By Fang Zheng, published: June 3, 2014
4:30 AM AT THE MARTYR’S MONUMENT ON JUNE 4TH, 1989. STUDENTS SHOUTED TO SOLDIERS WHO HAD ARRIVED WITH GUNS,“UNITE! WE DO NOT SHUN SACRIFICES! UNITE! WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF SHEDDING BLOOD!”
The Morning in Liubukou
In the spring of 1989, I was a college senior in Beijing Sports College, and one of the tens of thousands of students who took part in the Tian’anmen democracy movement. I was in the Square most of those days. I marched, participated in sit-ins, helped the rescue effort when students went on a hunger strike – there were 3,000 of them. They began to collapse. And, after May 19 when Martial Law was announced, I was part of the student patrol to protect the square.
During the days leading up to June 4th, the atmosphere was getting steadily grimmer. The announcement broadcast to us after dark on June 3rd was threatening: the military will do whatever it takes to quashthe anti-revolutionary riot and clear out the Square. I felt something would happen that night, I thought I should stay and, together with the last few thousand students, we should defend our ground in the Square.
We were scared, but at the same time I did not believe they would shoot us. Around 10 o’clock, the news of shooting and death at a nearby intersections came. We also could see the gunfire and hear the shooting. We knew that the troops were very close and coming closer. The last few thousands of students gathered around the Martyr’s Monument surrounded by makeshift tents. Then I met a girl from my college. She was scared and wanted to stay with me. I told her to calm down. I said we had been completely peaceful and there was nothing to fear.
Around 2:30 in the morning or so, about 100 soldiers, armed and in battle fatigues, came out of the Great Hall of the People. They made their way to the top tier of the Martyr’s Monument where the student command center was, and shot down the speakers. Sometime around four o’clock, the Four Gentlemen of the Tiananmen Square (Liu Xiaobo, Hou Dejian, Gao Xin, and Zhou Duo) reached an agreement for the students to leave the Square safely. After discussions and voting, it was decided that we were going to leave from the southeastern corner. At the time, tanks had already encircled us and bulldozed the tents.
Through a tank “gate” and then a passage of tanks on both side, the students walked away. The day had yet to break. I was with the last leg of the student file coming from the north side of the monument. Behind me there were some more students. The soldiers beat them with the butts of their rifles to move them faster, and my sense was that they were ordered to drive the students away before a certain hour and we were slow-moving.
WEST CHANG’AN AVENUE, THE MORNING OF JUNE 4TH, 1989. CLICK TO ENLARGE.
Leaving the Square, we turned westward on West Qianmen Avenue (前门西大街) because most of colleges in Beijing are in the northwestern part of the city. From W. Qianmen Ave. we turned north on a quiet street called N. Xinhua Street. Along the way, we saw smashed road barricades, overturned vehicles, a burned bus skeleton, broken glasses, rocks, and blood stains. We walked slowly in a long file and shouted slogans. We even walked past a file of soldiers marching in the opposite direction without incident. Standing on the roadside and at the entrance of their Hutongs, residents told us what had happened the night before as we passed by.
I was walking with the girl from my school, and around six o’clock, we turned onto W. Chang’an Avenue that runs east-west across Beijing and passed in front of Tian’anmen, and kept walking westward on the sidewalks and the bicycle route on the south side of the street. We sensed no danger, nor were there any soldiers in sight. Suddenly we heard explosions, one right next to us, and with it, a cloud of green-yellowish smoke cloaked us. The girl fell in the sudden chaos. My first reaction was to pick her up and move her to the sidewalk. But there were five-foot-tall fences separating the sidewalk and bike route, and as I turned to lift her over the fences, I saw, through the fog, a row of tanks, three or four of them, speeding towards the students. One of them was already very close to me, so close I felt its main gun was right over my head. I pushed the girl hard against the fence.
“LE MASSACRE DU PRINTEMPS. COLLECTIF, CHINE, LE ROMAN D’UNE REVOLUTION INACHEVEE, DOCUMENT OBSERVATEUR, NO. 7, EDITION HACHETTE, OCTOBRE 1989, P.116.” CLICK TO ENLARGE.
Next – it must have been just a matter of one or two seconds– I felt I was being squeezed and then dragged. I remember thinking, “Shit, I’m being run over.” With my shoulders and arms I pulled hard against the ground. I fell off and rolled to the roadside against the fence. My last visual memory was the white bones of my legs, and then I lost consciousness, first receding sound and then a bright spot moving farther away.
It wasn’t until 1999 that I learned of the existence of a photo of me right at that moment. A man was tying up my left leg, and others were helping. I didn’t see the photo until 2009 when I arrived in the U.S.
That intersection, I only learned later, was called Liubukou (六部口) where Xinhuamen, the entrance to the CCP Central Committee and the heart of Chinese leadership, sits at the northeastern corner facing Chang’an Avenue. The greenish smoke, researchers found, was military gas. Eleven were killed in Liubukou and many more wounded that morning.
In the Hospital
Around noon on June 5th, I came to at Jishuitan Hospital (积水潭医院). Around me stood a circle of doctors and nurses who towered over me as I was lying on the floor, I learned later, in the hospital’s conference room with other wounded.
“Do you know what happened to you?” A doctor asked me.
“Did I lose my feet?”
They asked me my name and notified the school. That evening, people from my school visited and confirmed my identity. I was still going in and out of consciousness, ice bags were placed on my head and under my armpits to keep my temperature down, and someone brought a recorder asking me to leave my will. I recorded my name, the names of my parents, what happened to me, and I can’t remember what else I said.
On the 7th, the girl who was with me came to see me. I had been asking about her. After she lost consciousness, residents took her to their home, and she learned about my injury when she returned to school the day after. By the 7th, my mother, my sister, and my girlfriend also arrived from Hefei, Anhui province, to be with me.
LIUBUKOU, THE MORNING OF JUNE 4TH, 1989.
On June 9th, a few nurses came and said they had to hide me. Rumor had it that the military would be in hospitals searching for wounded students and even taking over the hospitals. “We can’t let the military take you away,” they said, “you are still in grave danger.” They pushed me around the hospital looking for a good place and finally they hid me in the elevator machine room in the basement. The rumors turned out to be false, but policemen from Xicheng District’s Public Security Bureau did come. I was brought to an office, three policemen and one hospital administrator asked me questions about my activities and how I was wounded, recording the interrogation in writing. Unable to sign it easily, I pressed my fingerprint on it. So the Chinese government has the first record of my account.
“Review” and Refusal
I convalesced quickly. In about two weeks, I was able to sit on wheelchair and go to the bathroom by myself. On June 24th, I checked out of Jishuitan Hospital and went back to my school where I continued to recover in our school hospital. The reason I wanted to go back to school so badly was because I didn’t want to miss the class graduation photo session which had been scheduled for June 24th. But I didn’t know – no one who came to visit me from school told me – that they had already taken it without me.
I was very disappointed. I don’t know if they evaded me on purpose or not. If so, why? Perhaps they didn’t want me in the picture to permanently remind everyone of that summer. I have two class photos, one taken at the beginning of freshman year, and the other is the graduation photo. I was given a copy of it but was not in it.
FANG ZHENG (BACK ROW ON THE LEFT) WITH CLASSMATES IN FRESHMAN YEAR IN 1985. HE WAS 19 YEARS OLD.
On July 1st, most of the students graduated and left the school. Those who were held behind, myself included, were to go through the so-called “Double Qing” – qingcha (清查, thorough investigation) and qingli (清理, cleaning up) – to come “clean” of their involvement in the movement.
Cadres from the school’s communist party committee, its propaganda department, and administrators from my department began to visit me in my hospital ward. Once, twice, many times. They wanted to know how I got hurt. So I told them.
They did not accept my account. “Why did the tank run over you, not others?” They asked. “You must have provoked or attacked it or soldiers, because a tank would go after you only under these circumstances.”
“There are witnesses who have seen it all,” I said, enraged. “I also rescued a girl, and you can ask her. Before she fainted, we were walking peacefully hand in hand with students in front of and behind us.”
“We know the girl you talked about. We asked her, and she said she didn’t know what you did. She cannot prove anything for you.”
I was flabbergasted. “She at least knows that she and I left the square together, walked on the W. Chang’an Avenue together, and encountered the gas together. A tank rolled over from our side, she was rescued but I was injured. How can she not know all these? Also, when I was in the hospital, she visited me. At the time other teachers and classmates were also present, and they also asked about it.”
I don’t know what the school did to her, whether they applied pressure on her. In any case, she never visited me again, nor have I seen her ever again.
Two teachers from Beijing Steel and Iron College (now University of Science and Technology Beijing), one was Wu Bei (吴蓓) and the other by the family name Chai, came to my school to provide testimonies upon hearing my encounter with the school officials. They were at the Liubukou scene in the morning of June 4th, but the school didn’t accept their testimonies.
My own account of the event, one draft after another, had been rejected.
I was a student communist party member at the time. “As a party member,” the party official said to me, “you should keep the party’s interest in mind and yield to it. June 4th crackdown is in line with the party’s interest, and you have to make demand of yourself according to the standards of a party member.”
The party official claimed that “the interest of the party is the interest of the people.” I disagreed. “June 4th crackdown may be in line with the party’s interest, but it is not in the interest of the people. On this, the party does not represent the people.”
After the unsuccessful visits by school officials, many teachers whom I was familiar with came to give me advice one after another. “Give up,” they said. “For the sake of getting your diploma and for the sake of getting a job to survive, don’t say you were run over by a tank. You can say you were run over by a military truck, or even by an armed vehicle. As long as you don’t say tank, they will let you pass.”
Gradually I realized that the so-called “investigation” was all about getting me to obscure the fact that tanks had run over people. I refused to temper the facts no matter what. And from that point on, I considered myself to have withdrawn from the party membership.
Because of my refusal, the review on me lasted no fewer than eight months. In the end, the whole thing simply stopped without me knowing what conclusions they had made.
A Gold Medalist in the National Games for the Disabled
At the time, colleges still assigned jobs to each graduate, and before the student movement began that spring, I had already been accepted by South China Normal University in Guangzhou to teach sports theories. While I was in the hospital, the school sent three telegrams to the department asking me to report to work, but the school simply said “Fang Zheng is not available anymore for some reason” without giving them a reason why.
Meanwhile I stayed on campus waiting for a resolution of my future. After checking out of the hospital the school put me in one of the rooms that had been used for storing sports equipment at a far corner of the sports field. My younger sister came from Anhui to take care of me, while I helped teachers with various chores and got paid a little.
FANG ZHENG AT THE 3RD NATIONAL GAMES FOR THE DISABLED IN 1992.
In 1991, I met a woman who worked with the disabled. She told me that Beijing Disabled Persons’ Federation was recruiting athletes to attend China’s 3rd National Games for the Disabled to be held next spring, and asked if I would interested in giving it a try.
It was an excited idea. Although I wasn’t a student athlete in the Sports College, I had always loved sports, and was well built. Living next to an equipment storage room and off a sport field was no small advantage. Instead of ping pong or swimming which I was good at before my injury, I chose the wheelchair discus throw and javelin throw for convenience, and I began to practice on the field day in and day out.
In March, 1992, I participated in the 3rd National Games for the Disabled held in Guangzhou representing Beijing, and I won a gold medal for both the discus throw and the javelin throw.
For months, the school had been pressing me to leave, and my sense was that, as the post-89 students came in, more and more were learning about my story. After the Games in Guangzhou, I didn’t go back to Beijing but went straight to Hainan island where, with the help of Wu Bei, I was to work for the real estate company her husband had operated in the new economic special zone. The school had never awarded me my diploma.
Nonetheless, the two metals installed a lot of confidence and optimism in me about the future. I might succeed as a disabled athlete. Given my background, my inclinations and my physical condition, it felt right and it would be a tremendous self-fulfillment.
A Disabled Athlete to Represent China, or Maybe Not
With the help of Wu Bei (吴蓓), a teacher at Beijing Steel and Iron College who also witnessed the Liubukou massacre, I settled in Hainan and worked for the real estate company run by Ms. Wu’s husband. After a while, I opened a small convenience shop on the premises of the residential development where I lived.
In Hainan, I continued to train myself. In 1993, Hainan’s Disabled Persons’ Federation took me to two national tryout competitions that selected athletes to attend the Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled in September, 1994, in Beijing. I was chosen. In May 1994, the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF) organized training in Beijing for all the athletes who would be representing China, and it so happened that trainings for his events were held at my alma mater. Needless to say, I was excited about the opportunity to win for China and for myself. I trained very hard.
IN COLLEGE, FANG ZHENG (MIDDLE) AND FRIENDS CLIMBING THE GREAT WALL. CLICK TO ENLARGE.
The staffers and the coaches knew how I lost my legs, and they mentioned that the CDPF was discussing whether to allow me to attend the games, but all in all, everything else went normally. One day toward the end of May, Jia Yong (贾勇), a CDPF official who oversaw the training camp and who is currently the executive deputy chairman of China’s Paralympic Committee and deputy chairman of the Asian Paralympic Committee, and a coach came to look for me.
“Fang Zheng,” he said. “Come with me, our CDPF leader has to talk to you.”
They took me into the hall on the first floor of the college’s administration building, a place I was very familiar with during my student years. Lots of people were standing around, and I saw a few people lifting and moving the Chairman of the CDPF into the hall. He was Deng Pufang (邓朴方), Deng Xiaoping’s wheelchair-bound son who was paralyzed when he had jumped out of a window in Peking University during the Cultural Revolution to escape “rebels” pursuing him for being the son of one of the biggest capitalist roaders.
Xiao Xiaocheng (刘小成), the chairman of the CDPF and a few other officials came over to me. “I talk to you today on behalf of the CDPF,” Mr Liu began. “We know how you became disabled and we discussed whether we should let you participate. Despite differences among ourselves, the CDPF still hopes to keep you if you can make three promises. If you do, you can continue to train and attend the games.”
1) Do not talk about June 4th and your injury with other athletes at the training camp;
2) Do not contact anyone connected to June 4th during the training or the games;
3) If you win medals you will be requested for interview by the media. We hope you avoid media; if it really cannot be avoided, do not talk about the circumstances in which you were injured. Make up something else, like a car accident. Anything.
“If you can promise these three things,” Liu Xiaocheng concluded, “we will let you compete.”
These demands didn’t sit well with me, but I promised nonetheless. I said, “right now, I only see myself as a disabled person and an athlete, and I only wanted to compete and I don’t mean to politicize it at all.”
“That’s great,” they chorused. Deng Pufang was on the scene, but no, he didn’t talk to me.
After the conversation, they even took me with them to watch a show in the auditorium by some singers and other entertainment celebrities. I was relieved, because now that things were laid bare, I could focus on training and not worry about it anymore.
FANG ZHENG IN COLLEGE. CLICK TO ENLARGE.
Two months passed, one early morning at the end of July, two CDPF staffers came running. “Fang Zheng, hurry up to gather your belongings and go with us.” In a matter of minutes, one pushed the wheelchair and the other carried my bag, and I was taken into a van outside the dorm. The van drove to the Second Guest House of the State Council in Xizhimen (西直门). There they told me, “On behalf of the CDPF, we are letting you know that you are going back to Hainan today with the chairman of the CDPF Hainan chapter, and you cannot participate in the Far East and South Pacific Games for the Disabled.”
“Why?” I was dumbfounded.
“You have been disqualified.”
“Haven’t we had an agreement? Is there something else?”
“We cannot tell you anything.”
It was around 10 o’clock in the morning, and they told me that they had bought plane tickets for me and the Hainan chairman and we were to leave right then for the airport to catch the flight around noon.
I refused. “There is nothing I can do if you decide to take me out of the competitions,” I said to them. “But as an individual, I am free. I will not be leaving Beijing today. My family has come to be with me, my friends all know I am training in Beijing, and I can’t leave without saying goodbye to them. I will not be leaving today, unless you put me on the plane by force.”
They backed down but they didn’t allow me to go back to the training camp again.
That evening I went to meet teacher Ding Zilin (丁子霖), the founder of “Tian’anmen Mothers.” We had been in contact since 1992 but I had never met her. I thought if I didn’t take that opportunity, I didn’t know when I would have a chance to meet her. When I arrived at teacher Ding’s home at Renmin University of China (中国人民大学), a great number of plainclothes cops were loitering outside her apartment building. I had dinner with her, and left around nine o’clock. She walked me across the campus to see me off. All around us, plainclothes cops followed and watched us. It was at once infuriating and ridiculous. At one point, teacher Ding confronted them, asking why the government was so uneasy about an old lady and a man without legs.
The next day, two staffers of CDPF accompanied me back to Hainan, ending my athletic aspirations. In China, sports – like so many other things – is built into the party-state system. To compete in provincial games, you have to be selected by the city you live in; to compete in the national games, you have to be selected by the province you are in;
FANG ZHENG AND ZHANG QIANJIN IN FRONT OF HIS SHOP.
and to compete in the international games, you have to be selected by the state. Outside the system, you cannot take part in sports competitions as an individual.
In Hainan, I had been living with my girlfriend. I met her during the Chinese New Year holidays in 1989 in my hometown Hefei. She came to the hospital to be with me two days after I was hurt. Starting in 1993, Hainan’s real estate bubble burst, she was thinking about going abroad, so she went back to Hefei to obtain a passport. But the local public security told her that she would not be given a passport because of her relationship with me. This was something neither she nor I had expected. She became desperate about the future. In early 1995, she left me.
For all those years, for all the hardship she had to endure and the sacrifices she had to make, she didn’t leave me. But in the end, she had to give up because the state power did not like it.
The Sixth Anniversary of Tian’anmen
After the 1989 movement, many students went to jail, more were booted out of the system without a job or unable to maintain one because of lasting and systematic interference from the government. In the 1990s, Hainan had become a destination for many 1989ers, including Zhang Qianjin (张前进), Wang Dan (王丹), Kong Xianfeng (孔显峰), Lu Jiangtai (吕江台), Zheng Xuguang (郑旭光)，Zhou Fengsuo (周锋锁), where, far away from Beijing, they tried to find luck and make a living, or even make money, in the new economic zone.
My place became a hub for many of these friends. In May 1995, also the international tolerance year, we worked on a signature campaign calling for the release of political prisoners and to redress the Tiananmen movement as its 6th anniversary approached.
Another thing we were working on was a report about the custody and repatriation policies in Hainan arising from a young adolescent I had helped.
One day a boy walked down the street towards my store. Thin as a skeleton and pale, he was about to collapse at any time. He begged for food at the store; I gave him food and kept him. He was seventeen years old and had come to Hainan to look for his older sister from Zhejiang. Being a minor, he didn’t have an ID and was picked up by the custody and repatriation enforcement. In Hainan, you had to have an ID card (身份证), a temporary residential permit (暂住证) issued by the Hainan authorities, a migrant worker permit (外出打工证) issued by your home town authorities, a Border Permit (边防证) and, if you were a woman, a marriage and reproduction certificate (婚育证) to be legally staying in Hainan. Police frequently conducted raids and pulled people off the street and put them into iron-barred trucks. If you paid money, they would let you go, or they would send you to work on road or other kinds of construction sites in Guangdong or Hainan.
The young man was kept in the custody center for a month or so and was let go probably because he had become so weak that he might die there. My friends and I were enraged, Lu Jiangtai in particular who was a college student during 1989 in Hunan. Lu went to the authorities to complain, collected information, and wrote a report to be distributed to human rights groups overseas and to be filed at a court.
FANG ZHENG IN FRONT OF HIS APARTMENT IN HAINAN IN 1994.
In late May, perhaps in the evening of May 26th, we got both the appeal letter and the report typed and printed, ready to be sent the next day. We chatted and stayed up late. In the early morning, still asleep, a swarm of policemen and armed police raided us. The other half of our group, staying with another friend, was also raided at the same time. The police confiscated all of our materials and took all of us, including my younger sister, to the detention center. My sister and I were released after one day; Zheng Xuguang and his wife were detained for a month before being sent back to their home province, Shaanxi. Lu Jiangtai was indicted and sentenced to five years in prison for authoring the report about custody and repatriation policies that weren’t abolished by the State Council until 2003.
It was my first encounter with the police in Hainan. They had probably been watching me all along for all those years, but I just didn’t know.
I went to visit Lu Jiangtai once in the detention center. Then they barred me from visiting him again. After he was sentenced, they sent him away to I don’t know where. I have never heard from him again, nor do I know his whereabouts now.
As Hainan slumped into a depression, people who had come to look for jobs, opportunities and fortune took leave. My store had fewer and fewer customers, the road construction around it made it worse, so I finally closed it down. After that I partnered with friends and had a small tourism business that sustained us just barely.
After the 1995 raid, surveillance and harassment became constant. Telephone lines at home would be cut off during the so-called sensitive days. The police required me to report my whereabouts, should I travel, and my guests and visitors, except that I didn’t oblige. Why should I tell them? Sometimes things were just ludicrous. In March, 1997, a police officer came to “have a chat” with me early one morning. I asked him what it was all about, he said, “Don’t you know? Deng Xiaoping died.” “What does that have to do with me?”
By 1997 and 1998, most of my friends in Hainan had left. I felt lonely and life became harder. Friends in Beijing urged me to go back as well where, they said, economic development was taking steam and it would easier for them to lend me a hand.
On the evening of March 7, 1999, without much planning and without telling anyone, I got into a taxi and went to Xiuying Pier in Haikou (海口秀英码头). Quietly I boarded a cross-channel ferry and arrived in Zhanjiang (湛江), Guangdong, the next morning.
In Zhanjiang, I boarded a train to Wuchang, Hubei (湖北武昌) where I would transfer to the No. 88 train to Beijing. On the ferry, I met a middle-aged business woman, whose destination was Anyang, Henan, on the same route as me. She offered to keep me company and help me when I needed it. It was an arduous journey, and around noon we arrived in Wuchang. We bought tickets for the train to Beijing and then we went to have lunch outside the station. After lunch, I went to a public phone and I wanted to call a college classmate of mine to see if he could bring me a few clothes. Coming out of semi-tropical Hainan, I was wearing too little for March in interior China. I was shivering in the cold and Beijing was going to be much colder.
Before I reached the phone, a van pulled up next to me, and four or five men jumped out of it.
“Are you Fang Zheng?”
“I am. What’s the matter?”
“Come with us!”
With that they grabbed and lifted me into the van. The dajie (big sister), who was also taken, was scared and confused. I told her not to worry, and these men were after me. The van drove for a long while to a small villa-like building in a suburban, hilly area. My sense was that it was a station of the security police, because people in and out of there looked like well-trained people and there was a tall antenna on the rooftop.
“We are ordered by our superiors to hold you here temporarily,” they replied to my question of why I had been brought there.
They interrogated the dajie, my travel companion, asked about her relationship with me, and searched her luggage. In the end they let her go and took her back to the train station.
I was held there for about a week under 24-hour watch, day and night, four people a shift. I asked if I could be allowed to go to Hefei to my parents, they said “No, you are going back to Hainan.”
Finally three officers from Haikou Public Security Bureau’s political security office came, including director Li (李科长) and officer Ma (马警官), with whom I had had many encounters. They complained that I left without giving them a heads up. When I asked why I couldn’t go to Beijing to visit my sister who had gotten married and settled there, or to Hefei to be with my parents, they said we couldn’t tell you why. “How did you know I was in Wuchang?” “We can’t tell you this either,” said they.
Back in Haikou, I got sick, succumbing to prolonged bronchitis because I had no money to get medical care. When I said to officer Ma, who was also a college student in 1989 at People’s Public Security University of China (中国人民公安大学) in Beijing, that the public security should give me medical treatment, he said, “Let me give you two hundred yuan from my own pocket.”
Friends from Beijing sent me money, so did my parents, to help me get by.
Falling in Love
When I had left Haikou, I didn’t plan to come back. Now that I was forced back, I had no place to live. A painter friend of mine helped me to move into an abandoned “villa” he rented at the time. There were a lot of abandoned houses like that after the real estate bust, and some had been turned into hen houses or pig sties or small factories.
I rented a room upstairs, and downstairs lived a group of girls who came from the interior to look for jobs. When I visited my painter friend shortly before I left, I met them in the house, so when I showed up again and moved into the same house, one of the girls asked me, “Didn’t you just leave?” So I told her what happened.
Then I told her more – about June fourth 1989. Her name was Zhu Jin (朱进), and she was twenty-three, ten years younger than me. “Didn’t you kill a lot of PLA soldiers in Beijing?” She asked me. She was 13 years old at the time living in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province (江苏徐州). She had never heard of tanks running over people and machine gun fire on crowds. In the house, I spent most of the day on the first floor helping with various household chores, and I got to my room on the second floor either carried by my painter friend or crawling up myself. Zhu Jin would say, “Let me carry you.” Tall and strong, also an athlete, she would carry me upstairs. She did not worry about who I was. We fell in love.
Unbeknownst to us, in Xuzhou, public security officers found Zhu Jin’s mother. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly. “Do you know what your daughter is doing in Hainan? Get her back. She shouldn’t get involved with politically-tainted people!” Zhu Jin’s mother wrote letters to her asking what was going on. Zhu Jin wrote back, “Ask them to come to Hainan to talk to me. I am a grownup and I make decisions for myself.” So her mother told the police, “Stop visiting me. I do not interfere with my daughter’s life.”
Speaking of harassing relatives and friends, the public security over the years had talked to my direct family, my older sister, my younger sister, even my brothers-in-law, and anyone who had business or other associations with me. In a way, they spread a net over my head and everyone related to me. Out of fear or inconvenience, some had distanced themselves from me.
Zhu Jin and I planned to get married. The first obstacle was that I didn’t have an ID. My ID had been confiscated during a police raid and it had expired anyway. I didn’t have a Hainan household registration, so the public security wouldn’t issue me a new ID. When I left Beijing in 1992, I took my Beijing registration with me, but in Haikou, the police said I didn’t meet the requirements for a household registration. I tried my hometown Hefei, and the public security said they couldn’t give me a registration because I didn’t live here and I didn’t work here. I tried to bring it back to Beijing, but Beijing said, no, you had already left Beijing with it. So for eight years in Hainan, I didn’t have a household registration, and after 1995, I didn’t have a valid ID card. If a census was conducted during that time, I was not counted. Without a household registration and ID, I couldn’t get married to Zhu Jin.
In early 2000, I wrote to the Ministry of Public Security. I said I am not writing to talk about anything political; I am writing to talk about my household registration which I have to have just to live. In May my parents received notice that I could settle my registration in Hefei. In August of the same year, Zhu Jin and I moved back to Hefei and moved in with my parents. We got married on September 8, 2000. I had not seen my parents for eight years.
We received many blessings. In New York, Mr. Cary Hung (洪哲胜), a Taiwanese democracy pioneer, raised about 30,000 yuan for me to start a new life with Zhu Jin and our daughter who was born in May, 2001. Zhu Jin opened a cosmetics shop but just as it was doing better, the SARS epidemic shut down the city for several months and also shut down our shop. I sought employment assistance from the Disabled Persons’ Federation in Hefei, but nothing came out of it.
Unexpected Role in the 2008 Paralympics Preparations
In 2005, a high school classmate working at the provincial DPF asked me if I would be willing to assist the province’s newly-formed athlete team of the disabled preparing for the 2008 Paralympic Games. Of course I would.
So I became a helper for the team of the disabled. I lived with the 30 or so athletes, returning home only occasionally. It was not real employment, but I was very content to be doing what I liked and knew the best, and I was happy to help each one of them succeed.
ZONG KAI IN A SEMI-FINAL EVENT IN 2008 PARALYMPICS (HTTP://SPORTS.SOHU.COM/20080913/N259543435.SHTML). CLICK TO ENLARGE.
On the team, there was a 19-year-old young man named Zong Kai (纵凯) with a high hip amputation. He was a beggar crawling on the street, supporting himself with both arms, when he was spotted and picked up by the coaches looking for potential candidates for the provincial team. He came from the poorest countryside in northern Anhui. When the coaches discussed what events he should be trained to do, I opposed placing Zong Kai on the swimming team. I analyzed his condition, his muscle-type, using knowledge I learned in college, and I told the team and Zong Kai himself that the event he could quickly learn and excel in would be wheelchair racing.
But wheelchair racing was an expensive sport, the racing chair had to be custom-made overseas and was very costly, and only four cities and provinces – Beijing, Shanghai, Hubei and Liaoning – had this option. Through my connections, I introduced Zong Kai to Shanghai to try out, and he was quickly accepted and moved to Shanghai to train. In the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, he won one gold metal and one bronze. He is now a confident and successful athlete and married too. We had kept contact for a long time, and I was sure he would be attending the 2012 Paralympics in London.
My temporary employment ended in 2007 when the national qualification games for disabled athletes was over. Those who were chosen became members of the national team, and those who didn’t make it went back to their life before.
OLYMPICS TORCH RELAY IN HEFEI (HTTP://WWW.HEFEI.GOV.CN/N1070/N304695/N480699/1955510.HTML)
Ironically, from March 2008 when the Olympic torch relay began, all the way to September, I was pretty much under house arrest in Hefei. There were media that wanted me to visit Beijing, and they even booked a hotel room for me. But the police, CDPF local chapter and neighborhood committee worked together to monitor me. They took turns to visit me to warn me or threaten me against traveling to Beijing, because they too knew that I was a living example of China’s disregard for the Olympic spirit and its human rights condition. They were worried my appearance would ruin their grand show. Indeed, if you asked me then, I did not believe China should be hosting the Olympics.
So I had these mixed feelings about the 2008 Olympics. As someone who studied sports, as a sports fan, I was excited about it and I also knew that many of my college friends were working hard to contribute to its success. And I was also deeply gratified to have helped disabled people like Zong Kai to be part of it. But on the other hand, I was a victim of perverse persecution that ended my career as an athlete. During the Olympics, I watched the games intently at home, but all the while I was reminded that I was imprisoned.
At the time China promised the world that it would allow foreign journalists to report freely in China. Between March and September, 2008, there had been foreign journalists who came to Hefei to interview me. But this was how “free reporting” worked: I remember when a British journalist came to interview me, he was accompanied by a Chinese “observer.” Every time when I talked about my circumstances, this “observer” would interrupt, “Enough, enough, no more talking.”
In another case, in September, a German journalist with Süddeutsche Zeitungwanted to write about the conditions of China’s disabled people. He had interviewed various people already, including me, and he asked me to introduce some interviewees. We decided to visit a young marathon runner I helped train who had lost his arms to electric shock and didn’t make the national team. But before my appointment with the journalist, I was taken to the police station and warned not to go. In the end, we didn’t go because I didn’t think the young man would be free to talk to us, or we might be intercepted halfway.
But for nearly ten years from 1989 to 2008, I had continuously talked about the June 4th massacre to overseas media without fear, I had told the truth I experienced, and I regarded it as my responsibility to speak out.
Leaving China
Around 1994 and 1995, I toyed with the idea of leaving China, but even my girlfriend couldn’t get a passport, what were the chances they would give me one? I was also approached by someone offering to smuggle me out of China. I
FITTED WITH PROSTHESES AT MEDICAL CENTER ORTHOTICS & PROSTHETICS IN SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND.
declined, given my handicap. In 2007 and 2008, I had communications withZhou Fengsuo and Zhang Qianjin, using public phones to avoid surveillance. They and other overseas friends wanted to help me leave China before the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen movement. My passport application was eventually approved after much delay partly in exchange for my “cooperation” with them during the Olympics.
Before I left Hefei in February, 2009, government officials talked to me many times to prevent me from leaving. Their tactics ranged from persuasion, to threat, to enticement. “Your family are still in China. We can let you leave China, we can also refuse to let you come back if you don’t behave appropriately overseas.” “If you stay in China, we will give you a job.” When nothing worked, they tried to talk me into leaving China a few months later, say in July.
I said to them, “Now I have a passport, visa, and tickets. Unless you use force to intercept me, I’m going.”
FANG ZHENG, WIFE, AND THEIR OLDEST DAUGHTER IN 2009.
My wife and I arrived in San Francisco on February 26, 2009. Our daughter joined us a month later. In the United States, with the help of Mr. Michael Horowitz and many generous friends, I was fitted with prostheses and walked on my own for the first time in twenty years. I learned how to drive, and my family eventually settled in the Bay Area. Our second daughter was born in 2012. Here in the US, my heart is free, so is my movement.
(Based on Yaxue Cao’s interview with Fang Zheng in the summer of 2012. Translated by Y.C.)
As I translated Fang Zheng’s story the past week or so, his third daughter was born on May 30. – Yaxue
