With trembling hands, she picked up the last letter.

3 June 1989

Dear Kaili,

The evening is deepening and the hutong is quiet. I am waiting for Grandpa to go to sleep. He is lying in his bed three feet from me, at the other end of the room, still stirring. The heat has cooled, so hopefully he will soon he asleep. I want to write to you before I go.

Grandpa has forbidden me to go out at night. We live not far from the city centre. If I take my bicycle, I could be in Tiananmen Square or Changan Boulevard in half an hour. Out there, thousands of my contemporaries are making history. But I sit here evening after evening, with a group of older men, and sometimes older women, listening to them talk about the past.

I long to go out!

Grandpa lets me go where I like during the day. Every morning I get up early and leave the hutong. I want to know what happened overnight and to be with people my own age.

The situation in Beijing is desperate now. Fear has set in. Buses were burned to make roadblocks on Changan Boulevard. Trucks and cars have been seized and heaped together. No one doubts now that the army will be sent in. The students are preparing for the clash. Everyone is talking about tear gas an rubber bullets.

How did we get to this point? I don’t know. The city looks like a war zone.

I meet people on the streets, mostly students from the provinces. Some are staying with relatives, but others have wandered the streets since they arrived and sleep rough. They float on the periphery, like fallen leaves. They want to play their part. They sense history being made. I’m like them, in trying to find out what’s happening, but I don’t share their restlessness and naivety.

I know what you would say—that I’m being pessimistic again. Perhaps. But do you think we’ve thought everything through? When the students drafted their demands, did they consider how likely it was that they would be met? When they went to Tiananmen Square for the hunger-strike, did they believe it would make a difference—that the mighty Chinese Communist Party would surrender because a few students might kill themselves?

I’m speaking not as a man who lost his parents in one of Mao’s political movements but as a detached analyst of history. Death has always come cheaply to the Chinese, not just in the People’s Republic—millions in the Great Leap Forward and hundreds of thousands in the Cultural Revolution—but under generations of emperors.

If we try to change the course of history with blood, we must be prepared to see it run in rivers. But bloodshed and death are not the way forward. There has already been too much of both.

Somehow I feel death near, in the air. Maybe the mosquito coil is making me dizzy—or the night; it’s stuffy and too quiet. I’m angry because I’m afraid.

I’m reminded now of another incident. Around lunchtime, a group of students from the provinces and I were sitting on a kerb. The streets were mostly deserted, no buses or cars. Every now and then, people cycled past. We were discussing where we might go to find action.

Then about a dozen students rode past—a red flag with “Beijing Space College” streamed behind one of their bicycles. Some of the group wore white headbands. I couldn’t read what was written on them, they were going towards Tiananmen Square.

Everyone cheered, and one punched the air, shouting, “Fight till the end!”

Our spirits rose. The sun was shining and the wide boulevard radiated heat. We watched them disappear.

My companions began to talk about death. One was just eighteen. She said she would die to wake people like her parents to reality. It was as though our country was dead. How, she asked, could people submit themselves without question to the iron rule of the Party?

I couldn’t bear to listen any longer, so I left.

She reminded me of you. I remembered the night we spent at Qingdao station. We sat while some of our fellow students lay down on the tracks so that the trains couldn’t move. Your eyes shone with innocence and excitement. You insisted on sitting directly in front of the engine.

There were perhaps a hundred people at the station and we sang all night, old Soviet and folk songs, revolutionary hymns, lullabies, rock’n’roll anthems. We felt as though we belonged to a divine plan and that our lives had a higher purpose. We were so frightened that we couldn’t keep quiet for a minute.

I felt the same fear on the streets of Beijing, but there no one sang. In the shadow of ancient palaces, we were quiet. In our silence we could almost hear catastrophe.

Yet we tried to defy it. The more hopeless the situation, the more we wanted to fight. Perhaps we had hoped that through bravery we could repel this horrible feeling of demise.

The eighteen-year-old girl had puffy cheeks. She said that we would inflict the greatest tragedy on our country by not trying to change things. Do you agree? Will we regret it one day if we don’t fight till the end?

This evening, the radio has broadcast warnings from the city government. It is urging citizens and students not to go out tonight. Of course, when I said that I wanted to find out what was going on, Grandpa refused point-blank to allow it. To him, there is no doubt of what will happen tonight. The army, which has massed outside Beijing, will march in.

The mosquito coil has burned out. Grandpa has not stirred for a while. Perhaps he’s asleep at last.

I will wait for another five minutes, to be sure. Then I will go out of the hutong, cycle down South Drum Tower Street to Tiananmen Square. I’ve stayed at home too long, whether from cowardice or intellect I don’t know. I must go out. It’s the only way to find out what has been going on.

I think of those students lying in front of the tanks at the West Mountains. I compare myself with them. They have something I lack. They are determined. They don’t question or hesitate. I envy them.

Now I’m away, I think more of you than ever. I run your features through my mind like a film. I see your eyes lighting up and your face shining with a kind of beauty that is as clear as a child’s heart. I wonder what makes you so radiant. It’s more than youth. It’s passion and faith.

It seems depraved to think of love when Death lurks in the shadows. But talk of ideals has dried me out. The thought of you, like cool water, gives me courage. I love you.

There is an old maple tree in our hutong. When I was little, I used to climb it and sit on one of its high branches to watch dusk fall on the Drum Tower. Grandpa told me that, in imperial times, twenty-four drums would beat to mark the hour and the changing of the night watches. Perhaps for that reason I always felt the tower, with its layered butterfly roofs and thick walls, had a mystical power.

At the top of the maple, I could also see the hutong, its narrow alleys winding this way and that, like a maze, like the roots of an ancient tree. Each year the roots grew a little. More people moved into the courtyards, babies were born, children married. Somewhere a wall decayed and a house crumbled, or an extension was built in whatever space could be found; pigeon lofts went up; roofs were mended. Like an ugly but indestructible primitive life form, the hutong lived on.

Perhaps this is how it will end. I hope life, not death, triumphs.

I have to go. But I promise I will write again very soon.

Yours forever, L

The pages slipped out of her fingers. Mei remembered that night in Tiananmen Square. From the ministry’s residential compound, where she lived, she heard tanks and other army vehicles rumbling down Changan Boulevard and ran out to see what was happening. A stray bullet flew past her and her roommate. Artillery lit up the dark sky. The mighty machine of the Chinese Army had come to crush unarmed students. She remembered writing to Ya-ping, her boyfriend studying in Chicago, to let him know that some of their friends had been wounded, others were missing. She wrote several long letters about what she had seen that night and in the days that followed. She wrote about her guilt at not having been in the square, and her loneliness. She felt her friends had abandoned her, as she had abandoned them when they needed her. She felt guilty for having been unable to help.