Editor’s note: As summer approaches, as well as the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, we’re making a first foray into fiction. What follows is a truncated version of a longer story, written by author Jianying Zha in memory of the events of 1989 that she witnessed in Beijing. The protagonist, Shuya, is an idealistic college graduate who works in a stuffy Beijing television station and marries the conservative news editor Old Kang, who is then assigned as a Xinhua News Agency correspondent in Pyongyang, North Korea. That is where this adapted story begins, in April 1989 with news from Beijing of the memorial for Hu Yaobang that grew into the pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square.

“Are you awake?” Old Kang asked gently.

Shuya’s stiff back did not stir.

“Maybe tomorrow then,” he shrugged, sitting down by the edge of the bed. “It’s just some news from Beijing.”

The word “Beijing” touched a nerve string. Shuya asked, without turning: “What is it?”

Old Kang bent over to untie his shoes. “Oh, looks like some college kids are out to make trouble again. A few thousands demonstrated in Tiananmen Square today.”

Shuya turned around and sat up. “Really? To mourn Hu Yaobang?”

The abrupt death, in a heart attack, of the disgraced reformist leader had reached them all two days ago.

“I suppose so,” replied Old Kang, moving to sit next to his wife in the bed. He looked thoughtful. “But there was a sit-in in front of Zhongnanhai, and terms were demanded from the Party on Tiananmen Square, things like that. Obviously, some people are taking advantage of the mourning to stir things up.”

“What sort of demands have they made?” insisted Shuya, ignoring her husband’s damning tone.

“Oh, that Hu Yaobang’s career be reevaluated, also the campaign against bourgeois liberalization two years ago, and to disclose high party leaders’ financial accounts to the public, open up media, nonsense like that. You’ll hear it all soon enough.”

“So the non-party members will be briefed too?”

“Yes, either tomorrow or the day after. They want everyone to be vigilant.”

“Vigilant?” Shuya repeated. Suddenly a note of mockery and bitterness entered her voice. “What’s the use of being vigilant here? Against what? This is a desert. Worse than that: you can’t even stir up sand here. It’s all just a clean nothingness! Oh — why did I come here?” She moaned and threw herself back down in bed.

That night Old Kang made some efforts, valiantly but in vain, to get his wife interested in lovemaking. And since she was quite tired and wasn’t really interested, he fell asleep easily, having made the gesture. Shuya lay in the dark for a long time, thinking guilty, inconsolable thoughts about their son, who was only one year old when they left him behind in Beijing. Only briefly, before falling asleep, she thought again about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and wondered if the students would continue.

Dawn was hazy in Pyongyang on June 4. Outside the Chinese embassy, the early summer sun was rising, dyeing the sky with the immense expanse of a blood orange hue. Inside the embassy, people crowded into the large conference room with the large television set that carried CNN. The air, filled with pungent smoke, spit, fart, sweat, curse, and the staleness of a sleepless night, was so thick it was suffocating. As if suddenly startled out of a shocked daze, a middle-aged man — one of the political attachés — went over to the heavy drawn curtains and pushed a window open. A waft of morning air floated into the room.

Shuya sat on the first row of the chairs. There she had been, as though nailed to it, for five hours. There was a disheveled, wild look about her. Having been waken around 1:30am by a colleague’s phone call, she had bolted out of bed and rushed over to the TV room without combing or washing or waiting for Old Kang — who had found time not only to get dressed but also to make a phone call to the secretary of his Party branch and to make himself a large jar of tea.

The massacre in Beijing is done. Tiananmen square has been cleared. The tanks are rolling on Changan avenue. The city looks deserted, abandoned, eerily quiet. Hours later, in the afternoon, a rain will fall, putting out residual flames on blackened charred bodies of armoured vehicles, washing the blood stain away from flattened bicycles and roadblocks. Then it will keep on falling, like great cold merciful splashes of tears from the sky, onto the ancient capital of China.

The small Chinese community in Pyongyang — diplomats, journalists, staffers, wives, cooks and cleaners — had watched it all take place before their eyes on the screen. Like foreigners all over the world, and unlike the vast majority of the 1.2 billion Chinese, their own fellow countrymen, they have witnessed history. The tragedy of their own race.

Later that evening, back in the two-room suite, Shuya and Old Kang had the first — and the worst — serious fight of their marriage. At first it was in muffled low voices. Nobody should hear them; Old Kang absolutely insisted in this.

“So, let me get this clear,” Shuya whispered loudly in a breathless tone. “Even after this, this, this bloodshed, you still think the government is doing the right thing?”

She was pacing the living room in small, swift, uneven steps. Her limp had gotten more pronounced — no doubt due to the fatigue and the excited state she was in. She had slept a bit earlier, about an hour, at Old Kang’s insistence, but had been so tormented by fantastic horrible blurry images of death and mutilation that she had groaned and woke up in a damp sweat. Her face had turned so pale and ghastly, and horror so diminished and darkened the light in her eyes that even her husband did not try to urge her back to sleep.

The massacre in Beijing is done. Tiananmen square has been cleared. The tanks are rolling on Changan avenue. The city looks deserted, abandoned, eerily quiet.

Sitting in the chair by the dining table, Old Kang remained silent. He, too, looked tired. The flabbiness of his face and body contrasted with the nervous tension unwittingly revealed by his clenched hands and his eyes, which anxiously followed his wife’s every movement.

“Speak up, you!” Shuya demanded, still in that loud whisper. She stopped right in front of him, glaring down at his face from inches away.

Old Kang’s jaw moved, painfully, in an attempt to formulate an answer, yet words failed to come. “I think,” he finally gasped, “it’s maybe … still early to judge …”

She jumped off from him as though stung by some searing flash.

“Still early? Still early! You want more butchery, more deaths? Heavens, how can you …” She broke off in disbelief, throwing up her thin arms.

“You misunderstood me,” he said, lamely. But the urgency to expurgate himself in her eyes loosened his tongue. “I only mean that it’s a very complicated and dangerous situation out there. Some bad people are trying to overthrow the government and turn China into chaos, and it’s been going on for a month and a half now, and they just won’t stop unless you take tough measures.”

“Unless you kill, kill, kill!” Shuya’s voice rose sharply and, disregarding Old Kang’s gesticulation she went on: “Yes, roll out the tanks and kill your own people who have no power, no arms, nothing! Nothing whatsoever but hopes to make their own country a better place! Vain hopes! Oh, this really kills me.” All at once she choked. Staggering back, she rubbed her chest with a balled-up fist.

Old Kang stood up, walked a step toward her with the intention of helping her to a chair, but the sight of hot, raging tears streaking down her cheeks somehow halted him in his track. Frowning, he plopped back down into his chair instead.

They were both silent for a long while. The room darkened a shade, though the sky outside was still full of summer light. Wiping off tears with the back of her fist, Shuya began to pace the room again, slowly this time.

Slowly, Old Kang brought out with difficulty a conciliatory line: “The students had good intentions, in the beginning at least. But they are young and naïve. They demanded too much, so impatient. A small band of black hands could manipulate them easily. They are good kids, these youngsters, but they just don’t understand Chinese reality because they have this, this …” He searched for the words. It was on his lips to say “idealism,” but it didn’t seem right: Idealism, even in the Party culture he was steeped in, is a correct, positive quality, not something to be condemned or even criticized.

Shuya said, quietly but clearly: “You mean they have this habit of hoping.”

For a moment Old Kang didn’t recognize the phrase but it struck him as quite right, as just the phrase he was groping for. “That’s it,” he echoed, lighting up. “That’s what they all have: a habit of hoping.” But this repetition of the phrase brought to him a strange feeling of familiarity, and he looked, bewilderedly, at his wife.

She had stopped pacing. Now, standing facing him squarely and with her back to the window, she was a small, compact dark figure carved against a large background of crimson sunset sky, and all at once a high-pitched, piercing roar of laughter issued out of her.

The room shook and reverberated. Old Kang stared, in stunned blankness. Shuya was laughing a hard, uncontrollable, wild laugh. Her mouth was wide open, her jaw trembled, her body swayed, and long strands of black hair, some of it caked by tears, were falling and dancing all over her shoulders and face. She was laughing away, her body and soul going into it. The sound, sharp, hoarse, shameless, animal-like, gave Old Kang goose bumps. Shuya doubled over because of the hurt the laugh was causing in her stomach, yet she went right on laughing despite the convulsing pain. She was seized by it and simply could not stop. Finally she collapsed on the floor, in a trembling heap, and her broken, half choked laugh was subsiding into an exhausted whimper. She looked plain mad and a little pathetic, like someone in a seizure.

In 1991, Shuya finally got permission to return to Beijing and was reunited with Taotao, who had been under his grandma’s care. Another two years would pass before Old Kang completed his station in Pyongyang to join them. He came home to find not only his son unrecognizable — Taotao was shooting up, a lithe little animal full of restless energy — but his wife a changed woman.

The memory of those traumatic months after the Tiananmen massacre still haunted him. He had witnessed, helplessly, a neurotic streak in his wife that grew into a case of full paranoia. Periodically this would erupt into a hysteric fit. She had suspected, variously, that there was a general conspiracy to block her from ever getting back to her son; that she was followed by strange men in Pyongyang; that their meals and drinking water were poisoned. The worst fit, oddly, was over a suspicion of him: she thought he was a spy.

“Are you an informant for the ministry of security?” she had asked him one morning upon waking up, her eyes narrowly and fiercely trained on his face in an effort to penetrate the darkest recess of his soul. “Tell me honestly, comrade Old Kang, if you still care for me at all: have they sent you to Korea to spy? Is that why they wouldn’t allow Taotao to join us?” Her eyes glinted with an eerie, shrewd knowingness. “Taotao is the best hostage, isn’t it? The only child, a son.”

Life back in Beijing appeared to have affected Shuya differently. From their correspondence, which had been regular and business-like, Old Kang had sensed the hardships Shuya was suffering single-parenting a small child in Beijing. During the day she had her job at the TV station, full-time with a long bus commute. Evenings and weekends, she had Taotao on her hands. One winter, on receiving the news that Shuya had fainted and gotten sick after a particular trying trip changing gas cylinders for the kitchen, Old Kang suggested that Shuya should put Taotao into a weeklong kindergarten, to save her energy from daily pickups. But Shuya wouldn’t hear of it. “Taotao has had too much separation already,” was her simple reply. And that was that.

The memory of those traumatic months after the Tiananmen massacre still haunted him. He had witnessed, helplessly, a neurotic streak in his wife that grew into a case of full paranoia.

It was to a much-aged woman that Old Kang returned to. Shuya’s hair once had a lush gloss; now it looked dry. Gone was the naive youthfulness that had marked her face; her features now settled into more rigid lines, dull and lusterless. She moved around listlessly, sometimes like a sleepwalker. The change so shocked Old Kang in the first days that he avoided eye-contact with his wife for fear of revealing his true feelings. But Shuya didn’t seem to notice or care.

They seldom made love now, since Taotao went on sleeping in the double bed with his mom, while Old Kang took the single bed in the other room. Somehow he could not bring himself to demand a change of this arrangement. So it went on, even after his work unit finally assigned him a three room flat and they moved. On those occasional Sundays when Taotao visited granny by himself, and the apartment seemed infinitely quieter and emptier, Old Kang would try to make love to his wife. But here another change, a new trait of hers, was discovered. Shuya would yield, but her body had become so passive, so flat and unresponsive to his ministrations, it frequently gave Old Kang the feeling that he was holding a dead person in his arms. Once, while he was hanging on top and she lying perfectly still, her limbs spread out limply and her face turned to the side, her eyes closed, he had a sudden vision of her as a giant dead bird. He was making love to a giant dead bird!

Yet, not knowing why, he did not dare protest. He pretended not to notice. But all of this made him feel vaguely ashamed, though he could not explain why this was so. He had never been a very virile man, and now that he was getting to be 60 and near retirement, it was not difficult for him to be resigned to approaching celibacy and a quieter pace of things. Sighing, he felt a faint tinge of self-pity, but also relief. So it was not without a sense of gratitude that he took in his wife’s metamorphosis. Of course, he couldn’t say he liked it, but at least she was much calmer, more stable. Old Kang was certainly for calmness, and stability was always a good thing. Thus comforting himself, he made peace with this new state of his married life.

One area where Shuya was not calm had to do with their son: here, Old Kang could still catch a glimpse of the high-strung, passionate woman he had wedded years ago. But this did not disturb him too much. The maternal instinct, it seemed to him, always brings out the most powerful portion of a woman’s character. Infinite strength must be stored in a mother on account of her offspring. An ancient thing this is.

The dreaded moment finally arrived. Taotao, slumped in his chair before the computer desk like a cub in a trap, heard the sound of a key turning in the front door. Breathing deeply, he looked up with doomed resignation. The door opened, and in came his mother.

Even in his nervous state the boy noticed, almost at once, that something unusual must have happened to his mother. Shuya lumbered in with a heavy limp, threw her son a blank glance, and without a word went straight to the bedroom.

Instantly the boy forgot his own guilt. “Mama, what happened?” he jumped up and asked eagerly, trailing after her.

She was already lying down on the double bed. Her face, ghastly pale, was drained of all energy. She gave him a faint smile: “Mama doesn’t feel too well. I’ll just lie down here for a bit. Then I’ll make us dinner.”

“But I’m not at all hungry,” said the boy gallantly, though his belly had been grumbling for the last hour. He hovered around her like a little pet. “You rest, mama. I can cook up something for us. We’ve got some dumplings in the freezer; I know how to boil them.”

Shuya shook her head. “No, don’t go. I’m not hungry either.” Lifting a thin arm she touched his tousled, coarse black hair lightly. “Sit here, son, keep Mama company for a while.”

With a nimble thrust of his legs, the boy kicked off his shoes and hopped lithely onto the bed. In a second he was sitting cross-legged beside his mother. “Want a leg rub, Mama?” he inquired softly.

She nodded and closed her eyes. And for the next 15 minutes or so neither of them spoke. The boy, his fingers moving deftly and gently, massaged her tired, listless, aging legs. The ritual, familiar and long cherished over the years, brought them both such intimacy and comfort that a feeling of normalcy settled in the air. The room stood in silence, except for the tiny, hissing of skin friction, his breathing, and her occasional involuntary sigh of pain or pleasure.

When he finished, she lay there motionless for a moment. Then she stirred in a way that indicated not merely satisfaction, but a desire to talk. The boy sensed this — he knew all her body movements well. All at once, the report lying in his schoolbag crept into his consciousness and his guilt rushed back.

The boy had inherited from her the disease for which there was no cure. He had gotten the habit of hoping. It was in his blood.

“Mama, I’m very sorry,” he blurted out, blood draining from his handsome young face in the dusk glow.

Her eyes fixed on him in alarm. “What happened?” she asked, sitting up.

The boy trembled. “I … today, I got …” He swallowed with difficulty and could not go on.

Her face was stern, but when she spoke her tone was not angry but sad. “Is it another bad report?”

The boy nodded.

“Is it very bad?”

“Yes,” the boy murmured, moving to get off the bed to bring the report.

But she grabbed his arm. “Don’t go yet, son. Mama has some very bad news to tell you too.”

Now it was the boy’s turn to look alarmed. Legs dangling over the edge of the big bed, waiting anxiously, he gazed into her face.

Her chest heaved as she drew in a deep breath, and the ghastly pallor seeped back to her face. Unwittingly, a picture of someone drowning into water flitted across the boy’s mind, and he felt his heart sinking with a terrible foreboding.

“There has been a big stock market crash — a series of crashes, really — and I missed the chance to get out. All our savings are caught in it. I don’t think we’ll ever get it back.”

Taotao’s mouth dropped open. He was only vaguely aware of his mother’s growing addiction to the stock market news, which in his mind was no different than any other adult’s “hobbies” that he couldn’t comprehend. But what he heard now was a shock, and he simply did not know how to respond.

“Ah —” Shuya let out a wail, and suddenly she held out both hands to her son as though in a plea. “I’m so very sorry. It’s all my fault. I thought, I was hoping to get lucky and make enough money to pay for your future education. I was foolish, mad really …”

“What do you mean, Mama? My future education?”

“Yes,” Shuya said, a fire flashing in her eyes, words gushing from a suddenly-lifted floodgate. “I had a plan for you. I wanted to send you abroad, Taotao, to go to university in America! Some of my colleagues are making the same plans. As long as we’ve got money we can do that, you see? Some rich people have sent their kids off already. And that’s the only chance for a boy like you! You’ve been getting all these bad reports, and I just didn’t see how you were going to pass the exams for college here, with all this terrible competition. You are smart, Taotao, but you have a wild spirit, too wild for a Chinese, and I’m afraid you may become another—”

Here she suddenly stopped, as if the very mention of it might help turn her fear into reality. “Ah but now I’ve ruined it. I blew our chance. And you, you’ve got another bad report!” Her mouth twisted in an ugly twitch. She looked like someone on the verge of hysteria.

Terrified, remorseful for his own deed and pitying his mother, the boy burst into tears and threw himself into her open arms.

It was unclear how much time passed — perhaps just a few minutes, perhaps much longer — but finally the boy stopped crying and raised his head from his mother’s bosom.

The expression on his face was so solemn, so deeply serious, that it gave him a look far more mature than his age. “Mama, I want to make a pledge to you. You remember this and kill me if I break it. I’m going to change. I’m going to become a good student, a top one in my school. I will not skip another class, not a single one. From now on I’ll read and study hard, and I’ll get into a university, whether it’s here in Beijing or abroad. I’ll get scholarships to go to the best schools in the world. And I’ll become someone you will be proud of. Mama, believe me!” He was almost shouting now, his face burning. “This will happen. It will, one day, just believe!”

Shuya listened and stared at her son. There was a wild, almost ecstatic expression on her face — the ghastly pallor had vanished, now it shone in radiance. In her son’s burning, young eyes she saw something that tightened her throat. It was hope, writ large. What is the boy hoping for? For success and wealth? For love and dignity? For her confidence in him, in his ability to break out of this invisible, choking cycle of defeat? For hope to overcome despair?

It did not matter. She knew, for certain, as clearly as if the angels had declared it from above, that the boy had inherited from her the disease for which there was no cure. He had gotten the habit of hoping. It was in his blood.

Slowly, without thinking, she sank down to her knees and covered her face with both hands. For the first time in her life, she prayed. ∎

All illustrations by Xinyue Chen. Adapted from Jianying Zha’s original story, “The Habit of Hoping,” published in full at her personal website to coincide with this post.

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