Lead Review (Tiananmen Square)
- Book: Tiananmen Square
- Location: Beijing (Peking)
- Author: Lai Wen
Lai Wen is the pseudonym of a Chinese lady now in her mid 50s living in the UK with her husband and two daughters. She uses a pseudonym because of the subjects she covers and her fears of retribution from the Chinese authorities. Tiananmen Square is a novel but it is very much based on Lai Wen’s own life growing up in Beijing..
The heroine of the book is, indeed, called Lai. She was born in 1970 into a working class family and had a happy childhood playing with her friends. Her father had been imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution and had ended up as something of a recluse. Her mother was much more conventional, supporting the Communist government and worried about the family’s social status with their neighbours.The dominant influence in her early life was her larger than life grandmother. Lai progressed well through school and was awarded a scholarship to Beijing University, the first of her family to go on to advanced education.
She was the ‘poor girl’ amidst a fair number of wealthy and well-connected students. Two people were influential in her university life. One was Gen, a friend from her childhood. He has been her first boyfriend and in many ways they were still very close. The other was a somewhat eccentric young lady called ‘Madam Macaw’ (properly Anna). Anna constantly challenged authority and became Lai’s best friend. Petty regulations (including a new lights out rule at 10 pm) began to outrage the students and the unrest quite soon progressed into full blown confrontation with the authorities at which many issues were raised. The students were joined by many ordinary inhabitants of Beijing, and the authorities got very concerned. Lai was not a student leader by any means, but she was in Tiananmen Square when the massacre happened. She saw several of her friends killed.
Tiananmen Square is a very powerful book. It describes growing up under an authoritarian regime, and then the very violent reaction of that regime to what we would describe as normal student protest. One thing I did not know struck me quite forcibly. The commander of the 38th army of Beijing-based troops refused to attack the students so other soldiers were brought in from the provinces and held in camps surrounding Beijing. They were cut off from real news and subjected to propaganda informing them that the students and their supporters wee dangerous dissidents intent on overthrowing the state. It was their duty to neutralise them with maximum force.
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