For ordinary Chinese — and their rulers — this moment had to be thrilling and frightening, Wells thought. Every person in this crowd was both a spectator and a participant in the action. They wanted to remind the world, and themselves, of that most easily forgotten fact: that they existed. Wells half expected to see Gadsden flags — the yellow banners flown by colonists during the Revolutionary War, emblazoned with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” The crowd was delivering that message to America. But their rulers in Zhongnanhai would have to hear it too.
And yet… after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, ordinary Chinese had given up politics and focused on the economy. Maybe this demonstration, big as it was, would be forgotten in a few weeks. Or maybe—
“Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Wells murmured. He’d been in China not even twenty-four hours, didn’t speak the language, and now was forecasting the country’s future. Classic American arrogance. He ought to spend less time making predictions, more time figuring out if anyone was watching him.
PAST THE TELEVISION TRUCKS, the crowd quickened. They were close now. Just ahead the avenue opened into Tiananmen like a river pouring into a lake, and Wells saw the astonishing breadth of the square. He’d expected something like the Washington Mall. A manicured space, carefully maintained. Instead Tiananmen was a fixer-upper, a hole in the middle of a giant city, all the more powerful for its rawness.
From its northeast corner, where Wells had walked in, Tiananmen stretched south a half-mile, west a quarter-mile. The thick red walls of the Forbidden City marked its north side. The hall housing Mao’s body sat in the southern half of the square, behind a tall granite obelisk, a smaller version of the Washington Monument.
As Wells oriented himself, protesters flooded by, joining the hundreds of thousands of people already huddled in the center of Tiananmen. Shouts came in bursts from the loudspeakers around the square. Warnings or exhortations to the crowd? Wells didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know today. All his life he’d felt privileged, and sometimes cursed, by what he’d been allowed to see. But he had never, not even on his first day in Afghanistan, been so much of an outsider. He was in the eye of a human hurricane, watching a maelstrom whose physics were beyond his understanding, a force of nature uninterested in him, yet with the power to tear him apart.
THE SECURITY FORCES HAD LEFT the center of Tiananmen to the protesters. But at the northwest corner, where an avenue led toward the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, a green wall of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder before a phalanx of armored personnel carriers. Hundreds more soldiers blocked the entrance to the Forbidden City, where a giant banner of Mao hung from the outer wall of the palace.
Wells turned right, toward the banner, where the police had opened a path for any tourists brave or dumb enough to come to the Forbidden City today. An archway cut through the outer palace wall, directly under the portrait of Mao. This was the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the southern entrance to the palace complex.
And as Wells walked through the gate, it lived up to its name. The crackle of the Tiananmen loudspeakers faded away. “Open?” Wells asked the sweet-faced girl inside the ticket booth. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But she nodded.
As she handed him a ticket, a man grabbed his elbow. “You American? I student. Beijing University. Name is Sun.”
“Sure you are,” Wells said. Cops looked the same everywhere. This guy could have been the brother of the cabbie Wells had ditched two hours before. His shoes — black lace-up boots — were polished. Had any student anywhere ever polished his shoes?
“I take you,” Sun said. “Practice my English. Free.”
“I’ll pass. I’m kind of antisocial.” Wells held up the audio guide, which, weirdly, was narrated by Roger Moore. “Besides, I got the tour and everything.”
Wells handed over his ticket to the guard and walked through the front entrance. When he looked back, he wasn’t surprised to see Sun about a hundred feet behind, conspicuously tailing him. What would Jim Wilson do? Wells turned around.
“This is my only day sightseeing and I don’t know why you’re bothering me.”
“Not bothering,” Sun said. “Just watching out. Not good day for American here.”
“So I’m told.”
But Wells decided not to argue further. It was only 9:45 A.M., and the meet was supposed to be at noon, so he had two hours to lose this guy. He wandered through the palace, doing his best impression of a half-bored, half-awed American tourist. Which wasn’t difficult. The Forbidden City wasn’t a European-style palace like Versailles, a mansion filled with decorated rooms. Instead, the complex consisted of empty courtyards divided by ceremonial halls. The Hall of Complete Harmony. The Hall of Preserving Harmony. The Hall of Supreme Harmony. The emperors had been big on harmony. They wouldn’t have been happy today, Wells thought.
To the north, the inner palace held the emperor’s living quarters, elaborately carved wooden pavilions, painted deep red to symbolize the emperor’s power. The average Chinese had been barred from the complex on pain of death — hence the palace’s name. But over the years, the palace had been ransacked so many times that today its buildings were mostly empty. Without Roger Moore to guide him, Wells wouldn’t have known what he was seeing.
Besides the audio tour, he’d brought his own pocket-sized guide to the Forbidden City. He thumbed through it as Sun trailed behind, the world’s slowest chase. Wells shooed him off a couple times, to no effect. The complex got slightly busier as the morning went on. At 11:00, a dozen nervous-looking American tourists walked past, watched by two bored police officers. Wells guessed they’d come through the palace’s northern gate, not the Tiananmen entrance. He wondered what they were making of this. Joe and Phyllis from Sacramento probably hadn’t expected war when they signed up for seven nights in China.
Finally, at 11:45, in the northwestern corner of the palace complex, where narrow cobblestone corridors connected irregularly shaped courtyards, Wells found a way to lose Sun. He reminded himself not to run.
Wells ducked through a group of Japanese sightse ers and into a wooden pavilion housing a display of court costumes. As the Japanese clustered at the entrance, blocking Sun for a precious few seconds, Wells jogged through the pavilion and hopped over a railing into an alley, then sprinted along the side of the building. Thirty yards down, the building ended and the alley formed a T-intersection with another pathway. Wells swung right, ran a few feet along the pavilion, then hopped over another railing and back inside the building.
He flattened himself against a display case and peeked out. Sun reached the intersection, panting. He twisted left and right, looking for Wells. Finally he trotted left, toward the center of the complex. Perfect. Wells waited a few seconds more, then walked out the pavilion’s front entrance. He felt as though he’d rid himself of a piece of gum stuck to his shoe. Losing Sun wouldn’t matter if the cops were watching the meeting site, but Wells was glad to be rid of the guy anyway.
He made his way into the palace’s northeast corner, a quiet area filled with narrow pavilions and gardens. Over the years, emperors had competed to build the most beautiful spaces, adding narrow cypress trees whose bodies twisted like flames and the Buddhist rock gardens more common in Japan. The meeting with Cao was supposed to happen in a garden famous for a sculpted piece of rock known as “The Stone That Looks Like Wood.” All morning Wells had wondered if he’d recognize it. But when he stepped into the garden where the stone stood, he knew he was in the right place.