Reading Tiananmen Square
The text of Tiananmen Square, which is still being
read, was written communally. Re-presenting a small part
of it here, I have set translations of Chinese poems--
written by students, by citizens, who were involved in the
Pro-Democracy Movement during the Beijing Spring of
1989--like jewels, however rough their cut, in a narrative
ring of my own prose. The poems from Tiananmen were
written as dazi bao: "big character posters," expressions of
the great heart of the Chinese people. They were posted
in and around the Square--on walls, in tunnels--but they
were unsigned. After June 4, Bloody Sunday, when the
People's Liberation Army moved against the people, they
were collected, faxed to Pro-Democracy supporters in
Hong Kong, and from there to Taiwan, where they found
American poet Mike O'Connor who translated them.
The poems from Tiananmen are what their translator
has called documentary poems, or "docu-poems." Beyond
the monitoring of CNN and other television networks, the
Square was wired in the Spring of 1989. "Small Questions,"
"Fasting," "Mad Woman," "China," and other docu-poems
got out of Beijing over the wire. Whatever else they are,
they are electric poems, both literally and figuratively.
They record, in language charged by the historical moment
of their writing, what it felt like to be there, Chinese and
alive. "The body electric" that Walt Whitman sang in the
middle of his century has taken on a different meaning at
the end of our century. The small part of the text of
Tiananmen Square that I am re-presenting here sings the
body, and soul, electric of the Chinese people. Against the
bullets of the People's Liberation Army, these poems were,
and are, cast like ballots.
A selection of dazi bao / docu-poems
and my prose having to do with the China
that produced them:
The Politics of My Heart
There is a cliche among foreigners in China that goes
like this: "When you have been in China for a week, you
think you have a book to write. When you have been in
China for a month, you think you have an article to write.
When you have been in China for a year, you know you
have nothing to write." I am not a sinologist. I do not
have the language, Chinese--only enough of it to survive
there, to get by on the street. But my politics, having to
do with China, are informed. They are the politics of my
eyes and ears; they are the politics of my heart.
My wife, Jeanie, says: "Either we should never have
gone to China... or we should never have come back
from China." In fact, we are not all the way back. Not yet,
not ever. China will not leave us alone. We love China in
much the same way that Bai Hua does in his banned-in-
China film, Bitter Love. We love it bitterly, ironically.
My reading of Tiananmen Square is made up of
"slivers" of language. I call them slivers because China
has gotten under my skin, and because China hurts.
Child: Mama Mama these young aunties and uncles,
why aren't they eating anything?
Mother: They wish to receive a beautiful gift.Child: What gift?
Mother: Freedom.Child: Who will give them this beautiful gift?
Mother: They themselves.Child: Mama Mama in the Square,
why are there so many people?
Mother: It is a holiday.Child: What holiday?
Mother: The holiday of lighting of the torch.Child: Where is the torch?
Mother: Inside the hearts of us all.Child: Mama Mama Who is riding in the ambulance?
Mother: A hero.Child: Why is the hero lying down?
Mother: To best let the child behind him see.Child: Am I that child?
Mother: Yes.Child: To see what?
Mother: The flower with petals every color
of the rainbow.
Zhong and Guo
Zhong and guo are the characters that, put together,
mean China: Zhong / Guo, the Middle Kingdom. The
Chinese are a wonderfully superstitious people, great
believers in the old high art of geomancy: divining the
future by unearthing and tracing out lines of force. And all
the lines of force in "New" China intersect in Tiananmen
Square--the middle, as it were, of the Middle Kingdom.
For the Chinese, a powerful, charged, magnetic place, a
kind of psycho-cultural force field.
Tiananmen Square is said to be the biggest public
square in the world--bigger, for example, than either Red
Square in Moscow or St. Peter's in Rome. And in its
middle, of course, is Chairman Mao's tomb, his monolithic
mausoleum. I paid it, paid him, a ritual visit--out of...
was it curiosity or perversity?--during my own Beijing
Spring of 1988. Mao's corpse lies there, in the middle of
the middle of the Middle Kingdom, as it were, in an
hermetically sealed glass coffin, on view. My eyes have
seen it, still heavy with meaning for China's future.
Mad Woman
All day long hidden in the box called China
washing diapers for thousands of years
Now I spread apart my own bones and flesh
Beat them into a metal knife slash the disgusting faces
of this world
The disgusting faces of these men.China a father who killed his own sons
And this night, molested his daughters China China
A living coffin in which I have been buried
for a thousand years
My breasts have become my own tomb
The whole length of my body grown over with lichen
and moss.Corpses overflow this nation My naked body soaks in
The pus and blood flowing thick on the Yellow
and Yangzi rivers for thousands of years
They cannot wash white my skin
I lie in bed weeping and caressing myself,
abusing myself
China These proper and respectable men
always disappoint me.In thousands of years only I, one person, have climbed
out of this living coffin
Abandoning the pervading boredom and death smashing
the darkness
My black eyes black hair black-colored skirt and blouse
Black-feet and black, black soul
Only my gloves are white
This one pair of white gloves can be enough to kill
our father.I am an hysterical Chinese woman
The first mad woman but so what
In the midnight hour I run away from home
Casting off my own husband
But so what.I am a mad woman not a stitch of clothing on
Standing in a treetop, searching for the sun
At the places where men vote I am the opposing ballot
But so what.Throughout the land the nation's farmers
The nation's small-town people
And the bureaucrats
Have come from innumerable wars
From thousands of years of history, and in so much time
have not been rescued
At the intersection of death, in the earth's anatomy
They have gone from slavery to slavery
Their arms, once wrenched counter-clockwise, finally drop
like roll-curtains
And change into plants.Newspapers founded on lies
And the Great Wall founded on ashes are the same
Refined and gentle scholars old men reluctant
to be buried
And the insouciant, I-don't-give-a-damn young men
are the same
Famous poets squatting in public johns
and the computer kids are the same
Tea houses, spread out and numerous as stars,
and the offices of research institutes are the same
I hate everything Confucius Zhuangzi
Stalin Marx
They make me sick I want to swallow all falsehood
and crime
I died I took flight and couldn't race
toward the moon of immortality
The filthy China night body tattooed with stars
Like an adulterous man lies face downward
on my shoulders
Humiliating my lover I want to kill you
From now on you can't pollute my body
I am not a mad woman I'm a human being
and am willing to suffer my punishment.
Intellectuals in China
The China the students in Tiananmen Square during
the most recent Beijing Spring had inherited was--under
whatever cover, in whatever disguise--still, essentially,
Mao's China. And their teachers have remembered for
them what that means.
But Mao did not invent the banned book--or, for that
matter, the whispered word--in China; Qin Shi Huang, the
first emperor of the Qin Dynasty in the third century B.C.,
from whom China takes its name, did. Not only is Qin Shi
Huang credited as the founder, the unifier, of modern
China, completing the Great Wall and standardizing the
written language, but also he is credited, ironically, with
having ordered the burning of books and the burying of
intellectuals alive. Mao has often been compared, by the
intellectuals themselves, to Qin Shi Huang, and he is even
said to have bragged: "Yes, we are Qin Shi Huang, Qin
Shi Huang. But Qin Shi Huang only killed several hundred
intellectuals. We have killed several hundred thousand."
Intellectuals in China and their books have had, at
best, an ambiguous relationship to power, as it has bodied
itself forth in the Party or State. During the Cultural
Revolution, which can only be described, looking back at
it, as "a failure of morality," in Harold Laswell's words,
"a rupture of conscience," the universities were either
closed--shut down--or changed in ways that made them
unrecognizable as themselves. For example, the liberal arts
disappeared altogether, whole departments gone: political
science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, logic, and
history. Whole disciplines abolished. Teachers and
students alike were subjected to humiliating and painful
struggle sessions; confined in "cow sheds" or "cattle pens"
with little food and no medical care; or sent out to the
countryside for "re-education through manual labor,"
like carrying night-soil to the fields, in a May Seventh
Cadre School.
Until No Stone is Left
Statues of Chairman Mao are everywhere in China.
He had them built to scale, which is to say: They are
magnified, as his sense of himself as the Last Emperor was,
out of all proportion. In the spring of 1988, I was in
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, for a Fulbright
Conference. Walking about, I found myself in the center of
the city, surrounded by municipal buildings, done in the
Russian style of the 1950s, and in the presence of yet
another statue of Chairman Mao. But this one was different;
this one was scaffolded, as if something were about to
happen to it. I wondered what and started writing "Until
No Stone is Left."On the same day, all over China, scaffolds go
up and tarpaulins come down around the
remaining statues of Chairman Mao--erected
by Chairman Mao, in honor of Chairman Mao
--the Great Helmsman. We know that
something is going on in there, but we don't
know what... looking on in wonder. My guess
is as good as any. Deng Xiaoping has retired,
but Deng Xiaoping has not retired. He is still
China's puppet-master; he still pulls China's
strings. When Deng dies--he's in his eighties--
all over China, on the same day, the tarpaulins
will be lifted, the scaffolds removed. And lo!
Chairman Mao will have become... Deng
Xiaoping. Even as I write this, the workers are
chipping away at Mao with their hammers and
chisels. Deng is a smaller man than Mao was.
'He's in there somewhere, we know he is.' We
hear the workers say, chipping away. What I
conclude from this is: China's next 'real' leader
will have to be a smaller man than Deng
Xiaoping, and Deng Xiaoping is a small man,
so the workers can still chip away stone and get
at him. As the people in China get bigger, the
leaders get smaller. Until no stone is left, until
they're not there. At all.