At first glance, the title of Lai Wen’s new novel is deceptive.  For “Tiananmen Square” evokes not just a particular geography, a particular set of buildings, a specific physicality, but will forever suggest the low, interminable rumble of tanks, battalions of dead-eyed soldiers, the rattle of guns, and above all the bodies — the bodies which are strewn in the wake of a power which cannot bear to be challenged. When I started reading, these are the themes I thought would be to the fore, so it was surprising to be immersed in what was a rather gentle coming-of-age novel, beginning some twenty years before the events of 1989 and those images — both bleak and inspiring — that have reverberated across history ever since.

And yet, even in these gentle beginnings there is something more at work here.  Wen opens, like Proust, with the power of memory — in her case, the ‘madeleine moment’ is evoked by the remembrance of the scent of her grandmother:

I remember the smell of her. Somewhere between the scent of jasmine and the more earthy odour of the leather oil she used, working up the material to fashion slippers for neighbours on our landing.

It is this sensory detail out of which the family of the main character, Lai, her community, and eventually an entire world is gradually conjured.

Lai’s grandmother’s ability to fashion shoes has political roots, for as a young girl she was due to be submitted to the archaic practice of foot binding. As a result of her fierce resistance, her parents gave up on the ritual, and left the child with feet that remained in a kind of fractured limbo — too big to be bound, too small to be “normal”. It is for this reason that Wen’s grandmother was impelled to fashion shoes for herself. As she got older, she realised that there was a whole generation of women in a similar situation, and started crafting footwear for others — an expression of a brave and resolute gender rebellion rooted in the abuses of the past

History is something Wen wears lightly in her novel, and yet, just like the grandmother, every character is touched by it: from the quiet but compassionate father who is cowed by the unspoken horror of what happened to him during the Cultural Revolution, to the aging beauty of a mother, sardonic and sniping, whose social aspiration has been thwarted by her husband’s loss of status and the changing times. Lastly, there is Lai herself, a child who has inherited all these tensions — who is both secure and vulnerable, part of a larger Beijing working class community struggling to survive. Lai’s young life develops in the midst of the hustle and bustle of neighbours and friends on the corridor — the gossip, the petty rivalries — but also the compassion and solidarity and strength, evinced most of all by the belligerent, unapologetic and “politically incorrect” example of her grandmother.

All of this is to say that, in Tiananmen Square, the past becomes a character in its own right. Lai plays with her childhood friends in an abandoned lot on top of a hill, and from this standpoint, the outline of the Square is visible through a misty distance. Of course, the children, while seeing it, don’t ever really consider it, and yet, still it waits, just at the outskirts of their vision. The feeling that the future is an ominous force, something forever watchful, waiting to twist individual destiny into its grip is palpable here, and yet, in the same moment, the future possesses this fatalistic power because the past and all its contradictions have never truly been absolved, but only repressed.

And that is the question that Tiananmen Square poses throughout: how does one deal with the unspeakable horror of what has gone before? Lai’s father — hesitant and browbeaten, emotionally distant — makes perhaps the most definitive statement about the his past when he takes his young daughter to a “memory wall”, a place where the victims of the Cultural Revolution and their families can memorialise what happened to them:

People put up letters on the wall … Some were written from within the camps themselves, prisoners who would write clandestine notes to the families they had been separated from.  Others were about those men and women who never returned home.

The government, of course, cannot abide memory — the authoritarian state by its very nature requires a cultural amnesia. After the wall her father has taken her to is bulldozed to the ground, the young Lai ruefully reflects:

It suddenly seemed to me that this was life’s inevitable corollary, that the poets and peacemakers would always be stamped out by those who had force on their side.

This sense of amnesia, this sense of forgetting, is mirrored by the truly moving descriptions of Lai’s grandmother, whom she affectionately calls “Po-po”, and her descent into dementia. This is made doubly evocative: for we witness it from the eyes of an adolescent, hurt and baffled and confused by the interminable and ruthless action of the disease on this belligerent, larger-than-life figure whose presence has hitherto imparted on her a sense of self-belief in an otherwise deeply patriarchal society.  At the same time, we are also having this relayed from the perspective of the adult, middle-aged Lai (whom the reader may identify with the author herself who grew up in China before emigrating in 1989). And so there is, too, a kind of poetic, lonely distance imbued with the melancholy of experience and wisdom.  Time itself is a slippery, unreliable entity in Tiananmen Square, and memory often seems destined to perish within it.

The loss of self is not confined to the physical ravages of disease and the infirmities of old age, however.  Lai becomes deeply entangled in a love affair with a childhood friend named Gen.  But, having lost her grandmother, she has lost her bearing — lost someone whose presence gave her a sense of her own value and purpose — and, as she enters university, she finds life there to be lonely and alienating.  This loss is compounded by an unhealthy need to please her partner, to please Gen: the more he neglects her and feels her own invisibility, the more she desires to be seen. 

Gen’s character provides an effective evocation of modern male entitlement. On the surface he is a radical, a liberal — both intellectual and open-minded — but, in his relationship with Lai, he gradually and subtly diminishes her, all in the pursuit of a casual control that masquerades as affection and concern.  He is — despite some genuinely admirable qualities — a study in the way traditional and coercive values reinvent themselves in a more modern and self-deprecating language. The more Lai gives herself to the relationship, the more she loses the semblance of who she is, until what is left is little more than a phantom, orbiting his periphery, desperate for even a scrap of acknowledgement.

Just when Lai is at her lowest ebb, at her most vulnerable, we are introduced to the character of Anna, aka Madam Macaw, the head of a theatre troupe of misfits and bohemians. The friendship she develops with Lai is tentative and sometimes fractious, yet compelling.  It is here where one feels the influence of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, for Lai, like Lenù, is bright, bookish and overawed while Anna, her counterpart — her Lila — has an innate sense of defiance and a dazzling charisma which often verges on the cruel: “she’d say or do something scandalous, and I’d watch her, utterly astonished, secretly elated”. 

As in Ferrante, it is the immaculate details of this burgeoning female friendship that offer both hope and solace to the two young women in a relentlessly patriarchal society.  It is with her proximity to Anna, this remarkable and strange young woman, that Lai begins to reject the oppression of living according to the whims of another and regain her sense of self.

The awakening self-determination of an individual mirrors that of a whole generation.  Wen describes a slow burn: the meticulous process by which small oppressions on campus are slowly and gradually developed into existential threats against what little political autonomy the students have, while the latter — idealist and full of hope — are impelled to ever more courageous and reckless acts of protest against the building power of a terrible nemesis. 

And yet, there is more here than simply the morality of politics — namely the joy of self-discovery which comes from political participation. Lai’s awakening with Anna and her group is about participation, creativity, fun, debate, dancing and performance. But these things are also part of a broader democratic explosion as the students come together and begin to collectively dream up the forms and outline of a new world.  Significantly, the novel demonstrates just how the activities of the students catch fire in the larger society — how their bravery and determination ignite a much broader and wider movement against the state.  

Wen depicts, with great aesthetic integrity, just how Tiananmen Square involved so much more than campus protests. How it became a full-blown revolution, made from a billion acts of resistance and humanity on the part of ordinary people. 

In this sense, specific details of the actual leadership of the students are sometimes frustratingly scant.  Tiananmen Square is, rather, a novel that focusses on the great movement and ructions of large numbers of people — ordinary people moved to their very depths such that they form a great ocean of humanity, slow and interminable, but with an almost irresistible power.  One of the most moving moments comes when the police and the military are about to move against the students in the days before 4 June:

I see her in my mind’s eye, so many years on.  Anna’s face shining its beauty and its defiance, while behind her the police and military begin to move towards us in a flowing wave of black.  I hear too the screams of the students all around, as the awareness of what is happening settles on us.

And then something else happens.  Something no one expected.  The thousands of Beijing residents who had gathered on the sidelines — road workers, waiters, couples, cleaners, bystanders of every type — stepped out, forming a barrier between the students and the police and military.  The latter were halted in their charge, baffled by what was happening.  The numbers of Beijing residents pouring out just grew and grew.  They brought us bread, water bottles and ice creams.  As we reached Chang’an Avenue once more, there was a sea of people before me, young and old, men and women, flooding the eight lanes of the great boulevard from every direction and from every part.

This is poignant but, of course, we all know how things ultimately ended, and this weight of inevitability looms over the novel as a whole.   Inexorably, and with crushing grace, Wen streams the story of Lai and Anna into the events leading up to 4 June culminating, in a harrowing resolution which fuses individual destiny with the broader historical moment.  And yet, perhaps the book’s greatest strength is that when the reader finally arrives at the point of the massacre and the violence of suffering, there remains a sense of the beauty of humanity and the value of struggle.  Somewhat paradoxically, out of the despair, hope still manages to abide.

In the pantheon of contemporary Chinese novels Tiananmen Square is difficult to situate.   Wild Swans by Jung Chang is one of the most significant of the recent novels to emerge out of the Chinese diaspora.  Like Tiananmen Square, it is epic in its sweep (even more so, encompassing several generations for a more expansive historical period).  But Chang’s novel is much more earthy, and more recognisably Chinese, immersing the reader in the minutiae and idiosyncrasy of Chinese custom.  That is not to say that Wen’s novel is bereft of such details, but one feels that at times she sacrifices them to paint a somewhat more generic canvass.   

Wen’s adolescents often speak with an American slang, for instance, and this can be jarring. Having befriended an old bookseller, the literature Lai engages with is, for the most part, Western — Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea sits cheek by jowl with Camus’ The Stranger, Treasure Island, and Orwell’s 1984 among others. But, in using 1984 as a means to elucidate Lai’s intellectual journey and illuminate her perception of her own society, Wen provides an example more likely to resonate with the international reader. Although Chinese literature features throughout (in the form of songs of state propaganda (‘The Army Loves the People’), poetry (Su Shi), novels (Dream of the Red Chamber, Farewell My Concubine), folk tales (The Legend of Nian)) — the literature which most fundamentally shapes Lai and impacts her life is largely international. 

And so, for some, an ingrained sense of cultural authenticity is to some degree diluted.  And though that can detract from the earthy and organic aroma of indigenous Chinese life within the novel itself, it also creates a more universalist coda by which the modern reader can better interpret the direction of Lai’s life and growing political awareness of the nature of her society.   Something which might not have come across so easily had the novel restricted itself to a more exclusive exploration of Chinese literature which, to a world audience, might have felt more opaque.

In this respect, Tiananmen Square represents a more global style of literature — it becomes part of a thread which tapers from Joseph Conrad, to Graham Greene, all the way up to someone like Khaled Hosseini in our own time whose novels, while rooted in the life of Afghanistan of the last century, nevertheless have an international piquancy and tone.  It is the literature of the exile, the traveller, the immigrant, the eternal wanderer.  

Is there an irreconcilable dissonance between the national and the global in Tiananmen Square?  It is difficult to say, and each reader will have to come to their own conclusion. In any case, this is quite simply a stunning novel.  The delicacy and hope of a young woman coming of age is streamed into the building power of a greater historical unfolding, at which point the individual and the universal are united in a single flashpoint of the most moving and exquisite tragedy. 

Image: a detail from the cover of the book