June 3–4, 1989
From above, the heart of the city is easy to see. Beijing is a bull’s-eye. Concentric ring roads close in toward the old city walls, now paved into wide avenues. The avenues form a tight band around the heart: the south-facing gates, the moated palace, the desert square. On a map, diminishing circles draw in the eye, as if to say, Come.
Bodies have come. In the square, bodies sit, stand, and lie on the hot paved stone. The square was built for six hundred thousand bodies; for weeks, there have been more. Rats sniff between folds of newspaper; flies regurgitate on sunburned shins; roaches scuttle across sleeping toes. Women in white uniforms weave through carrying metal tanks, spraying disinfectant where concrete shows. From above, this movement looks like a primitive organism, breathing. In the nucleus a burst of color radiates and contracts, radiates and contracts, as bodies leave the square, return and leave again. West of the outer ring, a dark mass gathers: troops preparing to enter.
In every city and circumstance there are those who will go on with living. In the east quadrant, an old man circles his hutong courtyard for a morning stroll. By the northern lake a young couple wakes to Tian Mi Mi on the radio. South of the train station, three boys race to catch a hen escaping her coop. Between the second and third ring roads, a woman crosses a canal bridge on her walk to work. The woman has a round and candid face, and her hair, striped with white, has been brushed neatly off her forehead. She carries a sensible black purse over her shoulder that has served her for the good part of a decade. She is not chubby but her bones are sturdy, and she commands more space than a woman should.
Normally this woman, a nurse, bikes to the hospital where she works, her lightly permed hair clipped at the base of her neck, a thin shawl draped over her arms to protect her skin from sun. In recent weeks the streets have been too crowded; she has had to take her feet off the pedals and toe her way through. This morning she has decided to walk the two kilometers. She clutches her purse to her side and steps through the people standing in her way. She advances slowly. Sweat beads on her lower back.
She walks past a complex of luxury apartments. In one of the top windows she imagines a woman not unlike herself looking down and shaking her head. She heard once that wives of deposed government officials are given rooms here as a consolation prize, and ever since, she has thought of these buildings as the widows’ towers. Whenever she sees them she is reminded of how she wouldn’t mind so much being a widow. Being a widow would give her a simple answer for the question of why she has no husband.
The faces crowding the nurse are young, the faces of children. The nurse has never been so foolish as to have children of her own. She learned long ago that she does not like what children grow into. She remembers herself as a high school student, how her grown-up heart felt trapped in her adolescent body. Looking back, it is clear that the opposite was true: her body had been more mature. As a result of this mistake, in the early days of the Cultural Revolution she and her classmates stoned to death their high school physics teacher, a reasonable woman who wore her long hair in a bun at her neck. This is what the nurse sees in the faces of the children around her. A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks. Desperate to turn their own growing bodies, their own aches and despairs, into material that might reset the axes of worlds. What did it boil down to but children, giddy with breaking rules!
She arrives at the hospital three minutes past seven and heads to the end of the north corridor. In the nursery her colleague is counting the newborns. There are eight, five boys and three girls, and they are lined up next to each other with the tops of their heads along the wall, swaddled under the incubation lamps like loaves of warm bread.
The nurse cares for infants in a way that she cannot their grown counterparts. Perhaps it is because they are so helpless: nothing more than potential. She cares for them with the hope that they will grow not into humans but rather become something entirely new.
Did you hear—her colleague asks—last night a car ran over some students?
The question comes bursting out as if the girl has been holding it in all night.
No license plate, nothing, she continues. And they say they found guns and helmets inside. Already there is bloodshed! What will it come to?
Her colleague is a slim girl who wears her hair in a pert ponytail and just finished school the year before. The nurse finds her overly excitable. She hangs up her purse and changes into her frock.
I guess you’d better go check the delivery unit, her colleague says, and the nurse exits through the swinging doors.
The delivery unit is at the opposite end of the building, adjacent to the operating rooms. To reach it the nurse must walk through the maternity ward. Here, at seven fifteen in the morning, a handful of pregnant women are waiting with their families at the check-in windows for their numbers to be called. The nurse walks quickly, fixing her gaze ahead. But before she can reach the door at the end of the hall, her path is blocked by a face.
It is a small face, with small, plain features, so plain, in fact, that the face resembles a blank paper, on which anything can be drawn. The mouth on the face moves, dots of sweat filming the edge where lip meets skin. For a long moment the nurse does not understand that the face belongs to a person—a woman, pregnant, nearly full term. The woman’s voice is soft and pleading and the nurse does not hear what it’s saying. She cannot stop looking at the woman’s blank face, at the mouth moving—the lips shaping, the wet tongue swelling, the slivers of teeth emerging and disappearing. Finally she steps back, blinking, and hears:
Ahyi, my name is Su Lan, please help me. Here is my husband—the woman pulls forward a man—we are not from Beijing, we arrived just last week—
The nurse pushes past. A shudder moves up her neck. It is not that she has never been accosted for help in the halls of this hospital before. No, something disturbing cuts through this woman’s voice, a desperation so bare it’s indecent. The nurse does not take a good look at the couple, but she has the impression that they are handsome and well-dressed. City people, even if they aren’t from Beijing—not, in any case, the type of people who should beg.
Six of ten beds in the predelivery suite are empty, along with the delivery room itself. In the operating rooms the first cesarean has begun. The nurse slips in and waits, preparing identification tags and linens as blood-soaked cloths line the floor. Then the baby is out, a boy, and he is in the nurse’s arms on his way to the nursery before the surgeon’s needle has begun to mend his mother’s wound.
In the nursery there is just one window, a small rectangle carved high in the wall. Some mornings the sun reaches through on its way to noon and fills the room with light. The faces of the newborns become so bright that the nurse can’t stand to look at them. The sun passes quickly, but in the minutes before the room returns to bare fluorescence, everything inside insists so baldly on its life that she must look at her shoes in embarrassment.
This day is cloudy. Light presses on a sheet of gray. The nurse looks into the glow and tries to replace the images in her mind with that same static colorlessness. But one persists: the blank-faced woman, her moving lips. Ahyi, my name is Su Lan, please help me. In a flash she sees the husband pulled forward, his pupils narrowed, his lips thin. The nurse shakes her head. Briefly she wonders why the couple came to Beijing, if they were drawn by the same excitement as the other young people flooding the city. She picks up a boy who has begun to howl. She prepares to return him to his mother.