During the day, the little sparrow hops around the bed. Sometimes it flies up and circles the room; then, when it’s tired, it settles on my chest and grips my skin with its shaking claws. Since it arrived, the room seems to have grown much larger. I follow it as it flutters through the air. It has given me back a sense of night and day.
I imagine slowly lifting my hands then bringing them down to touch the feathery warmth of its body. It pecks out a hair from my nostrils, rubs its beak against my cheek, and chirps. An episode from my past suddenly returns to me. It’s so vivid, my whole body seems to clench. I see A-Mei look up at me and say: ‘If you could have one wish, what would it be?’
‘To travel the country and climb Mount Everest. And you?’
‘That sounds too tiring for me. My wish would be to come back as a bird in the next life and fly through the sky.’
‘I often have flying dreams, but when I reach the clouds, I start feeling cold and have to come down again.’
She looked into the sky and said, ‘In the next life, I’ll be your lovebird and keep you warm. We can fly off to the heavens together…’
You are a bird’s skeleton drifting on the cold wind.
‘Open up! Open up!’ There are people banging on our front door. I can tell at once that it’s the police. They always turn up at dawn. It’s 2 June today. I wonder where they’re planning to hide us this year.
‘I’m coming,’ my mother croaks sleepily, turning on a light.
‘Are you — Chen Huizhen?’ This man’s voice is unfamiliar. He hasn’t visited the flat before.
‘You’ve come to drag us out of the city before the tenth anniversary of 4 June, haven’t you? So I’m sure you know who I am.’
‘You took part in the Falun Gong siege of Zhongnanhai on 25 April.’
‘It wasn’t a siege, comrade. All we were doing was trying to lodge a complaint at the Central Appeals Office.’
‘Ten thousand people surrounding the residential compound of our top government leaders! If that isn’t an attempt to subvert state power, then what is?’
‘We’re a timid lot. We don’t dare march through the streets, or even stick up posters. How could we possibly topple the state?’
‘Haven’t you read the newspapers? Falun Gong is a deceitful, dangerous organisation. 1, 400 practitioners have died as a result of refusing medical treatment. Some followers have become so unhinged that they’ve committed suicide. One woman even strangled her own daughter.’
‘Falun Gong fosters the cultivation of truth, compassion and tolerance. What’s evil about that? If it opposed the Party, I wouldn’t have joined it. I’m stuck at home all day with this mute son of mine. As soon as I step outside, my every move is monitored by the police. When I fall ill, there’s no one to help me. Why shouldn’t I do a little meditation to help release my tension? And I’m not just doing it for myself, I’m doing it for my son as well. I can’t afford to buy him any more medication. If I continue to practise the exercises, my energy field is bound to have a beneficial effect on his health.’
‘You think your meditation can heal him?’ says a female officer. ‘If you’re not careful, you’ll end up a vegetable yourself.’ She walks in and rifles through the drawers, then frisks my mother’s mattress. The police always bring a female officer with them. This one has been here twice before.
‘You went to the People’s University to speak to Ding Zilin.’
‘Of course I did. She asked the international community to provide humanitarian assistance to the relatives of the 4 June victims. I wanted to thank her. But that was three years ago now.’
‘You know that you’re strictly forbidden to have contact with such people. And what about those other women from the Tiananmen Mothers group? They come here every week. What have you been plotting?’ This policeman speaking is the officer who interrogated me when I was fifteen. He is now the head of our local public security bureau.
‘They only come here for a chat. Aren’t we allowed to have a bit of companionship? Do you really think that a few old ladies like us could bring down the government?’
‘Just a chat, you say? You can’t fool us.’
‘I wrote a statement supporting the government crackdown nine years ago. What more do you want?’
‘We want to know why you joined the siege of Zhongnanhai. Tell us who sent you there.’
‘No one sent us. I was practising my routines in the yard with my neighbours that morning. We were upset about the arrests of those Tianjin practitioners. After our session, we decided to go to Zhongnanhai to appeal for their release. We didn’t know that so many other practitioners would have the same idea. It wasn’t a siege. All we did was stand on the street meditating. No one is giving us orders. You must believe me. Falun Gong practitioners never lie.’
‘We are high-ranking officers, so you’d better watch how you speak to us.’
‘We were afraid the government would accuse us of staging a demonstration. That’s why none of us sat down, apart from Granny Pang. After standing up for a few hours, her legs began to shake, so she had to rest on her knees for a while.’
‘Don’t give us any more lies. We’re treating this matter very seriously. Pack your bags now. We’re taking you and your son away from Beijing for a few days. We don’t want you causing any trouble during the 4 June anniversary.’ I remember this officer shouting to me in exactly the same way when he kicked me in the shins nearly twenty years ago.
‘I’m a law-abiding citizen. You have no right to take me away.’
‘If you’re so law-abiding, what were you doing demonstrating outside Zhongnanhai?’
‘This is my home. You don’t have an arrest warrant. I refuse to leave.’
‘I warn you, things are going to turn nasty. The government will pronounce its official verdict on Falun Gong soon. If a religion that causes the death of 1, 400 people isn’t an evil cult, I don’t know what is.’
‘You can knock me to the ground, but I will crawl back up again, and the Falun wheel will still be spinning inside me. Arrest me, if you want! I don’t care. What difference will it make? China is one huge prison. Whether we’re in a jail or in our homes, every one of us is a prisoner!’ She turns abruptly and storms off to her bedroom.
I’ve never heard her so enraged before. She certainly didn’t react so angrily the last two times the police came to take us away for 4 June. Six weeks ago, she stood outside the Zhongnanhai government compound with 10,000 fellow practitioners for six hours, and returned a different person. She probably feels just like we did at the beginning of the student movement. When people become part of a group, they find a courage they never knew they possessed before.
‘In fact, the clampdown on Falun Gong has already begun,’ the female officer says, following my mother into the bedroom. ‘The police have begun scouring the city’s hotels, rounding up Falun Gong members who’ve travelled up from the provinces. We’ll be turning on the Beijing practitioners soon. We’ve placed you under surveillance all these years because of your son’s involvement in the student movement. But this time it’s your membership of the cult that worries us… We’ve heard that Falun Gong members are planning to stage a mass suicide in the Fragrant Hills on the birthday of your leader, Li Hongzhi. You can’t expect the government to sit back and do nothing.’