Free Forbidden City by William Bell Page A

one minute translating stuff for Eddie, then running down to meet Dad in the square, then being called back by Eddie on the two-way radio to do something for him. Eventually he slept in thesuite with us, which was against hotel regulations, but no one in the hotel seemed to be paying much attention to regulations. It seemed like everybody was having a holiday from regulations.
    Me included. I tried to keep up the schoolwork, but I didn’t get much done. I skipped school a lot. I went to the square at least twice a day to see what was going on. Sometimes I went with Dad.
    Eddie said he figured the students started the hunger strike when they did to embarrass the government. He figured their tactic was to force the government to give in to their demands because the government wouldn’t want hunger strikers in Tian An Men Square when Premier Gorbachev arrived. It would look pretty bad, if when the premier came for the required tour of the square and the Forbidden City before going into the Great Hall of the People, three thousand students were laid out on the pavement starving to death.
    Dad mimicked a tour leader’s nasal voice. “Here is the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and there, just past the students who are starving themselves because they think we’re a bunch of old crooks, is the Chairman Mao Memorial.”
    When Gorbachev got here for his visit on the fifteenth, all the news reports showed him shaking hands with the Chinese government bigwigs. Everybody smiled so hard I thought their faces would crack. Banquets. Visits to the Great Wall. More banquets. More smiles and handshakes andfriendly talks while they sat in deep armchairs with big doilies on the arms and interpreters sitting behind them. There was a whole lot of talk about the renewed friendship between the Russian and Chinese people after a thirty-year break. I didn’t see any
xiao ren
— ordinary people — Russian
or
Chinese, on those broadcasts. As far as I could tell, the Chinese people were in Tian An Men Square.
    And the Russian premier didn’t get to visit the Forbidden City or the square, because the students were still there, lying on the concrete surrounded by their friends and classmates. Too bad, Gorby.
    On the second day of Gorbachev’s visit the ambulances started coming to Tian An Men Square. I was there. It was a hot sunny morning and the hunger-strikers lay in rows on army-type cots under protective canopies. Some of them had even been refusing fluids and were so weak they couldn’t stand or sit.
    I tried again to find Lan and Hong, but it was hard to get close and harder still to see the faces of those lying down. But I kept searching. I must have been at it for over an hour before I found them.
    I hardly recognized Lan. She looked like a stick-doll. Her eyes had sunk into her head and she sort of stared into nowhere. She was one of those who would not take anything to drink. Hong was on the cot beside her. He still had on his red cap. When I called out to him he got up on his elbow and smiled when he saw me.
    “Hello, Canadian friend,” he said weakly. Hislips were dry and cracked. “How are you today?”
    “How are
you?”
    “We are in good spirits, although some of us are weak. More and more students are joining the hunger strike every day. We —”
    Hong was interrupted by a voice blaring over the loudspeakers the students had set up.
    “What was that all about?” I asked him when the noise stopped.
    “More ambulances have come,” he said.
    About fifteen minutes later, four students took Lan away. As she was being carried through the crowd a woman cried out and tried to clutch Lan’s clothing, wailing as though someone had died. All I could make out was, “Please, please.” Lan was lifted into the ambulance. Others were helped in after her. Then the ambulance crept away, horn braying as it moved slowly though the crowd. Hong stayed on his cot, staring up at the canopy above him. I figured he had one more day until