and the authorities seemed to have entered a deadlock. Emotions, hunger strikes, compassion, sympathy, determination, frustration, desperation, pleading and imploring, hatred, threatening and vengeance, all aspects of human nature seemed to collectively sneak out within a short period of time. Teachers were worried about students’ safety; the parents were anxiously calling their children to remain inactive, citing their horrible reminiscences of the numerous political struggles in China’s history.
Bing’s dad called him once with his keenest admonition he had ever given to him, asking him not to join the demonstration, reasoning that he was from a poor village, unlike those urbane, advantageous people, and that without the communist party, he wouldn’t have had a chance of going to the university, and that he ought to be humble and grateful, cherish the precious opportunity the great country had offered him, and not spoil and ruin his bright future... and Bing was replying: ‘Yes, yes, yes, you are right, I promise I won’t go to the street.’
But still, he went once more, and, worse, he had an idea of going northward to Beijing.
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