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  • The Corpse of Chairman Mao
  • Mai Wang (bio)

On the morning of the massacre, Li Fei biked across Beijing to see his wife Chen Yan in the apartment near Third Ring Road, where she lived with her mother and father. It was a calm, clear day in June, and Beijing was under martial law. Li Fei arrived two hours late. As he walked through the door, he took off his glasses and wiped them with his sleeve. His nervous eyes and bloodless face told Chen Yan something was wrong.

She asked for the news. Li Fei shared the rumors he had gathered from the other professors at Tsinghua University. The night before, the People's Liberation Army had encountered civilians blocking Eternal Peace Avenue to stop the advance of the army into Tiananmen Square. The troops were the same age as the student demonstrators gathered in the square who refused to leave. At first, some soldiers leaned over the sides of their tanks to shake hands with the crowd. When everyone heard the first shots, they assumed the guns were filled with rubber bullets. They only realized the bullets were real when blood stained the streets. Angry men and women hurled rocks and bottles at the uniformed boys until gunfire rained down. Many were shot in the back trying to flee, and others trampled on them.

Li Fei reported these events to Chen Yan calmly as they sat in the bedroom where she and their daughter Jing Jing lived. Chen Yan had moved out of Li Fei's campus studio with Jing Jing so Chen Yan's mother could take care of the child during the workweek. Li Fei visited them every Sunday with stories of all he had seen and accomplished during the week. Now Chen Yan hoped his latest stories were exaggerated. As they talked, Jing Jing sat on the floor playing with an expensive [End Page 390] blond-haired, blue-eyed Russian doll. Li Fei often purchased toys for his daughter to make up for his absence. Through the wall, a cheerful female voice blasted from the new color television in the living room, where Chen Yan's nieces and nephews watched the broadcast on CCTV. The anchorwoman warned her viewers to stay indoors. Military units were advancing from all four directions to secure the city. Then she discussed national sorghum yields, which only increased year after year. Mahjong tiles clicked as they hit the large circular dining table, where Chen Yan's mother and father, her three sisters, and their husbands sat playing against each other. Her family was not interested in politics. As long as life continued to improve and the government guaranteed their pensions, they supported the Communist regime.

"The leaders are turning against the people again," Li Fei said.

"There's nothing you can do about it," Chen Yan said. She hated it when Li Fei explained the news to her as if she was incapable of thinking for herself. Sometimes she secretly wished he were not a professor. She laid a hand on his shoulder to comfort him and hoped he would stop talking.

Li Fei pulled away. "My students are taking a stand, and I should be there with them," he said. He added that government officials had falsely labeled the students counterrevolutionaries, but the students were right and only wanted to stop members of the Party from lining their own pockets. He, too, wished for change. He had spent his whole life reciting passages from Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but he no longer expected the proletarian revolution to deliver universal health, wealth, and contentment.

Chen Yan could not bear to listen any longer.

"Don't go running all over the place like a mad dog," she told him. "You're older than the protestors. You have a child."

They gazed down at Jing Jing. She looked up at them and offered Li Fei her doll, but he shook his head with a smile. [End Page 391]

"I have to see what's going on outside," Li Fei insisted, turning to Chen Yan with a solemn look. "The side streets were quiet, but the action is in the center."

"You don...

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