35

  IN LATE JULY I heard from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation that they had offered me a fellowship for a full year. I was overjoyed. With a grant like that I’d be able to work on my dissertation dedicatedly and should be able to complete it within a year, since I had done most of the research. On the other hand, I felt more apprehensive than before. If the Chinese officials knew about my receiving this fellowship, they might scrutinize me more hostilely and connect me with Jason’s case. If they found anything suspicious, they could stop me from leaving China.

  So I only told my mother about the grant and made her promise not to breathe a word to others. I didn’t even let my father know, afraid he might get too excited and not be able to stop talking about it. Once I was back in New York, I would notify him of my grant and tell him to stop wiring me money every month, since the fellowship was quite generous, $24,000 for the year, perhaps because living expenses in New York were much higher than elsewhere. My award seemed to be an exception. In general, a doctoral fellowship from the foundation only brought in $20,000 a year. I wrote to Loana and Bailey to thank them. They were both thrilled to hear the good news. Bailey replied that with this fellowship, I wouldn’t need to teach in the next academic year, so that I could complete my dissertation sooner. That was what I planned to do.

  Except for worrying about Jason, my summer was peaceful and productive overall, and I finished reading the books as planned. I managed to keep a low profile, staying under the radar of the Chinese police, so they didn’t attempt to deter me from coming out. When I got back to New York, I told John Bailey, Deborah Sundar, and Joe Davison, the trio on my dissertation committee, that I was ready for the qualifying exam. Joe was an assistant professor in East Asian history who had come to Columbia just two years before. Bailey had said it would be better to have a junior faculty member on my committee, because usually young professors’ scholarship was more up-to-date. In retrospect, I see that Bailey might have been trying to keep firm control of the committee by having the other two faculty be very junior to him. I had taken his advice and asked Sundar and Davidson, both of whom were willing to supervise me as well. The date for the exam was scheduled on the second Wednesday of September.

  On Monday evening I got disturbing news: Wentao was ill and hospitalized. I called him, but his phone was off. I contacted another expat in Flushing and was told that he had suffered a heavy stroke and been rushed to the hospital. The man said Wentao was still in a coma. I couldn’t go to the Queens Hospital to see him, since I had to prepare for the exam, which was just a day away. I had to do a final review of my notes.

  The exam was oral. In a classroom I was seated at a large folding table across from the three professors. One after another, they asked me questions that covered three areas: East Asian history, modern and contemporary China, and political theories. I was well prepared and answered their questions fully. Following an older graduate student’s advice, I kept talking and gave the examiners the impression that I could speak endlessly, being thoroughly informed of the areas I was supposed to know. Toward the end of the three-hour exam, Bailey said, “Tell us something about your plan for your dissertation.”

  I said I was going to write about the creation and evolution of Tank Man, exploring its origin and dissemination, its iconic evolution, artistic consumption, and its suppression in China. They all nodded their approval. I went on, “I would like to examine the historical event in a manner that is both macro and micro, combining the national and the personal. My parents were involved in Tiananmen Square. In fact, my father was one of the sculptors who created the Goddess of Democracy. I hope to make the dissertation into an intimate piece of writing as well as an academic treatise.”

  They approved of my approach. Then Bailey asked me to step out of the room and wait in the hallway for a while. I went out and sat on a long windowsill, feeling I’d done pretty well. Four or five minutes later they called me in. They all said, “Congratulations!”

  They then shook hands with me—I had passed the exam.

  Now I was officially an advanced PhD candidate, an ABD—all but dissertation. I felt excited and was looking forward to sharing the good news with my parents without delay.

  But my euphoria was short-lived. That evening word came that Wentao had just died. I hurried to the hospital the next morning, but was told that his body had already been shipped to Peaceful Passing Funeral Home in downtown Flushing. I called them, saying I was a friend of the deceased and would be available if they needed me to help. The woman on the phone said that his body would be cremated after the wake, which would be held the following day.

  Early the next morning, I went to the funeral home. I meant to help with the arrangements as a way to make up for not paying a visit to him when he had been hospitalized. In the lobby of the house I ran into two men I knew by sight. They were both expats and said they had been Wentao’s friends and accompanied him during his last hours.

  “Does his ex-wife know about his passing?” I asked the shorter one of them, who had a kind face with a balding head and large ears.

  “She can’t come today. There’ll be a memorial service this weekend, which she and their son will attend.”

  That was understandable, since she must be busy with her life and work in Las Vegas. I went into the main hall; at its far end lay a brown casket, surrounded by flowers, with four wreathes standing at its front. I regretted not having brought along some flowers or a wreath. But who was I to Wentao? We had had a one-night stand but we were not lovers, and I would have felt uneasy letting my name appear in his service. People would imagine things and gossip about me.

  A withered old man was busy working on Wentao, powdering his pallid face to make him appear more presentable. His hair was combed back, neat and shiny now, but the corner of his mouth slightly turned down, as if still showing traces of pain and misery. In fact, it was an expression I had known well when he showed his misgivings. His right hand rested on his stomach, as casually as if he were dozing. I went over and bent down a bit. The two expats came up too. I stifled the urge to kiss Wentao on the cheek; instead, I put my fingertips on my lips and then placed them on his lips, which to my amazement were quite dry. Then my tears flowed, but I kept quiet. The old man was startled and looked up at me. I forced a smile and said, “I was his friend and knew him well.”

  “It’s very kind of you to come to see him off,” he said, in Mandarin with a Cantonese accent.

  Then, to my horror, I noticed that the casket containing Wentao’s body was made of thick cardboard. The glossy color was mere paint on the outside, but the inside of the casket was still the naked surface of pasteboard. Seized by a gust of grief and anger, I asked the old man, “Why didn’t you use a wood casket for my friend? This looks so cheap.” I slapped the side of the cardboard.

  “We offered that, but they couldn’t afford it. They said they had to collect money for his cremation and memorial service, so they couldn’t rent a standard casket for him.”

  I turned to the two expats and demanded, “Was that true?”

  They didn’t reply, both fixing their eyes on the floor of ceramic tiles. I asked the old man again, “How much does a wood casket cost, Uncle?”

  “One hundred forty dollars a day.”

  “Then let me pay for him. Please change the casket this minute so that people won’t see him lying in this trash can!” I was possessed by a sudden fit of anger and had to force down my tears.

  “Of course we’ll do it at once. It’s so generous of you, Miss. Please come with me.”

  He led me into an office at the side of the hall, in which a woman in her thirties was typing at a computer. He told her that I’d pay for a standard pinewood casket to replace the one the deceased was occupying. I handed the woman my Mastercard.

  She started processing the payment and said, “Don’t worry. It’s easy for us to switch it. The wake doesn’t start until nine thirty.”

  “Please change it quickly. I don’t want people to see him humiliated, lying in that shabby box.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Of course, we’ll do it right away.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I can see you must have loved him dearly.”

  “I don’t know about that. We were just friends, but I know he was a kindhearted man, very dedicated to the cause of China’s democracy. He was a full-time human-rights watchdog besides.”

  “An idealist, huh?” said the old man.

  “Yes, he was too idealistic to live a good life in America.” I didn’t want to talk to them more about Wentao, as grief kept stirring in my chest and made me heady, with a stuffy nose.

  I stayed in the main hall for about an hour, during which a dozen or so people came in. A few of them I knew in passing, but most of them were strangers to me. After seeing Wentao lying in a decent casket, I slipped out of the funeral home before the wake started, unwilling to meet more people. I was sure that the two expats would tell others that I had paid for Wentao’s temporary casket, which might make it seem like there was an unusual relationship between him and me. They might even say I had been his girlfriend. That was why I didn’t want to stay at his wake to mingle with others.

  As expected, rumors about Wentao’s death appeared online. One woman even mentioned me, saying I had paid for the expenses of his wake and evidently I had been his lover or something. The woman even said Wentao used to tell others that I was his girlfriend. There might have been a grain of truth in this rumor—I could see that he might have brought up my name as a salve to soothe his wounded ego and damaged manhood. In spite of my bitterness about the gossip online, I didn’t feel like I’d mind being used by him that way.

  Still, the association of my name with him could cause other kinds of trouble for me. He had been known as a top democracy activist against the Communist regime. My intimate connection with him might make the officials view me as a potential enemy, or at least a hostile element. If so, they might take measures to frustrate or even ruin me. But I couldn’t possibly step out and deny my relationship with him, and all I could do was remain silent.

  One night Rachel called and asked me, “What’s this rumor about? It says you were a married man’s girlfriend, basically a home-wrecker.”

  “You mean Meng Wentao?”

  “Who else?”

  “I came to know him long after he and his wife had been divorced. He had lived like a bachelor for years.”

  “Were you really his girlfriend?”

  “Not at all, we were just friends.”

  “Are you telling me the truth, Lulu?”

  “Why should I lie to you?”

  “Then tell me, did you sleep with him?”

  “Well, only once, a one-night stand. He was miserable because his ex-wife had left New York with their son. He wanted me to stay the night with him, so I agreed. Why are you so nosy?”

  “I want to see if you’re really a chaste lady like you are in appearance.”

  “Of course I’m not. I can be crazy too, crazy about a good man if I meet one.”

  “So Wentao wasn’t the man you loved?”

  “He was my dad’s age. He and I were not compatible, but I respected him.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say for sure. He was attractive in his sad, tragic way.”

  “I know you have a hero complex. I wish I had known him. You have better taste in men than I.”

  “Come on, you’re much more experienced with men. I didn’t lose my virginity until last year.”

  “To whom?”

  “That I can’t divulge.”

  “I know you’re a slut at heart too.”

  “All right, say that if you want.”

  She laughed and said we were two peas in a pod. She relished the analogy as if it brought us closer.

  Wentao’s passing made me think a lot about the dissidents in North America. There were different ways of looking at his life in exile. One way was to compare it with the image of Tank Man. Like that defiant hero, Wentao had year after year faced the overwhelming power embodied by the Chinese government. His defiance might have demanded more courage and tenacity, and also more sacrifice. His ex-wife might have been justified in calling him “a loser” and “a feckless man” here, but in some respects he must have been crazed and traumatized and couldn’t help standing up to that crushing authoritarian power. You might even call him another type of Tank Man, crazed into a prolonged confrontation with the Communist regime. Who can deny that Wentao was a brave man and a hero? On the other hand, he couldn’t see that those in power didn’t fear a pipsqueak like him.

  What does upset their complacency is the truly independent and fulfilled life that a dissident should live, without constantly resorting to fighting the evil power for meaning. He was right that he should have gone to graduate or professional school and learned to put his feet down in America. He ought to have lived his own life fully first. He should have looked down on their nefarious power as garbage, as not worth his effort.

  I kept thinking about how to include his tragedy in my dissertation, as a comparison to the outraged Tank Man. I was positive there must be some emotional connection between the two men. Evidently because Wentao had never stood in the limelight, we tended to neglect him, and at most to regard him only as a run-of-the-mill dissident. But in spirit, he must have been similar to Tank Man, willing to be driven by a kind of madness and ready to make sacrifices for the ideas he had believed in.

  36

  ONCE THE WRITING of my dissertation started, I proceeded rapidly. With the reading and research already done, I was in full command of the topic. I had divided the dissertation into five chapters plus a prologue. The prologue gave a broad backdrop of the Tiananmen democracy movement. Since there was no way this part could have much originality, I tried to enliven the narration with detailed descriptions. In addition, I presented the intense fear that had possessed the top national leaders and affected their decision-making. The first chapter focused on the implementation of martial law in Beijing and how the field armies were prepared by brainwashing the soldiers insulated within their barracks. I also tried to answer the question of why fourteen field armies, and even paratroopers, were deployed. I argued that Deng Xiaoping feared some armies would disobey him, so he needed more forces to come to Beijing to check and offset one another. In spite of his iron hand, he planned the crackdown with trepidation and actually prepared to flee China lest the suppression fail and he fall from the treacherous pinnacle of power. He even had an evacuation plan—having tens of millions of dollars transferred to a Swiss bank and an airliner at his disposal.

  My second chapter was devoted to the confrontation between the civilians and the military, which culminated in the violent bloodshed and the unnamed man confronting a column of tanks on the morning of June 5, 1989. The third chapter analyzed who Tank Man might be, described how his image was caught by four foreign cameramen separately, and how the footage of the confrontation galvanized the world. The fourth chapter traced the evolution of Tank Man as an icon in the Western media and in its artistic works, and in contrast, it also reported how Chinese censorship suppressed the image after promoting it briefly. The final chapter was mainly my meditation on Tank Man as a political, cultural, and psychological phenomenon. Though the last part was less academic, to me it was essential for the dissertation and also helped explain why I took up this topic for my dissertation. So it was rather intimate, discussing my personal involvement in the investigation. I valued this chapter the most and considered it more original than the other parts.

  I analyzed two episodes as precursors to Tank Man’s confrontation on June 5. These happenings were recorded by numerous eyewitnesses. In the early morning of June 4, a group of civilians gathered on Chang’an Avenue to stop the army. Both sides got into a tug-of-war. The soldiers opened fire and some people were shot down. But after being dispersed, the civilians came back to face the army again. Most of them sat down on the street, about seventy yards away from the troops. Neither side budged. Then suddenly a girl in a white dress ran out toward the soldiers, as if to fight them barehanded, by herself. People gasped, and some men followed her, running toward the army too. The troops fired and shot down a few men and forced them all to lie down in their tracks, but the girl in white continued charging toward the soldiers. When she almost reached their ranks, the troops fired at her directly. She fell. A bunch of men, with their hands raised above their heads, went over to retrieve her body. Her thighs were shattered, but she wasn’t dead yet. They rushed her to an emergency clinic.

  A few hours later, around six a.m., another crowd at Liubukou, near Xinhua Gate, was still lingering to welcome and protect the students who had just retreated from Tiananmen Square. Residents had been blaming the soldiers to their faces for killing civilians. For hours the troops had not advanced, as though they, too, had been stunned by such an eruption of violence. Then their ranks opened and a group of tanks emerged. It looked like they wanted to use the tanks to push forward. A few middle-aged women went over and lay down on the street, and about a hundred people followed them, all lying face up on the asphalt. The tanks roared and moved toward those brave souls. The tanks were coming closer and closer. When the first vehicle was just fifteen feet away from the women, it stopped so abruptly that its rear lifted from the ground. All the tanks stopped, their engines idling. Then their hatches opened and the soldiers began tossing gas bombs at the crowd on the asphalt. The yellow poison gas enveloped and choked the people, who coughed and gasped for breath, their throats and lungs burning. They had to climb up to breathe and look for water. The tanks seized the moment and charged at them. The attack scattered the crowd. One tank crushed a few people, who yelled and shrieked, and then it did a 360 in place. This maneuver crushed some of the injured ones who couldn’t get away. According to eyewitnesses, this tank was Number 106. It belonged to the First Armored Division and carried the title of Heroic Vehicle, which meant that its predecessor had performed valiant deeds in the civil war and the Korean War. Altogether eleven people were killed on the spot and two were injured, having limbs cut off, including Fang Zheng. Their names and brief bios are clearly listed by various sources. (The historian Wu Renhua recently just identified a former crew member of the Number 106 tank, Wu Yanhui. Some people phoned the veteran, who acknowledged that he had been in the tank that day, but he refused to name the commander of the tank. Then so many calls came in that he stopped picking up.)