I topped the day off by preparing myself a dinner of two garden burgers and three-potatoes worth of homemade french fries. I then sat down and watched the 196-minute roadshow cut of The Sand Pebbles (1966), which I had picked up at the library earlier in the afternoon.
If you ever want a cure for whatever ails you, try sitting down to a Steve McQueen movie, particularly anything he did from The Cincinnati Kid (1965) to Bullitt (1968). You'll be treated to a view of American masculinity that is long gone. Athletic, laconic, working class, always butting up against the-powers-that-be, the McQueen take on heroism does not exist anymore. Now we favor super-assassins or comic book superheroes.
The Sand Pebbles, with its story of a U.S. Navy gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River when the Kuomintang took control of China from the warlords in the 1920s, premiered at a time when LBJ's going-all-in commitment to war in Vietnam was starting to arouse significant domestic opposition. The Sand Pebbles, for its time, is a surprisingly provocative anti-imperialist statement from a major Hollywood studio (Twentieth Century Fox). The message? Nations traffic in lies and everyday people -- the sailors, the coolies, the whores, the missionaries -- are merely grist for the mill.
It has been quite some time since the last "The Colt 45 Chronicle" post. The reason for the delay is the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time, my wife and I watched the whole thing unfold on television, and I think we were deeply affected by it, enough at least that I wrote a fictional account of the crackdown from the perspective of an actual Columbia exchange student who returned home to Beijing to participate in the democracy uprising. I wrote it in a letter to my friend Mark who was teaching English in Madrid.
I was motivated by the Tiananmen Square student protests but also I think I was influenced by recently having read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) as I rode the subway back forth to various temporary clerical jobs. In the introduction to my Signet paperback edition it was mentioned that Civil War veterans who read the novel thought the twentysomething Crane was actually a grizzled former combatant at Chancellorsville. Instead, he was a sensitive young man who wasn't born until six years after the Civil War but who successfully conjured up the battlefield by means of his imagination.
I thought the same thing could be done with Tiananmen. So what you get is a The Red Badge of Courage inspired rendering written in the early Grunge Age by a young man suffused with the spontaneous prose of Jack Kerouac. It is laughable, and I was immediately embarrassed once I sent the letter off to Mark. I think the next time I saw him I even apologized for subjecting him to it. But it is what it is.
In the weeks prior to and following the June 4 anniversary, the New York Times ran many stories devoted to Tiananmen and its aftermath. I didn't have time to read many of them, but I went back later and did something of an audit. And what surprised me was how little, despite the prodigious number of column inches, was really there. It brought to mind Hemingway's idea that whatever is edited out from a piece of writing leaves a trace presence, a gravity. Papa's directive was always to cut freely because the weight of that which is eliminated the reader will feel as if by some occult power. Well, the reverse is true. Publishing story after story regardless of actual substance will create a presence, even if it is merely a mirage. This is how thought control works in the "free" Western world where media monopolies dominate with government approval.
Probably the biggest story the Gray Lady ran was on Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua, who in 1989 happened to be the student body president of Peking University. "With Choice at Tiananmen, Student Took Road to Riches," by David Barboza and Michael Forsythe, is meant to be a morality tale where the Gray Lady instructs her readers on the hopeless venality of the Chinese government. Barboza and Forsythe begin their lengthy article by writing that
A few days after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests 25 years ago, the Chinese government filled the airwaves with a list of the 21 most wanted student leaders accused of stirring up an antigovernment rebellion. At the top of the list was a 20-year-old student at Peking University named Wang Dan, who set up an unofficial student union to mobilize his classmates to demand democracy.
There was no public mention then — and there have been very few mentions since — of the head of the official student union of Peking University at that time. His name is Xiao Jianhua. Mr. Xiao never opposed the government, and the events of June 1989 did not make him one of China’s “most wanted.” Instead, they catapulted him into the ranks of its most wealthy.But after digesting the entire story all one comes away with is a sense that Xiao Jianhua is a smart guy who worked hard within the system to make a success of himself. There is neither a portrait of feckless collaboration nor a smoking gun of corruption to be found here. I found the most compelling passage to be a description of Xiao's devotion to reading:
He grew up in Feicheng, a poor farming village in a mountainous region of the eastern Chinese province of Shandong, one of six children born to a middle school teacher and his wife. At a young age, he was, by most accounts, a voracious reader of history and literature.
“Every morning, he’d get up at 5 a.m. and jog into the hills to study,” recalled Guo Qingtao, a childhood friend from the village and later a Peking University classmate. “He could recite every text from memory. He even read the teacher’s manuals.”
At 14, Mr. Xiao passed the highly competitive national college entrance exam and won admission to Peking University. He arrived in Beijing, friends say, with tattered clothes but ambitions to be a political leader.
“He loved politics,” said Zhou Chunsheng, his college math tutor and now a professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing. “He wanted to be a high official, and he was reading everything — social sciences books, Marxism, the collected works of Mao.”
Mr. Xiao’s path to power was interrupted, though, by the most momentous student protests since 1919. At Peking University, the students were not just swept up in the protests, they were among the leaders of it — the ones who led a march into Tiananmen Square, the city’s axis of political power, to press for political reforms.
At the time, Mr. Xiao was president of the university’s official student union. The duties were largely social, organizing lectures and dances, but the post was coveted because of its ties to the Communist Youth League, a launching pad for future careers in the party.
But in the spring of 1989, students at the university began to march on Tiananmen Square with a list of demands both for university leaders and for the Communist Party at large. Mr. Xiao, as the titular representative of his fellow students, was caught in the middle.
“Xiao tried to tell the government what the students demanded, but some of the activists didn’t like his conservative approach, so they set up their own organization,” says Mr. Guo, his former classmate. “At the time, he was only 17 years old and was put under a lot of pressure. Feeling powerless, he went to the library and buried himself in books.”
The responsibility of pressing the student cause fell to a history major named Wang Dan, who helped set up an alternative student association at the university and organized boycotts, sit-ins and hunger strikes.The Xiao expose falls particularly flat when one studies Andrew Jacobs' "Tiananmen’s Most Wanted" post that appeared a day before the 25th anniversary on NYT's Sinosphere blog. A "where are they now?" of seven of the 21 Tiananmen protest leaders that the Beijing Public Security Bureau listed on a most-wanted circular issued on June 13, 1989, five of the seven ended up working on Wall Street.
Can there be any doubt that Wall Street is more corrupt than the Chinese government? After all, was it China that melted down the global economy causing untold suffering that we are still dealing with? Of course it wasn't. It was the casino capitalism promulgated on Wall Street and K Street.
But China is an unofficial official enemy, and Tiananmen was the proto-Color Revolution that failed. This autumn the Gray Lady will no doubt be celebrating the proto-Color Revolution that was the mother of all Color Revolutions, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany.
Spring 1989
Democracy. Democracy. (We're on a roll now.) Looks like it's time for an American liberty & TV monoculture, globe round and China wide. -- Columbia student leaves Morningside Heights lecture hall, leaves strolls on campus greens (who knows? we might have seen him that day as he made his way to library main, text books neatly wrapped in arms), leaves for hometown Beijing when martial law is announced. Goes and joins his buddies on the SQUARE. Not much sleep or food -- but so the fuck what? Democracy rocks on old Tiananmen. Nights in sleeping bags on the hard ground under Mongolian stars and Chairman Mao (big sir) portrait. -- The morning becomes for him timeless. Early Saturday, he hears the crow of a cock, street bred and fed, as it tramps in the damp dawn dust of silent secret garbage alleys half a mile to the east; and he wakes and rolls over to snuggle into the softness and sweet smells of Mei Ju Ne, his love. She smells like summer, he thinks.
The cock crows, and its cry rips and rises out of the east side by side with the deep blue dawn sky promising a day full of the sun. He lifts up his head and cocks his ear and says to himself: "This, this is the cockcrow of the West, of enlightenment and freedom and Columbus and New York. Here I am in my birthplace, grand ancient Forbidden City Beijing, heart of the East, and I am alive . . . to it all . . . a great Western happening being announced in the East."
He sighs, letting his head fall back on old Tiananmen, and falls asleep to dreams of Broadway bookstores, 1 trains and university coffee shops.
His eyes open and he sees an egg yolk hung up in the sky, and he thinks, What time is it? -- People are crazy and running all around and a dull hum is shaking his back.
The tanks come and the soldiers come. And he says, "Fuck this shit! Who do they think they are? They want to fight. I will stay here and fight with them."
He shouts -- "THIS IS OUR FUCKING SQUARE!"
So he stays. He finds Mei Ju Ne at the southern edge of Tiananmen, the area where the troops are massing; she's with some friends checking out the situation, trying to figure out if the troops are really going to march.
He grabs her. This scares her; and pissed off, she starts screaming. Friends avert their eyes, looking down at their shoes bashful and uncomfortable. He apologizes; tells her he didn't know where she was and was worried. She looks at him, and right then -- right then and there amid the fear and tension and incredible highness of everybody -- they exchange a glance of such pure sweet kindness that at that moment they know exactly what it is that they're going to have to deal with soon.
So they cut out immediately, leaving behind buddies to face and contemplate ugly green colored army, and they hustle towards the monument at the center of the Square.
The shooting starts and the tanks roll. Students scatter. A lot of the more energetic and vocal dissidents are the first to take to their heels, while some of the laziest and quietest are the most at ease in the bam and whistle of gunfire. He and Mei Ju Ne sit close to the monument and watch everything unfold. It seems unreal to them, like watching TV -- no, bigger, like a movie with Dolby sound -- a total sensory overload: Too many people running this way and that; too many people falling; too much noise and energy and confusion and fear and hate, and blood -- all that unreal strange leaping red just there -- and death, silent stupid meek sorry death littering everywhere.
And the bodies pile up and the tanks roll on. He is mad angry and teeth grinding; he wants to sprint and explode into that weak mass of frightened soldier steel, destroying it with his strength and fearlessness. But she is crying and very afraid, and he must not abandon her. So they stay, along with several hundred others, and they wait on the monument.
Eventually they come. And he sees them coming because they're not that far off. He can see the shine of the sun bouncing off round polished helmets. He puts his arm around Mei Ju Ne. She knows. The soldiers are sixty yards away and firing live rounds. He thinks back across the Pacific, back across America, to New York City, the land of his education and enlightenment, back to afternoons inside quiet subway stations, back to afternoons on the ferry looking at Liberty statuesque and ghostly green, a time when he dreamed of home, of China -- how much he felt for it, his love and need -- and his girl.
People start to drop around him. Wails moans screams -- people dying, brains spilling on stone. The soldiers have come bayonets drawn white. He hugs her to his heart and turns his back . . . .
A death, one soul vote for democracy. A Columbia student, the paper said, went back to his hometown when martial law was declared; was one of the students who chose to stay on Tiananmen Square after the People's Army began its advance. I guess he made his decision to take it on. Old big old bad ass grandpappy Death -- just the biggest thing any of us (anybody anywhere) will ever have to take on in our little chicken-scratched sojourn on the compost heap.
Two months ago today, Tuesday April 4 (which is recorded in my date book), we made our Columbia jaunt, Mark. Somewhere among the pretty fashionable liberal university babes sheltered by ivy-strewn brick walls and charcoal-black wrought iron fences was our holy Chinese saint-to-be. Fresh from bookstore browses and cigar chomping blanknesses, our most pressing and deep-felt problem was the boredom bought by too much liberty and liberality. We have switched the conjunctions in Pat Henry's famous American formula; switched it from an "or" to a"but. "
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