One afternoon, Jane came by again and stayed a long while. When the laundry room was empty of customers, she leaned in over the counter and asked, “Do you like babies, Lulu?”

  “Of course, especially if they are my own,” I said. “I want to get married someday and raise a family.”

  “Then how about having a baby for me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She explained that Alec and she couldn’t have their own baby. It was her problem, and they’d love to have a baby by other means. She also said they could offer me fifty grand for being a surrogate mother.

  I was shocked and asked, “Why…why pick me for this?”

  “Because you’re smart and pretty, and healthy. Alec saw you, and we both admire you and would love to have your help with having a baby. Think about this, okay? It would take you two or three years to make that kind of money by working full-time at this place. That much money could give you a good start in life, don’t you think?”

  I shook my head and said, “I can’t help you that way, Jane. I’m a student and have to finish college first. If I did what you’re asking, my mother would disown me for sure.”

  “Why? You’re already out of your teens and have rights as an adult.”

  My twentieth birthday had been a month before, and I had told her that without knowing she had been gathering information on me. It was all right that she had planned this, but I didn’t want to be involved. Jane even said that if I was unwilling to become a surrogate mother, I could sell her and Alec my eggs. This did pique my interest, but it would involve a lot of tests and hospital visits, so I dismissed the idea. Deep down, in spite of never being rich, I believed I would always have enough money for my needs as long as I worked. Above anything else, I didn’t want my baby to grow up without me in its life. So I turned down Jane’s offer flat. She grimaced but said it was all right, and that her offer remained open.

  After that she didn’t come to the laundromat as often as she used to. In America, everything boils down to dollars—that was a lesson I learned that summer.

  * * *

  —

  Rachel was amazed to find me slightly different when she came back. “My, you looked so mature now,” she half teased, “like a serious young lady, with lots of gravitas.”

  “Come on, I’ve always been serious,” I said. “But maybe I’m more independent now.”

  “Apparently so.” Her big eyes kept flickering. She still couldn’t contain the excitement of our reunion.

  I thanked her for allowing me to house-sit for her. It had made my summer peaceful and enjoyable. In the past three months I had read more than a dozen of the books that every history major was supposed to know.

  4

  I PICKED LESS-DIFFICULT classes for the fall semester. Among my choices was a seminar taught by Loana Hong, a Canadian postdoc: Memory and Amnesia: The Tiananmen Suppression and Its Consequences. I went over the course description and saw that a good portion of the reading assignments were in both English and Chinese. This was encouraging and might suit me better than other classes. I thought I was relatively familiar with the context of the subject and would be able to read the assigned books and papers rapidly, especially those in Chinese. So I signed up for the class before it was full.

  Rachel was taking the course too, for the same reason. In the back of our minds lingered an unstated motivation—since the teacher was of Chinese descent, she might be lenient on us when it came to grades. It had occurred to me that Hong could also be a Korean last name, because few Chinese women had “Loana” as a first name, but Rachel had met her and was positive she was Chinese, probably Canadian-born. Rachel said she’d greeted Loana in Korean—jal jinaesseoyo? (How are you?)—but the professor didn’t know how to answer. Then she switched to Chinese—ni hao—to which Loana responded right away.

  Unlike us, Joe didn’t bother with such classes, believing it was lightweight and a waste of time. He was a science whiz, and had once been on a team that competed at the Chinese Chemistry Olympiad during high school. Though only a junior, he had already participated in one of his professor’s research projects, and he worked in the lab at night and on weekends, being paid a small stipend.

  Loana Hong’s seminar was a 500-level course and attended mostly by seniors and graduate students. There were only four juniors enrolled, including Rachel and me. But we were not intimidated by the older students and felt confident that we could manage, since the subject matter was on our own turf, in a way. During the first class, Loana asked us to introduce ourselves briefly and tell each other why we were taking her class. This was unusual, and most of us only said something perfunctory. Some claimed they wanted to know more about China. Sarah, a rosy-cheeked English senior from Nebraska, said she had been to Beijing, where a tourist guide had told the visitors to avoid talking about three T’s: Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen, so she wanted to take this class to learn about one of the taboo topics. Gary, with flaxen hair and an aquiline nose, said he felt like he was possessed by the Tiananmen suppression, particularly by Tank Man, who embodied the fearless spirit of the individual against the oppressive state. I had only a vague idea whom he was referring to. Derek, skinny and curly-haired, said back in Jamaica he had heard of the Tiananmen crackdown, but he didn’t have any concrete idea what it was about, so this was his chance to learn more. Rachel was quite straightforward, saying she was curious about this course, having recently heard about the Tiananmen Square Massacre in the American media, but she wasn’t sure if there had been such killings, so she wanted to know what had really happened. When my turn came, I said, “I believe this course might be less hard for me than others. I am familiar with China and can do the readings faster in Chinese.” That made the class laugh.

  Loana Hong smiled with her white teeth gleaming and nodded, apparently appreciating my candor. She went on to introduce herself in a low-pitched voice, saying she had written her dissertation on this subject and had a book, The Tiananmen Ramifications, which was coming out from a university press. We were impressed. She also told us not to worry about the reading assignments, because there’d be a lot of visual materials—films, videos, slides, photos—to watch and examine. She explained that although the course would be centered around the Tiananmen tragedy, we would also look into historical events and movements that occurred before the suppression, as well as its aftermath. She emphasized that this wasn’t just a regular history seminar, and that we were going to study various areas related to the Tiananmen democracy movement: the social structure, economy, literature, ideological discourses, popular arts. We would also have some visitors who had participated in the student movement. In short, it was a comprehensive course.

  The class turned out to be harder than I had expected. I mean that it was hard for us to take emotionally. After a week, we could clearly see that the tragedy had taken place, since Loana showed us some footage of the Tiananmen demonstration and lots of photos. I accepted the veracity of the event, but I was not sure if the students had really just staged a peaceful protest against official corruption and for political reform and more freedom. We didn’t need the teacher to offer us a conclusion. Loana didn’t try to disabuse us of our views, either—she just assigned reading and visual materials for us to go through before class. In the basement of the Harvard-Yenching Library there were twenty-eight boxes of items gathered from Tiananmen Square. Loana led us down there to look at some of them: pamphlets, pants and skirts drilled with bullet holes and stained with blood, banners, some student leaders’ notes on meetings, headbands inscribed with slogans and also blotched with blood. As the class continued, it began to take a heavy emotional toll on us. Often someone would break down in class, sobbing wretchedly.

  Samantha Su, a public health senior, started to cry one afternoon after a video had just been played. She said, “I grew up in Beijing and passed Tiananmen Square every day on my way to school. But why did nobody ever mention the bloodshed and the violent killings twenty years ago! We were made to live in a big lie.” She was sobbing bitterly.

  I also felt miserable, anger and grief swirling in my chest. But compared to the other women in the class, I was shy and quiet. I didn’t volunteer to speak much. I didn’t reveal that I had heard the tragedy described as a counterrevolutionary uprising. Nor did I mention that my mother had taken part in the hunger strike. I tried to remain clearheaded so as to make my own assessment and judgment. That was also what Loana wanted us to do.

  She made us listen to songs that the students had sung in their demonstrations, particularly “The Internationale,” which was kind of an ironic choice, since it was the de facto anthem of the global proletariat, the supreme Communist march. Loana also played some popular music for us, like Cui Jian’s “I Have Nothing to My Name.” Cui was an iconic singer at the time, and his band performed in Tiananmen Square. Loana was a huge fan of Cui Jian, the rock star who seemed to possess her generation, but to my taste, “I Have Nothing to My Name” was too loud and lacked deep resonance and nuance. I preferred songs by the Taiwanese composer Lo Ta-yu, which were also sung by students at the time, after their movement had been quelled. Lo Ta-yu’s songs usually had delicacy and subtleties, and they resonated with deep grief and political awareness, particularly “The Orphan of Asia” (“The orphan of Asia is crying in the wind / The yellow face smeared with red mud / The black eyes full of white fear…”). The music and lyrics gripped your heart, and they suited my generation better. Rachel agreed with me, saying Cui’s songs had no poetry, though we didn’t share our opinion with Loana and the rest of the class. I also felt that Cui Jian’s songs tended to be too folksy and too blunt, often over-macho, without universal appeal, making them particularly hard for women of my generation to embrace.

  We also read some poetry, which I didn’t like that much either. Rachel also felt that the poems were too nebulous and mushy and lacked intelligence. She called them “juvenile” and “unnecessarily fuzzy.” We both liked poems that spoke to one’s heart and shone with wisdom. I guessed that our sensibility might have been shaped by the literature in English we had read over the years. Rachel was harsher in her literary judgment because she was an English major and had learned many great poems by heart.

  In class, I didn’t want to just follow the views established by the media in the West and by the overseas Chinese and by student leaders who had fled China. So I began to study all the materials I could get my hands on. There were a lot. For weeks, I devoted myself to reading books and watching documentary films and examining photos. I wanted to figure out whether this had truly been an insurrection against the government, totalitarian though it was. My conclusion was that it wasn’t, and I shared my view with the class.

  I offered three pieces of evidence to support my argument that the students were peaceful and hadn’t staged an uprising at all. First, on April 22, 1989, three students, representing more than a hundred thousand others in Tiananmen Square, knelt on the stone steps at the east side of the Great Hall of the People with a petition raised over their heads, requesting that Premier Li Peng come out to accept it and talk with the demonstrators. Just two days before, many students had been beaten by the police when they gathered in the square to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, the liberal-minded former general secretary of the CCP. The three young men stayed on their knees for twenty minutes, but no official came out to accept the petition. I believed that if the students had meant to fight against the government with force, they wouldn’t have bothered to beg the national leaders that way.

  My second piece of evidence showed how the students reacted to others. On the afternoon of May 23, two days after martial law had been declared, three young men from Hunan Province went to Tiananmen Tower and threw eggs mixed with paint on the giant Mao portrait there. Students in the square immediately apprehended the three culprits and handed them over to the police; one was given a life sentence, another twenty years in prison, and the youngest one got sixteen years. Though in the course of time many student leaders regretted having handed over the three men to the police, this very act indicated that the students were law-abiding and that they didn’t tolerate any acts against the government.

  My third piece of evidence was conclusive. On the early morning of June 4, an armored personnel carrier, No. 003, which belonged to the Thirty-Eighth Army, ran amok, charging into the square and crushing several people. Local residents hit it with stones and wooden clubs to no avail, but then someone thrust rebars into its caterpillar tread and stopped it. The outraged people climbed up on it and smashed all the devices that were on the outside, and then they threw some quilts over it. They then doused the quilts with gasoline and lit them on fire. The flames heated up the vehicle, and in no time the soldiers had to climb out to avoid being burned alive. People began to beat them up. However, some students rushed over and saved the three soldiers, taking them away to an emergency clinic while they were being followed by a mob chasing them with clubs and bricks. The students’ intervention in the midst of the violent suppression showed that they were peaceful and self-restrained and wouldn’t do anything unlawful. All the class agreed about my conclusion, since the evidence I had presented was well documented and familiar to them.

  The issue of casualties arose in our discussion. There was no definite number for the number of people killed. The Red Cross estimated that the number of deaths had reached 2,700, but many people argued that the number must be over 10,000. I said it was not that meaningful to be fixated on the number, which had already become a riddle. What was essential was to identify as many victims as possible so they could be given a name or a bio or even a face. I was enlightened by an old woman who had found her son’s body in a shed behind a hospital building. She saw a pile of trash bags containing decaying bodies that were not identified and were about to be trucked away to be disposed of. In comparison with others, she said, she was lucky to be able to bring her son’s body back and be able to set up a memorial tablet at home so as to offer him a good meal and burn joss money for him. I argued that for many families who had lost members, the wounds couldn’t begin to heal until the lost ones were located, so it was much more of a priority to identify the dead. That was exactly what Tiananmen Mothers had been doing. To date, they had identified 202 people killed by the army, their names and ages and occupations all listed. Loana showed us a map made by those brave old women. On it every spot where a victim had fallen was marked by a purple dot. Their map of Beijing swarmed with purple dots that made the landscape almost unrecognizable. Loana had been a high schooler in 1989, so she hadn’t gone to Beijing to demonstrate, but in her hometown of Nanjing tens of thousands of students gathered and marched before the city hall in protest against the violent crackdown in the capital. The national tragedy had shattered her belief in the government and made her decide to go to Canada for college. To study this tragedy and its consequences and to keep it in the public memory had become her calling. We admired her for that.

  Loana was well connected with the exile communities in North America. Every other week she invited a former student leader over to talk with us. In late September Wang Dan came. At the time he was teaching at a university in Taipei, but he would often come back to Boston, since he had earned his PhD at Harvard and had many friends in the area. He was happy to be back in a classroom here, he told us. He had been number one on the wanted list issued by the Chinese government after the Tiananmen crackdown and was arrested in Beijing in July 1989. Together with several other students and local demonstrators, he was put in the notorious Qincheng Prison, which the Soviets had helped the Chinese government build in the late 1950s. Located to the west of Beijing, it was primarily a destination for senior officials defeated by their political enemies within the party. Wang Dan was an elegant man, like a scholar in the traditional manner, with delicate sensibilities and lofty aspirations.

  I had noticed that the best of his generation tended to possess an altruistic worldview, carrying the weight of the nation on their shoulders, because they believed they were the elite of the country and that it was their duty to save it from totalitarian tyranny. They were educated that way—taking “all under heaven” as their responsibility. Unsurprisingly, Wang Dan said that the imprisonment hadn’t frightened him that much. In fact, when he was leading the demonstrations and the hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, he had felt vaguely that if the movement failed, he might land in jail. At the time he even had a romantic view of imprisonment, assuming he would have more time to study and read in there, as Vladimir Lenin had done in the czar’s prison. It turned out to be true. He read about a thousand books in prison and also worked on his English. “Many inmates were studying foreign languages in jail. It was an efficient way to kill time,” he said to us. “Once a middle-aged warder told me he had learned Japanese when he was imprisoned in the same place a decade before.” Wang Dan seemed romantic as well as brave. I was convinced that he was sincere when he said he wasn’t that afraid of death. He quoted from Zhou Guoping, a popular contemporary philosopher: “The worth of one’s life lies in its density, not in its length.” That enlightened me.

  Rachel asked him, “Didn’t you fear anything at all in prison? You must have had some fear, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.” Wang Dan smiled. “I was young and quite innocent. I was afraid my health might get ruined, because the food was so bad. Mildewed cornmeal buns and salty vegetables at every meal. Still, I forced myself to eat as much as I could. I feared I wouldn’t last many years if the government viewed me as a chief criminal. They might do something covert to damage me physically and mentally.”