‘A mass suicide? That’s absurd! All we Falun Gong practitioners want is to cultivate our energies so that one day we’ll achieve immortality and fly into the sky. None of us wants to kill ourselves.’ My mother moves closer to the woman and asks, ‘Who are those two male officers? I haven’t seen them before.’
‘They’ve been sent by the municipal public security bureau. They’re dealing with your files now…’
‘A nurse comes twice a week to look after my son. I’ve already paid her fees upfront. You can’t expect us to leave like this at the drop of a hat…’
While I listen to the commotion, I see Nuwa standing at the foot of the national flagpole on Tiananmen Square, commanding us all to sing along with her: ‘Don’t be sad! The flag of the Republic will be stained with our blood…’ She was wearing a thin white T-shirt. You could see her red bra underneath. It was dawn, and a crowd had gathered round the pole to watch the daily flag-raising ceremony. We didn’t feel the cold of the morning air. During those last few days in the Square, we always seemed to be singing ‘The Bloodstained Spirit’. There was a large vat of egg soup on the back of a tricycle cart beside me. A woman was ladling out bowls to a long queue of students. She’d come to the Square with the motorcyclists of the Flying Tigers brigade. At first glance, I thought she was Lulu. She had the same short, permed hair and flowery nylon shirt. Perhaps that’s why the smell of her egg soup remains so vivid in my mind.
The sparrow suddenly plops onto my chest, digs its claws into my skin and lets out a shrill cry.
‘… The army’s about to roll in and you’re still worrying about your stupid opening ceremony. It’s too late for that now.’ This was Big Chan speaking. His feminine mouth was rosy and his eyes were sparkling. He was wearing a cotton glove on his left hand to protect his long nails. He would only remove the glove when he went into his tent to strum a few tunes on his guitar. He was very popular. Even when he was asleep, there was always a cluster of friends around him. He and I were walking towards the Goddess of Democracy. If we’d known the dawn that was breaking was the last one we’d ever see, perhaps we would have looked a little longer at the beautiful grey glow in the distance.
The officers have carried me downstairs and put me in the back of their van. My mother jumps up and says, ‘Wait a minute. His bedpan! I forgot it last time, and had to put him in nappies every day.’
‘Follow her up, Xiao Hu. Make sure she doesn’t fling herself from the top of the building. That old bag’s very devious…’
‘We’re going to be stuck with them for five days! I hope we get a bloody big bonus.’
They light their cigarettes. The van stinks of petrol. The engine begins to rumble.
Damn. Who’s going to look after my sparrow?
The emperor tied the God of Twin Burdens to the trunk of a tree, binding his hands together with strands of his own hair. As the years passed, the god slowly solidified into a rock.
The police took us to a small guest house near the Great Wall. Every day, the female officer read out articles to my mother on the evils of Falun Gong. In the month since we’ve returned, the police have visited twice a week. My mother was told to stay in the flat, but today she went out, leaving me to listen to callers talk into the answer machine.
‘It’s terrible!’ shouts the voice on the other end of the line. ‘The police are knocking on every door in the city, rounding up Falun Gong members. Two officers came to our flat last night, dragged my father out by his hair and forced him into a police van. They arrested about thirty people from our compound…’
My mother set off with Granny Pang this morning to meet Master Yao outside the Central Appeals Office. He wanted to submit a petition. It’s evening now, and she still hasn’t returned. I presume she’s been arrested. The government appears to have launched a large-scale manhunt.
There is a sinister atmosphere in the air. Two police officers suddenly break into the flat and begin searching through my mother’s belongings. One of them comes over and slaps me on both cheeks. ‘My God, look what I’ve found. Is he dead or alive?’
‘He’s the vegetable. Everyone round here knows about him. He’s been like this for ten years. We thought he was putting on an act at first, so we planted a nurse here for a few days, but she confirmed that his coma was genuine. If he’d been faking, we would have flung him in jail. He was one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen movement.’
‘So mother and son are both counter-revolutionaries, then.’
‘Let’s hurry up and see if we can find any incriminating letters or Falun Gong tapes.’
They pull the quilt, sheets and pillowcases off my mother’s bed and empty her drawers onto the floor. A third officer pulls out the sofa in the sitting room and rips off the fake leather cover. Then they unhook the mirror from the wall and smash it to check whether there’s anything hidden inside the frame. The television set has been wheeled into the middle of the room and is also being smashed open.
‘Hey, look at this book: The Great Law of Falun. I found it hidden in her kitchen drawer.’
‘Well done, Inspector Holmes!’
‘It wasn’t difficult. She lined a filthy drawer with a clean sheet of newspaper. Any fool could have guessed there was something hidden underneath.’
I feared something like this might happen. Master Yao has been put under house arrest. He phoned my mother several times this week. He told her there are two armed police officers guarding his front door and a police van parked outside his block. At night its headlights shine straight into his flat. He said everyone who petitioned outside Zhongnanhai in April is going to be arrested. 10,000 armed police officers have been mobilised to carry out the job.
At the end of the phone conversation he had with her this morning, he said, ‘The government feels we made them lose face in April, and they want to punish us. But they shouldn’t slander Master Li Hongzhi. He has never tried to stop any members from seeking medical treatment, and he has no intention of usurping the Communist Party. Falun Gong isn’t a political organisation or a religion. It’s a cultivation practice that promotes well-being through meditation exercises and good morals. There’s no foreign force manipulating us behind the scenes. The government’s accusations are unjust. When the guards have their lunch today, I’m going to sneak out of the flat and go to Zhongnanhai to submit a petition to the Central Appeals Office.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ my mother said. ‘And I’ll get Granny Pang downstairs to come too. I don’t care if they arrest me. The police came round last night and told me not to leave the flat. What are they afraid of, for God’s sake? I’m not likely to go very far, am I, as long as Dai Wei is still alive. They’re forcing us to renounce our movement, just as they forced the students to renounce theirs after the 4 June crackdown.’
But after she put the phone down, my mother squatted on the floor and sighed, ‘Huh, I’ve had to live through so many political campaigns. Is this the one that’s finally going to break me?’
She removed the photograph of Li Hongzhi from the wall, gathered all her books and instruction tapes together and began concealing them around the flat. She switched on the radio and tuned into each station, searching for the latest updates. Every station was broadcasting the same pre-recorded reading of the People’s Daily article entitled ‘The Truth about Li Hongzhi’. ‘Are we going to have to be subjected to another Cultural Revolution?’ she muttered to herself. ‘Has President Jiang Zemin lost his mind?’