Forbidden City (19 page)

On my way back to Nai-nai’s gate I heard someone talking through a loud-hailer. His words bounced and echoed down the canyon of the
hu tong
. I made my painful way past the gate, continuing around the curve for about twenty meters to where the alley straightened out. Just along from there was an intersection. Someone was selling Chinese celery from the back of one of those vehicles that looked like a giant tricycle with a flat platform behind the rider — a
ping ban che
. On the opposite corner an old man squatted next to a carefully stacked pile of round watermelons. Beside the
ping ban che
about two dozen people had gathered around a young man who stood astride a bike. He was talking to them through the loud-hailer. He stopped
when machine-gun fire popped rapidly in the distance, then started up again. When he finished, he mounted the bike and rode off.

When I got back to the house I asked Xin-hua if she knew what that guy might have been doing. She told me that the young man was probably a news spreader. People like him were going around the city, passing on the latest news at a free market or
hu tong
corner, then riding on to the next spot. I knew that what they were doing was illegal, what Lao Xu had called “spreading rumours”, and that if they were caught they’d be in big trouble. Maybe even be shot.

“We have no other way to find out what is happening,” she said. “Only one radio station now and it is all lies. Same thing with TV.”

I had to lie down. My leg was killing me and my headache was worse. My cot had been folded up and put away so Xin-hua helped me up onto the
kang
. She brought me a couple more of the pills. I swallowed them and lay back.

I felt trapped and totally frustrated and sick with worry about my dad. Maybe, I thought, maybe I should just walk along the
hu tong
until I got to a main street and hail a cab or get on a bus or something. One thing was sure, I couldn’t walk or take a bicycle. But I could make it to the Beijing Hotel
some
how.

But between me and the hotel was Tian An Men Square, which was now full of tanks and
PLA
.

Well, maybe I could skirt the square, just take a
long way around. Then I remembered. There were barricades on all the roads leading to the square. And in other places, all over the city. Maybe buses weren’t running yet. Maybe taxis weren’t either. I wondered if I could get Xin-hua to help me back to the hotel.

My thoughts were interrupted by a long burst of AK 47 fire, then a couple of short bursts. I flinched, feeling suddenly afraid. Maybe it wasn’t so safe for anybody to be out on the main streets, I thought.

After lunch — noodles again — Xin-hua’s friends came by. I was up again, not because I felt any better but because it was too depressing lying on the bed behind the screen.

Xiao Nie immediately examined my leg. He rolled up the pant leg and slowly unwound the bandage while the others watched. It stung like mad because the dried blood had glued the bandage and my leg hairs and the skin all together. I felt stupid, trying not to howl in the presence of three people who had been shot at a couple of days ago. By the time the bandage was off I was breathing hard and blinking hard, hoping no one noticed I was about to faint. I twisted my leg a bit and looked at the wound. It was all dark red with old blood and sort of an ugly yellow colour tinged the muscle around it. There was still a fair amount of swelling, too.

“It’s better,” Xiao Nie said.

“It feels worse.”

“That mean it’s healing.”

He said something in Chinese and Xiao Yang, a
small guy with thick horn-rimmed glasses handed him a small green canvas bag. Xiao Nie rummaged around inside and came out with a paper packet. He unfolded it and sprinkled some white powder on the wound. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and drew out two little paper envelopes.

Putting them on the table beside the hissing two-way radio he said, “Take these. One from each package every four hours.”

“What are they?” I was imagining some ancient Chinese medicine like eye of newt or powdered tiger’s teeth or something.

“One is painkiller. The another one is tetracycline, antibiotic. Now I give you this treatment.”

From his little green bag Xiao Nie removed a clear plastic sack with a lot of different-length needles in it and a bottle of clear liquid. “Needles for the acupuncture,” he explained. “It will ease your pain and help the swell to go away.”

“Acupuncture? Are you kidding?” I wasn’t too fussy about the idea of anyone sticking needles into me. I couldn’t believe a real doctor was using voodoo stuff like that.

“I thought you went to the western-style medical college,” I said to Xiao Nie. In China there are also traditional medical colleges where you can go and learn about roots and berries and needles.

“Yes, Shan Da. Acupuncture is good. Many of Western doctors are using it.”

Maybe so, but not on me, I thought. My leg
didn’t agree with me. As soon as Xiao Nie finished his sentence, a firecracker of pain flared in my wound.

“Does it hurt?”

“Little bit of pain, but goes away fast.”

“Okay, try it,” I said. What did I have to lose? “But if I say stop, stop. Okay?”

“Very okay, Shan Da.”

Xiao Nie sat down across from me — which surprised me. How was he going to stick needles in my leg from his chair? He took the needles from the little plastic bag and spread them out. Then he unscrewed the cap of the bottle.

“Give me your left hand, please, Shan Da.”

I did as he asked, curious. He turned my hand palm down on the table and took my wrist, feeling around with his thumb where hand and wrist met. He seemed to find a spot he liked. Holding my arm firmly, he chose a needle, about ten centimetres long and dipped the point into the liquid. I guessed that was to sterilize it.

He put the needle against my skin where his thumb had been and pushed it into my wrist. It stung like it does when — well, when you’re getting a needle. He twirled the needle slowly clockwise, then counterclockwise. The sting went away.

Within a few minutes he had placed three needles around the first one. He looked up and smiled. “Any paining, Shan Da?”

“No. Nothing.” I stared at the needles. Okay, I thought, now my wrist looks like I had an argument
with a porcupine, but what’s my wrist got to do with a bullet wound in my calf?

“Xiao Nie, why are you putting the needles in
there
?”

“Send your
qi
over to your hurt spot, Shan Da.”

“Oh.” I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. I watched as he put three more needles into the back of my hand. Then he knelt in front of me.

“Those needles for healing. Now I put some to make the swell go away.”

Xiao Nie inserted a couple of needles below the wound and a couple above it, twirling each one before letting it go. He stood up and screwed the cap back onto the bottle.

While I sat there, punctured, Xin-hua’s friends passed on the news and rumours they’d picked up. Xiao Nie was helping out when he could at the Union Hospital. Xiao Yang had been touring on his bike, secretly taking pictures. He put two rolls of exposed film on the table. I wondered why, but didn’t say anything. Xiao Liu, a big solid guy who made Xin-hua and Xiao Yang look like kindergarten kids beside him, had been checking out the university campuses because most students thought that it was only a matter of time before the
PLA
raided the campuses. They were afraid of another blood bath.

They talked in Chinese — Xiao Liu had no English because his foreign language was Japanese and Xin-hua would stop every few minutes and
translate for me as best she could with her limited vocabulary. Probably she didn’t have words like
murder, blood, bullet, tank
, and
armoured personnel carrier
in her English textbooks. While she talked to me I made notes, then when she switched to Chinese with her friends, I put a summary on the tape recorder. I had to do it that way because I was starting to run low on tapes.

This is what they found out.

The Chinese Red Cross estimated 2,600 civilians and students dead so far.

Police were patrolling the city in groups with iron truncheons. The
PLA
were at most of the intersections and doing spot checks, demanding to see people’s identity papers.
PLA
in plain clothes with heavy canvas shoulder bags were patrolling the city. There were machine guns in the bags. Were the
PLA
using the civilians for cover for some reason?

In many neighbourhoods, life goes on as usual. People are shopping, sitting in the shade of the plane trees, playing with their kids.

On a side street out near the Friendship Hotel a truck full of soldiers was moving slowly along because the street was narrow. A street sweeper threw down his broom and lay on the pavement in front of the truck to prevent it going forward. He was arrested.

PLA
forced their way into the Capital Hospital and arrested a camera crew who were taking pictures of the wounded. Doctors had let them in against strict orders. Two doctors were shot.

Outside the Citi building soldiers pulled a man off a bicycle and beat him with the butts of their AK 47s. “I have a wife! I have a wife!” he yelled as they struck him. At the same place soldiers rounded up civilians from the street and forced them to kneel with guns at the back of their necks for forty minutes, then let them go.

There are rumours that the soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Army have been fired upon by other troops because of what had happened at the square. Also that, on the night of the massacre, soldiers from the Twenty-seventh Army stood behind other troops and shot them if they refused to fire on the students.

In the east part of the city, near the Workers’ Gymnasium, a truckload of soldiers rumbled down a residential street. An old lady standing on her fourth-storey balcony shouted at them, waving her fist, “
Fa xi shi! Fa xi shi!
” Fascists! Fascists! She was shot from the moving truck and she toppled over the balcony railing into the street.

Tanks are massed ten across and eight deep at the north end of Tian An Men Square. There are three hundred thousand
PLA
in and around Beijing. Tanks are deployed at strategic spots, like major intersections of the Second Ring Road. The big diplomatic residence compound on the Second Ring Road has been ordered evacuated. I looked up when Xin-hua told me that, remembering the map of Beijing in my head, remembering when I showed Eddie and Dad where I thought the
PLA
would enter the city. The
tanks set up in that way meant only one thing — whoever deployed the tanks was expecting an attack. It seemed Beijing was on the verge of civil war.

Today was What To Do With Alex Day. Or, I should say, With Shan Da.

It was pretty much like yesterday — sunny and hot, with no breeze to stir the poplars in the courtyard. I couldn’t move around too much. I guess I had overdone things yesterday, tried to hurry the wound along. Today I paid for it. The wound raged and complained and every move I
made sent a fiery bolt right up to my knee.

So I sat around and got in Nai-nai’s way all day.

I was really on edge. Nothing on the two-way, nothing to do except sit or lie around feeling sore in the head and leg, wondering when and how I was going to get out of this place, thinking about Lao Xu, worrying about Dad, wondering what had happened to Eddie the night of the massacre — in other words I was going nuts with frustration.

On top of that, I was homesick. I missed my friends. I wanted to be in my own room in my own house. And I wanted Dad there with me.

Tears ran from the corners of my eyes, hot and ticklish. I took a deep breath to stop the crying and let it out slow.

I decided that no matter how badly my leg hurt and no matter what Nai-nai or Xin-hua thought, I was going to leave tomorrow morning. I would thank them for taking care of me and I would ask to borrow the cane. I would make my way along the
hu tong
until I got to a major street. Then I would try to get back to the hotel. I knew I was south of the square, and as long as it was still sunny, I’d be able to figure out where north was.

If I met soldiers, well, I’d have to try my luck.

I felt a little better after I had made my decision, and I dozed off and slept till suppertime.

Our meal was boiled rice and stir-fried celery with soya bean sauce and sugar in it. That’s it. A typical meal, Xin-hua told me. Not much like the
Beijing Hotel. I realized that the meals there and in the Chinese restaurants in Toronto don’t have much to do with what people actually eat in China.

After supper, Xiao Nie and Xiao Yang came by. They looked tired and scared and sad at the same time. But I had never known them when they
didn’t
look that way

Right away I asked them if they had heard anything about my father. Xiao Nie didn’t say anything. He dropped his canvas bag on the table, then knelt and began to unwrap my bandage, keeping his head down as he worked. Xin-hua and Xiao Yang rattled away in Chinese and every few seconds Xin-hua looked across the table at me, her face anxious.