Last Kiss in Tiananmen Square (8 page)

Baiyun walked in the family dining room/Father’s bedroom. Father sank down on a cushioned wooden chair trimming the end of a twig. A pot of sand sat next to the twig. In the dim light of a desk lamp, he examined the twig to make sure the cut was perfect. After several tries, he buried the end of the twig in the sand and set it next to a row of pots on the windowsill. With the help of the magnifying glass, he examined them one by one.

"Meow, meow!" He yowled and Baiyun took it as a sign of pleasure.

“Father,” said Baiyun, which startled Father.

“Oh. What are you doing here?” He looked at Baiyun with his old eyes and went right back to his trimming task.

After taking care of the plants, Father returned to his desk. He began scribbling on scraps of paper. Once in a while he would crumple the paper and throw it into the wastebasket. Then he took a new piece and scribbled some more. Finally he held a sheet of paper in front of his nose and laughed loudly.

"One and a half rats per flower pot, my honored citizens. That's right. Ha, ha..."

He spun around on his chair and picked up a white plastic pail from underneath the desk, which was full of dead rats. He took out the rats one by one and laid them on the dirt in flowerpots. Returning to his desk, he began cutting the rest of rats in half with a huge pair of rusty scissors, one after another. Blood spilled on the floor, and sprayed onto his clothes and face.

"Meow, meow!" He seemed to enjoy the taste of blood in his mouth.

Watching this, Baiyun couldn’t stand it anymore. She ran out of the room and thought about leaving this disgusting place. Then she remembered her duty to bring food to father. She opened the refrigerator and found some cold stir-fry. She heated it up on the gas stove in the small kitchen and walked back to the dining room with one hand on her nose.

Father was writing comments between the lines of a textbook using a magnifying glass. The book itself revealed why he had to use the magnifying glass. It was a textbook of advanced mathematics called, "Special Function" that had equations and words. However, a handwritten version also was superimposed on top of the print. In fact most of the printed version had been either crossed out or pasted over with handwritten text.

Baiyun left the food on his desk. Underneath the glass on the table, Baiyun noticed many new pictures of red and purple roses.

Father wolfed it in and continued his writing on the textbook. After a few minutes, his head nodded. His hand dropped with the weight of the magnifying glass. The pen stopped; blue ink soaked through the page and created a large stain on the page. In a minute, loud snoring sullied the silence. Under the dim lamplight, the flushing of his face made him look like a roasted animal.

Baiyun looked away and only to set her eyes on pots of roses in full bloom. Their color ranged from yellow to pink and from red to black. But most were bloody red like a girl's lipstick ready to be kissed.

Baiyun realized her parents were in no mood or shape to talk to her. Before she decided to leave, she heard a motorcycle approaching. She decided to sit at the middle room desk.

A tall man, wearing a shiny leather jacket, rushed into the apartment without knocking. The man, whom Baiyun recognized as Meiling's old boyfriend Lao Zheng nodded to Baiyun, winked at her, and then went straight to Meiling's bedroom after letting the curtain down. The curtain on Meiling’s bedroom door was like a woman's summer dress—just long enough to hide the mid-parts of the body.

"How much do we have now?" That was Meiling's voice.

"Oh, about twenty thousand," said Lao Zheng.

"No, I don't believe you. You must have put away some for yourself."

"Come on, woman. You can't be serious. Have I ever cheated you?"

"Stop!" It was the sound of Meiling slapping Lao Zheng. "Don't think you can lay me as soon as you get here. Get serious for a minute. If a civil war started, we wouldn't have anything left. We'd better find a way to save our hard earned money."

"Okay, but let's talk about that later."

"Oh! What do you want? What do you want? Ha, ha..." Meiling's hysterical laugh indicated she was no longer ill. The handsome tiger embroidered on the dark brown knitted curtain suddenly came alive. His widely open mouth and pointed teeth revealed his great hunger.

"Don't be too rough with me! I’m sick."

"Come on, I’m the cure for your illness."

Two pairs of feet in slippers appeared in the space beneath the curtain. One was big and strong with bulging veins under rough dark skin, the other tiny and elegant as marble. They moved closer, separated and rose up onto the bed. The door was closed shut.

The tiger on the curtain seemed to roar. The curtain was thick and impenetrable. Peering through the tiger's eyes, Baiyun could see Meiling's and her boyfriend's ecstatic faces that made her look away immediately. Just before she was about to leave the middle room, she saw her father went to the kitchen.

Father lit a burner, took a fire poker and laid it on the fire. When the tip was red hot, he picked it up and marched toward Meiling's bedroom. Without hesitation, he jabbed the fire poker directly through the curtain tiger's eye. A hissing sound told her Meiling's bedroom door was closed and Father had also burned a hole through the wood. Then he burned another and another. Finally he threw down the poker, jumped at the door and spied into Meiling's room through the holes he had made like a lizard crawling on a wall. He leaned against the door, making it squeak, then turned toward one side and slid down. Something was growing in the front of his pants. He put his hand in, rubbing and squeezing. His face was scarlet and twisted.

"Aaeh! Aaeh!" This time his moaning became harsher and more intense.

"What's going on?" The door cracked open. Meiling poked her head out. Their meeting in this situation scared Baiyun. Her heart came up in my throat. In order to distract them, she pointed to a bee on the bamboo cabinet, "Look, there's a bee!"

"What?" Father stared into the dark hallway with his two hollow eyes.

"Wow, what a beautiful bug!" Meiling leaned forward and took a close look at the bee as Father retreated. "Look at the pretty black and yellow strips, how beautiful." Meiling turned around her fulsome body, which was covered by an almost transparent nylon slip. She smiled with her perfect white teeth exposed and her big dark eyes full of charm.

"Yes, yes," suddenly chuckled Father humbly. His shy eyes were cast down, and dimples showed on both cheeks. He pulled his hands out of his pants and folded them obediently on top of his Buddha’s belly.

“What are you staring at? Why don’t you find a flyswatter and kill the bee?” Meiling commended.

"Kill it. No. I'm...I'm allergic to bees," mumbled Father. His tongue was always in the way when he talked to Meiling.

Then the bee flew away. "My god, if it messes up my flowers, I'll kill it." Father gathered his strength and started chasing it.

"Okay, let's catch it." Meiling shut her bedroom door behind her and followed father into his room. Baiyun found a flyswatter and joined them. Father, whom Baiyun had never seen run so fast, used all his energy and jumped in front of the flowerpots scattered around the far end of the dining room.

"Don't touch my flowers or I'll kill you!" He threatened arms akimbo like a warrior.

Meiling, meanwhile, scampered after me from one side of the room to the other. Baiyun followed her, waving the flyswatter.

"It's here, Baiyun! Here, oh, you missed it. A little toward the right. Here, here. Oh, shit!" Stroke by stroke, Baiyun's technique was getting better. Then all of sudden, the bee landed on the windowsill.

"Baiyun, stop waving the net." Baiyun knew Father would intervene.

"Father, I'll be careful. I promise, I promise."

"Baiyun, aren't you going to listen to me?" He stared at her with two fierce eyes. His hands were clenched.

"Oh, Baiyun. Let your father take care of it. He may have the magic hands." Meiling turned around to her bedroom.

Silence returned to the house again. The excitement the bee had generated disappeared. Baiyun and Father gazed at the windowsill, which was occupied mostly by small flowerpots. With one smack, Father killed the bee that was stupid enough to show up on the windowsill.

Silence this time came with the darkness. The place was as dark and cold as a grave. Father strolled back to his faded brown, old heavy wooden desk.

Baiyun slipped out the door without saying another word. She got on the bicycle and started riding in this pitch-dark sky that hardly had any stars. She could feel the darkness that gradually weights on her and her city Beijing and the whole country. Yet the fresh air had already cheered her up and the paddling of the bicycle made her feel powerful. I will never come back here again, she was telling herself.

Chapter 5

At 9:00pm, Baiyun got back to her dorm but was too excited to sleep. Meeting Dagong was a pleasant experience for her. Although she knew very little about him besides the fact that he was a nice and handsome young man, she felt that he had the depth to understand her, her eccentric mother and her strange family. She found him easy to talk to and she could open her heart. But she hadn’t known him very well yet, she was telling herself. Tomorrow she would go back to the triangle trying to find out more about the pro-democracy movement. She felt an obligation now. She had now found many more interesting things to do besides studying chemistry. It was like a new chapter in her suddenly opened up. She knew the situation would change as soon as she talked to her mother. Meiling would force her to study TOEFL again. But this was her life. Meiling could not control it anymore.

The sound of loud radio woke up Baiyun in the morning. From the content she soon realized that it was a new campus news broadcasting station.

“When the student marched to the Tiananmen Square last night, all along the road Beijing citizens came out to support them,” said the Broadcaster, “People gave out cases of soda, juice, bread and eggs. The square was full of people sitting in from the night. At dawn, police started to appear. The students demanded that the authorities guarantee their safety and let them enter the Great Hall of the People to pay their last respects to Hu Yaobang. The government only granted the first request.”

“Oh, my God. It’s so early. Demonstration is a good thing. But they shouldn’t disturb our rest.” Li Yan went back to sleep.

Too tired to say anything, Baiyun went back to sleep as well. When she woke up again, everyone had gone. She looked up her watch and it said 11am. She knew that she just missed a 10:00am mathematics class. Then she found a message on a piece of torn notebook paper.

“Baiyun,

I’m going to the class. I’ll lend you my notes. You’d better sleep. Hope to see you in the next class.

Yumei”

An egg-bread was on the table as well as a bowl of porridge. Yumei must have gotten them for her from the cafeteria in the morning.

She quickly washed her face, brushed her teeth by the concrete sink in one of the two large washrooms on the fourth floor. She ate the breakfast, made her bed and walked out of the dormitory. She decided to attend the rest of classes just to be good.

At 4:30pm Baiyun rode slowly back toward her dormitory. When Baiyun passed by the Triangle, she ran into Li Yan who was rushing.

“Where are you going?” Baiyun asked as she balanced her bicycle between her legs.

“The News Center, the new campus radio station,” said Li Yan. “You should stop by sometimes between your studies and social life.”

“What social life are you talking about?” Baiyun sensed something new in her tone. Was she making fun of her for not having a social life?

“A worker named Dagong has been hanging around the campus and would like to meet up with you,” said Li Yan and waved goodbye without noticing Baiyun was a little embarrassed.

Dagong was here! What was he doing here? Baiyun thought as she pushed her bicycle in the slow traffic. She noticed some people on the street didn’t all look like students. Some men were older, more muscular and had swarthy faces. Older women also ran around the campus, carrying blankets and tin containers under their arms. The streets inside Beijing University were almost like any streets in downtown Beijing. What a change! The prodemocracy movement made Beijing University, normally an intellectual’s paradise, into a community theatre. She could see clusters of students and workers on street corners, talking to each other like a family. Whenever she went, everyone smiled at her friendly. Through this atmosphere, she could see changes that had happened in people’s hearts and souls.

As soon as Baiyun arrived at her dorm, she saw Dagong waiting for her by the door. He wore a pair of dark green sunglasses. His starched white shirt and khaki pants made him look like a professor instead of a technician.

“Baiyun.” He approached her enthusiastically.

“Hi Dagong. What bought you here?” Leaning her bike against her waist, she shook hands with him.

“I’m here for a meeting with the Beijing Student Federation. We are planning a rally on May 4th to commensurate the seventies anniversary of the May 4
^th
student movement. We want to be part of it, too. Also I think I might see you here.”