Looking for tank man, p.1
Looking for Tank Man, page 1
ALSO BY HA JIN
Between Silences
Facing Shadows
Ocean of Words
Under the Red Flag
In the Pond
Waiting
The Bridegroom
Wreckage
The Crazed
War Trash
A Free Life
The Writer as Migrant
A Good Fall
Nanjing Requiem
A Map of Betrayal
The Boat Rocker
A Distant Center
The Banished Immortal
A Song Everlasting
The Woman Back from Moscow
Copyright © Ha Jin, 2025
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Patrice Sheridan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Jin, Ha, 1956- author.
Title: Looking for Tank Man / Ha Jin.
Description: New York : Other Press, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025002249 (print) | LCCN 2025002250 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635423839 (paperback) | ISBN 9781635423846 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political activists—Fiction. | China—History—Tiananmen Square Incident, 1989—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3560.I6 L66 2025 (print) | LCC PS3560.I6 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20250224
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025002249
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025002250
Ebook ISBN 9781635423846
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Contents
Also by Ha Jin
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
FOR LISHA
1
IN THE FALL of 2008, my sophomore year at Harvard, China’s premier came to visit and gave a speech. Urged by the officials of the Chinese embassy in D.C., we gathered in the central quad of campus to welcome the delegation. We were each holding a tiny red flag printed with five stars, provided by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association of our school. Most of us felt obligated to join the welcoming crowd, because the delegates, even though we disliked them as officials, were from our motherland.
There were more than four hundred of us, all dressed formally. Young men were in suits and ties and leather shoes, and women in colorful clothes, since the official instructions had urged us to treat the premier’s visit as a festive occasion. I was wearing a long floral dress with a cloth belt cinched around my waist. Some in the crowd were from MIT, Boston University, Tufts, Brandeis, UMass, although for attending the premier’s speech in the auditorium, one had to have a ticket, which was not given to regular students like me. But I wasn’t that interested anyway, I had too much schoolwork to do.
A slender woman in a pageboy—she was in her early forties, and looked like a visiting scholar—stood away from us, alone. She raised a placard that declared: “We Won’t Forget the Tiananmen Square Massacre!” The massacre, if there’d been one, had taken place almost two decades before, and I was amazed that the woman was still bent on making a protest about it today. As the solitary protester, she began walking around among us, but no police stopped her despite hundreds of them being around. Many of us were angry at her. What a drag! What a crazy woman! Some called her an idiot. One man yelled that she was a professional China-basher.
A few of us tried to intervene. My friend Rachel, wearing a polka-dot dress, stepped out and said to the bespectacled protester, “I grew up in China and never heard of such a massacre. Why help Americans demonize our country like this?”
The skinny woman said with a Hong Kong accent, “You’re too young to know the truth, it has been erased from the public memory by the Chinese government.”
Joe Ma, Rachel’s boyfriend, pitched in: “You’d better knock it off, all right? You’re a pathetic liar, and nobody believes you. I lived in Beijing for many years and never heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Look around, see who believes you and your nonsense.”
“I won’t just forget what happened and I want to tell the truth. I was there and saw the killings with my own eyes. I was stained with the blood from a young boy who was killed in Tiananmen Square. My nose still can smell his blood, and my ears still hear him crying.”
“Shut your trap!” Joe bellowed, flinging up his hand. “There were no random killings at all. Even if the insurrection was squashed with force, it was the right choice, and it later earned an economic boom for China. See how strong and prosperous our country is today.”
“But the Chinese people are still living under tyranny and oppression. They deserve freedom and human rights.”
“Get out of here!” Joe cried. “The top priority of human rights is to let people have a decent livelihood, which our country has managed to provide for our people.”
“No, the Communist regime oppresses our people, treating them like dumb animals in a corral. Besides, people earn their livelihood, which isn’t something given by the state.”
“Bitch, go away!” a female voice cried.
“Fuck your mother!” a man barked at the protester.
“Stupid cunt!” came a female voice.
“What a loser!”
The middle-aged protester said calmly, “You’re all college students here and ought to be more civilized. Haven’t you learned more words than those obscenities?” I was also surprised by their using our mother tongue this way, lapsing so suddenly into such vulgarity.
My pulse was beating as I watched them, and I pushed the butterfly hair clip I was wearing for the occasion up above my ear. I worried they might manhandle her, but two officers came up and stopped the squabble. It couldn’t go on anyway, as the premier’s retinue was already appearing at the front gate. The quarrel quieted down, and a few in the crowd turned their phones vertical to snap photos. The solitary protester raised her placard higher and waved it while we were fluttering our little flags and crying “Welcome!”
The smiling premier raised his hand and waved at us as he passed by, his legs slightly bandy. He was escorted by his aides and bodyguards. Behind him was a petite young woman in a navy suit and black pumps who must have been his interpreter.
Later I came to learn more about the solitary protester. Her name was Liu Lan. Some students dug around online for more information on her, which they shared with us. She worked at a Hong Kong media company and was currently a visiting fellow in the Nieman program for journalism at our university. People in my social circle called her a traitor and a diehard China-basher. But deep down, I was fascinated by her. She was bold and headstrong, to say the least.
I looked more into Liu Lan online and found some video clips of her. In the photos of her youthful days, she looked elegant and was kind of a beauty, with bright eyes, smooth skin, slender limbs, and a soft voice. She looked like a typical college student, mild and maybe even frail. But she had been an activist of sorts even then and given a speech at every memorial meeting held in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park on the anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy. In one interview she broke down, sobbing wretchedly. Then she collected herself and went on to tell her experience in Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989: “We were sitting on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square and meant to block the army from advancing to harm the students. There were more than one thousand people in the crowd, most of us sitting on the ground. The soldiers, all wearing helmets and carrying assa
“A few moments later I rose to my feet and went up to a young commander of the troops in front of us. I grasped his hand and begged, ‘We’re students from Hong Kong. Believe me, officer, those in the square are not counterrevolutionaries. They are the brightest youths of our country, and they’re peaceful and just demonstrating for a more liberal and fair society. They are doing this for all of us. Please don’t harm them, don’t open fire on them!’ I couldn’t hold myself any longer and dropped to my knees in front of the officer, who looked at me with watery eyes but said nothing.
“When I rejoined my fellow students, a boy in his early teens turned up, bawling and telling people that the army had just shot his elder brother. He kept crying, ‘Brother, brother, where are you?’ I can never forget his hoarse voice, which sounded like an old man’s in spite of his young age. Some people in the crowd were sobbing with him and calling the soldiers fascists. Then the boy grabbed a club from a man and broke out running after an army truck while yelling ‘Brother, Brother!’ He meant to avenge his brother. We tried to stop him but couldn’t.
“Two hours later, after we had been dispersed by the soldiers, I ran into the boy in Tiananmen Square again. He was bleeding from several gunshot wounds and had been carried over by two workers. I helped them load him into an ambulance; my shirt was stained with his blood. I was so overwhelmed that I blacked out. So they put me in the ambulance too. On arrival at a Red Cross emergency clinic, I came around and saw two wounded soldiers lying nearby. A nurse went over to check their injuries and treat them, but some people stopped her, shouting that they were murderers and didn’t deserve any medical attention. Then a doctor, a middle-aged man, said loudly, ‘Stop interfering with our work. Even though they’re soldiers, they’re still human beings. Our job is to save lives.’ That shut everyone up.
“The makeshift clinic could only treat the wounded preliminarily, and most of the victims had to be transferred to hospitals nearby. When an ambulance came, a female doctor ordered the medics to put me into it together with three wounded people, I said I was not injured and was fine now. But the doctor just told them, ‘Take her with you too.’ I kept protesting but was interrupted by the doctor, who said in English, ‘Child, we need you to get away and tell the world what has been happening here. Otherwise, people in other places cannot know the truth.’ Obviously, she spoke English because of fear. She was afraid that those around us could know her intention and might stop me and even inform on her. I promised her that I would spread the truth.”
Liu Lan sobbed again. A moment later, calming down some, she added, “In Benevolent Hospital, some armed soldiers turned up to arrest the wounded counterrevolutionaries. The doctors stopped them, saying the real counterrevolutionaries were all in the bicycle shed, which was being used as a stopgap morgue and was already crowded with dead bodies. I sneaked away. Ever since that day, I haven’t stopped telling the world about the massacre. If they had put another wounded person instead of me into the ambulance, that person would likely have survived. In other words, my life must have been saved at the cost of another life, so as long as I can breathe, I won’t stop acting as a voice speaking for those victims!”
That explained why she had shown up in the central quad of our campus to protest alone the other day. I half believed her—her truth might just be another version of what had happened. I emailed the link to her interview to Rachel and Joe, curious to see how they would take it. Joe wrote back, saying Liu Lan was just a crazy woman who couldn’t see any positive side to our country. Rachel also said Liu Lan might be a liar. I tended to agree with them. I had grown up in Beijing and often passed Tiananmen Square. I had never heard about the massacre either, though in history class we were once told that there’d been a rebellious mob who intended to overthrow the government, but who were subdued mostly by peaceful means.
2
A FEW DAYS later, at dinner, I chatted with Rachel Guo and Joe Ma about the odd journalist, the lone protester. They both dismissed her as a crazy woman, someone who had only been able to survive in the West by becoming a democracy activist. There were many of them like that, self-styled exiles and dissidents who couldn’t stop striving for the limelight by bashing China. I felt my friends were too opinionated, though I tended to share their conviction that even if there had been a bloody crackdown on students in June 1989, that had been almost two decades ago—history moved on and life continued, and it was silly to get bogged down in the mire of the past.
Rachel’s family was wealthy. Her father was the general manager of Baobao, an internet retailing conglomerate headquartered in Nanjing. It was believed that her parents had given Harvard six million dollars for an endowed chair, and that was why she had been admitted. But I don’t think that was the reason she had gotten in. She was an excellent student, smart and perceptive, and she would have been qualified for any top college in the States, though she could be willful, less tolerant of people who didn’t have her kind of privileges. Perhaps her parents had made the donation just to ensure that she would be accepted by Harvard, her number one choice. I suspected that Joe was running after her with an eye on her family’s clout and wealth, but to be fair, she was attractive in her own way, tall, with an open face and glossy skin. In my opinion, Joe was a bad influence on her, because he was actively involved in the politics of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which was sponsored and controlled by China’s consulate in New York and the embassy in D.C. Such involvement made him a little red flag waver, and this must have affected Rachel’s political attitudes.
Soon I forgot about Liu Lan, the only protester. The coursework at Harvard was overwhelming. I had been an exceptional student back in Beijing, but here I felt out of my element, especially in my freshman year. I had to struggle to survive. Last semester I had received two Cs, and that had never happened in my life. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I declared my major—history. It felt like a mistake. Back in China, the humanities and social sciences are viewed as easy fields, mostly for inferior minds that cannot survive the rigors studying the sciences. But here, history is one of the hardest majors. On average, I had to read three books a week. This was killing me. In China, for a history class, you usually read one book a semester, a standard college textbook. Worse yet, for each course here we had to write two or three papers, and they had to present original views. This was something alien to students of my background, who had been good at regurgitating what our teachers had fed to us. We were excellent back home mainly because we were skilled in taking exams.
Due to the heavy coursework, I hardly had any social life. Rachel, Joe, and others in our circle went on outings quite often, skiing in Vermont and visiting Martha’s Vineyard and Newport in Rhode Island. I hardly ever went with them. I was on a scholarship and had to earn decent grades to have it renewed. To me, studying hard was like a matter of life and death.
My diligence helped stabilize my life, which was confined to the library, the dorm, the cafeteria, and the classroom buildings. The hard work paid off—at the end of my freshman year, my average grades were B+, which wasn’t great, but good enough for me to retain my scholarship. Gradually I realized that courses had different amounts of reading assignments. Some were extremely heavy, while some were quite light. For example, if you took a film course, there wasn’t a large amount of reading materials, whereas a seminar on the Civil War meant you had a pile of books to read, besides the research papers you had to write.
We often talked about the amounts of coursework in various classes. So in my sophomore year, I took some lighter courses, most of them related to China, partly because I could do the readings in Chinese if the original works were written in my mother tongue. By now, I felt confident that I could survive academically here. This year, the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year, fell on February 15. Many Chinese students flew back to join their families for the holiday, as long as their parents could afford the plane fare. I didn’t go, because the flights were too expensive for me—flying round trip would have cost my mother two months’ salary. My father urged me to go back, saying he’d pay for my plane tickets, but I didn’t listen to him, nor would I take any extra money from him. As he had agreed with my mother, he gave me a monthly allowance. They were divorced, living in different cities now. He had abandoned her for another woman many years before.
