Free God's Double Agent by Bob Fu Page A

finally turned off the light to go to sleep, I’d created a poignant tribute to the man who’d inspired so many students in China.
    “Here,” I said the next day, when I saw my friend again. “For your consideration for publication.”
    He took the poem from me, read it silently, and swallowed hard. “It’s perfect,” he said, fighting emotion. The official newspaper had a large distributorship beyond the school, and I smiled when I thought of all the people who’d read my tribute to the fallen leader.
    The next day, the editor came to my dorm with a proof of the following day’s newspaper, used to catch typos before the school made the official copies.
    “Look,” he said, holding up the proof of the paper. “Your poem will be front page, above the fold!” I grabbed the paper and admired the amazing placement. I read my poem again, this time aloud, enjoying the way the words rolled off my tongue. The poem was an imaginative interpretation of Hu Yaobang’s love of education and the circumstances that surrounded his death. It ended with a simple line: “We should all do more.”
    That night, as I drifted off to sleep, I made plans to get several copies of the paper off the stands to show my friends and family. At midnight, however, a harsh banging on the door jolted me from sleep. I jumped out of my bunk bed, stumbled in the darkness, and flung open the door. My friend the editor stood there with a look of horror on his face.
    “What have you gotten me into?” he asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “We’re in big trouble,” he said. “We printed our newspapers and they’re already ready to be sent out to the school and other cities. But someone in the administration read your poem and recalled them all! We have to redo all of it!”
    “Because of a poem?”
    “Yes,” he said, exasperated. “I don’t understand it, butapparently they didn’t want to portray Hu Yaobang in such a positive light.”
    I rubbed the remaining sleep from my eyes. Was this a dream? Would a teacher’s college really not let me honor the life of an education reformer? And why would they take such draconian steps to stop me?
    “And there’s not enough time to do another print run of the paper without it,” he finished.
    After he left, I tried to go back to sleep, but the trepidation in my spirit wouldn’t let me. I pulled the covers up to my chin and looked at the ceiling. Why would the administration consider a poem so dangerous?
    Without any real answers, I decided I’d try to snatch a copy in the morning and get advice from the university president. Surely, this was some weird oversight or miscommunication. I laid there all night, nervous about what seemed to be a strange tightening of control over the students. When the morning finally came, I jumped down off my bunk bed, threw on some clothes, and headed down to the newspaper rack.
    Another student, wearing jogging attire, was standing next to a completely empty newspaper rack. All of the copies had been destroyed during the night.
    “Look at that,” he said. “I wonder why there aren’t any papers today.”
    A lump caught in my throat as I responded.
    “I honestly don’t know.”
    After that moment, I was shocked, confused, and more than a little angry. After Hu Yaobang’s mysterious death, some students had gathered at Tiananmen Square to try to get the government to reassess his legacy and to honor the man’s life. One week after his death, there were one hundred thousand students gathered there for his memorial service. But this spontaneous public mourning had turned into a nationwide protest for political reform and against all the Party corruption. The students heldhunger strikes and demanded government accountability and freedom of speech and press. Though some of our American professors were nervous about the unrest, no one else really seemed to give the events in Beijing much thought. It didn’t affect their grades, after all.

    One evening, as I