Introduction
June 1989
will be remembered in Chinese history. During that month the student revolution
against the government spread throughout China, ending brutally when the Chinese
Army invaded Tiananmen Square, the Gate
of Celestial Peace.
That month Luc's sabbatical year in China was coming to an end. During the first
part of the year he had taught at Yunnan University in Kunming, the City of
Eternal Spring, and the second part of the year at Guanxi
University in Nanning, a southern city not far from North Vietnam. He was
accompanied by his wife, Genevieve, and two of his children, Xavier and Didier.
Before leaving China they decided to visit a few cities. First they went to
Beijing where Xavier had moved to study film in the Beijing Film Studio. There
they were joined by their daughter Marie-Laure who was studying graphic art
in Paris. Since all the news was in Chinese, they were very surprised when they
arrived at the Beijing train station, and Xavier told them that there were many
student demonstations in the city.
They stayed at the guest house in the famous Beijing Film Studio (where Bertolucci
had filmed 'The Last Emperor' not long before). The studio was an enormous park
full of movie sets and props, for example, a reconstructed medieval village,
an old fashioned army tank, an antique rickshaw. When they walked in the park
they passed people doing martial art, jugglers, dancers, actors practicing their
roles and even an enormous giant from Mongolia.
During that week most of the museums were closed, including the Forbidden City.
Towards the end of the week the subways stopped running, then the buses, and
finally bicycles were the only means of transportation left. As they had only
one bicycle for both them, Luc took Genevieve on the back of his bicycle to
go to Tiananmen Square where most of the demonstrations
were taking place.
Towards the end of the week they went almost every day to Tiananmen Square.
There, things seemed even more unreal than at the Film Studio. Thousands and
thousands of people (one day the official count was one million), most of them
students, were trying to see what was happening or guess what was going to happen.
To have a better view, some young people balanced on their bicycles' seats.
Only Chinese are capable of such acrobatics.
Everybody was in a good mood, young couples flirting openly for the first time,
people laughing, singing and shouting, all of them thinking that this was the
begining of a new era. They were convinced that the government was weakening
and that it would never dare to attack them. All they wanted was freedom, although
many did not know exactly what it meant. One could hear some young people say
that freedom meant that everything would be free in the stores. It was extremely
hot on the square, so people were eating ice cream and drinking sodas.
The atmosphere was exhilarating. Luc had experienced this kind of atmosphere
only twice before in his life. The first time was in 1945 when Bruxelles, his
home town, was liberated from the German occupation. The second time was at
the end of the sixties during the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, when
the American students took control of the university campuses. In Beijing, as
in the other two instances, people had lost all contact with reality and were
living in a euphoric state, committing foolish acts that they would later regret.
They were reminded that there were some people who did not share the same feelings
the day Marie-Laure found one of her new friends crying quietly in her office.
The lights were out and she was alone in the administration building of the
Film Studio; all the others had left to join the manifestations. The friend
explained that she did not like political upheavals. She had lived through the
Cultural Revolution and was afraid of big political movements.
Later Luc and his family learned more about the effects of the Cultural Revolution
on the people around them. For example, they heard that even in the Film Studio,
victims were living side by side with the persons who had tortured them. They
also found out that a good friend of Xavier was married to the young man who
had killed her father during those terrible days. It took them a long time to
discover how deeply several of their close friends had been marked by the Cultural
Revolution.
After a week Luc, Genevieve, Marie-Laure and Didier had to continue their trip,
leaving Xavier in a city in delirium. They left with worry in their hearts.
They knew that something had to happen and that it was going to be very dangerous.
After Beijing they visited Xian and Guilin. During that time they were so taken
by all the extraordinary things they were seeing and by the daily life, that
they weren't thinking about the recent political events. But one morning they
were awakened by an Australian couple who had heard on Australian radio that
the Chinese army had moved on Tiananmen Square with tanks and that there had
been a lot of bloodshed. They also heard that the government of the United States
was advising all American citizens to leave China as fast as possible. At that
time Luc and his family were in a hotel in Guilin. When they heard the news,
they were terrified and immediately called Xavier. He answered very calmly and
said that he might leave Beijing by bicycle to hide in the countryside. They
panicked and tried to convince him that that would be folly. Then they rushed
to Nanning to pack their belongings and go to Hong Kong and from there to the
US.
When they arrived in Nanning they found that the unrest was slowly moving to
this rather remote part of China. The news was travelling very slowly for even
television broadcasts did not include a word about what was happening. They
tried to explain what they had just seen in Beijing and what they knew had happened,
but very few Chinese people believed or wanted to believe them. A little later
demonstrations started on some local campuses. In order to avoid possible violence,
the Guanxi University started summer vacations early and sent the students home.
The foreigners wanted to leave in a hurry but, most of them had difficulty finding
tickets on planes from Hong Kong (the closest city from which they could leave
for America or Europe). Luckily Luc's family had reserved seats for the 19th
of June before their departure for China.
One evening Luc and his family were invited to a farewell party at a makeshift
village occupied by some Australians who had planted Australian trees in an
effort to reforest the area. Their government had ordered them to leave with
their families the next morning and to abandon most of their possessions. Everybody
was very drunk and the women were crying at the thought of leaving their Chinese
friends, probably forever.
The situation in China degenerated very fast. The trains from Nanning to Hong
Kong had stopped running, no planes were leaving the airport, and there were
rumors that several small towns had revolted. The only way to leave Nanning
was by boat, along rivers, all the way to the ocean and to Hong Kong (a four
day trip). The officials of the university warned that it might be unsafe for
foreigners to stop in small cities where the government might have lost control.
Our story begins
at Nanning's harbor when Luc and his family are about to take the boat along
the Yunjiang river, to escape from China. They are
accompanied by Professor Chen, a charming lady who had invited Luc to teach
in her Physics Department and had taken care of them as if they were her children.
They are also accompanied by Professor Lou, a very friendly and jovial man.
They had enjoyed listening to him play a very special flute from which he could
only get a few barely audible sounds or arguing with him about the legend surrounding
the poet Li Bai drowning in a lake while trying to embrace the reflection of
the moon on the water. They also had loved listening to some of the funny stories
he told, like the one about a dangerous snake that had entered his bed while
he was sleeping.
It was very courageous of Dr Chen and Dr Lou to accompany them at that time.
There were rumors that the army was going to invade their university that evening.
They had good reason to worry, for the day before, hundreds of essays written
by Chinese students had disappeared from the office of an American professor
who was taught English there. In these essays, written in English, the students
had described freely their feelings towards the regime, the government and the
local officials. If the authorities were to find them it could be disastrous
for hundreds of people.
Parts of the
following story are hard to understand if you don't know that one week before
their departure for China, in August 1988, Luc learned that he had an incurable
liver disease-four years later Luc had a liver transplant
.