The year 1989 was a watershed year in China, as it was in communist Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall fell that November and the Solidarity movement won Poland‘s first free elections since the end of World War II. In China, there was the massive student-led uprising against the Communist Party-controlled government at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and its environs during the spring of 1989. A 33-foot-tall papier-mache statue dubbed the Goddess of Democracy and resembling the Statue of Liberty with her upraised torch appeared in the square.
But the outcome in China was horrifyingly opposite from that in Eastern Europe. In the early hours of June 4, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square, demolished the Goddess of Democracy, and shot and killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of protesters. There were mass arrests, torture, and imprisonment, and a crackdown on free speech and other political expression that continues to this day. Indeed, the Chinese government’s censorship regime has tried to erase all memory of the uprising and its violent denouement, including blocking websites, forbidding commemorations, and tightly controlling access to the square itself.
Lai Wen’s new novel, Tiananmen Square, revisits the events of 1989 from the perspective of a young narrator, also named Lai, who gets caught up in the protests because her friends and fellow students at Peking University are among the activists. But the novel is structured as a memoir, starting with Lai’s childhood in 1970s Beijing, and it seems clear that most of its contents are autobiographical, although how autobiographical we are never sure. Furthermore, the name “Lai Wen” is a pseudonym, we are informed. In the novel’s epilogue, Lai tells us that soon after the massacre, whose victims included at least one of her friends and which left her feeling suicidal, she was accepted into a scholarship program at “Toronto University” (a fictional name, although there is a real-life University of Toronto and a Toronto Metropolitan University). She left China for good, except for brief visits to her family in Beijing, and she is now, she tells us, a mother of two nearly grown-up children and a teacher of literature in Toronto.
As a memoir, Tiananmen Square is both a fascinating glimpse into daily life in the Chinese capital during the country’s economic and tentative political opening-up after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and a coming-of-age account of a lonely and talented young girl growing up in a family scarred by Maoism’s brutalities layered on top of her mismatched parents’ disappointments with each other and with life itself. Lai’s father, a cartographer, was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Traumatically withdrawn, he ekes out a living at his desk in the family’s cramped apartment in a noisy, seedy working-class Beijing neighborhood. (When Lai wins an essay contest in high school, she uses her prize money to buy the family a television set that makes them the envy of their neighbors.) Her mother, once a beauty with social ambitions, resents her husband’s carapace of indifference and her daughter’s opportunities. Lai’s little brother, Qiao, is too young to be a real companion.
Lai’s only source of comfort is her grandmother, nicknamed Po Po. Coarse-mannered, foul-mouthed, and, with her clacking false teeth and her belching, an embarrassment on social occasions, Po Po is the only adult in Lai’s life who listens to her and takes her seriously. Po Po and an elderly man who owns a ramshackle bookstore into which the adolescent Lai stumbles one day to get out of the rain. She can’t afford to buy the books, so the old man lends them to her: Norse myths, Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea. He serves her tea, the two talk about the books, and Lai discovers a world of literature outside her pinched neighborhood and troubled family. Her prize-winning essay earns her admittance and a scholarship at Peking University, China’s most prestigious. A tree grows in Beijing.
There is lovely prose in this book. Here is Lai’s description of working on school assignments late at night in the apartment: “The sense that everyone else is asleep, that the building itself is groaning under the weight of all the slumbering bodies and sleepers’ snores. That you alone have entered into some kind of demi-world where human life has given way before the shadows and stars and the strange music of animals: the rustling of mice, the scraping of insects, the solitary yowling of a lonely fox.” There is also some awkwardness. She tends to translate 20th-century Chinese children’s banter into 21st-century American slang: “No way!” “Way!” This can be jarring.
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When Lai enters young adulthood, the world she knows falls apart. Po Po succumbs to dementia and dies. A high school romance has blossomed between Lai and a boy named Gen, a childhood friend and another top student headed for Peking University. But the romance quickly withers when Gen, from a wealthy family and politically ambitious, finds that he can attract girlfriends more beautiful than Lai. It is at this point that Lai falls in with the crowd of student outcasts who will propel her into the Tiananmen Square maelstrom. She comes under the charismatic spell of Anna, a not entirely believable older student who, between stealing motorcycles and playing gross practical jokes on a married professor who dumped her as his lover, leads a theater troupe that stages a performance of Mother Courage (scripted by Lai) during the heat of the demonstrations. Anna’s presence drags Lai out of her preoccupations with the caddish Gen and her hysterical mother into the hallucinatory vortex of June 4. She witnesses a troupe member’s fatal shooting and holds in her arms another dying, bloodied victim while pretending to be his mother.
The novel ends with Lai’s startling revelation: the identity of “Tank Man,” a mysterious figure, captured on video and in iconic photos, who positioned himself in front of a column of People’s Liberation Army tanks headed for Tiananmen Square, bringing the vehicles to a halt. Tank Man disappeared after this performance, either to his death or to an escape. If you are like me, you will peer obsessively at internet images of the video and photos wondering whether Lai’s identification is correct or simply part of the fiction. You, like me, may not be able to decide. But you will almost certainly conclude that the Chinese government has been terribly successful in crushing dissent even in our own time and making sure that dissenters pay a price.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.