EXHIBIT H

Xinjiekou South Street, Beijing University

Beijing

Wednesday, 17 May 1989^[60]

“Wild Thing”—the Troggs version. Teng Wenshu drops it onto turntable one and brings the volume up just as Link Wray bangs to an end. “Wild Thing” is an annoying song to play, because two minutes and thirty-four seconds later you have to play something else, but it seems appropriate. The world has lost its fucking mind.

Teng has today’s People’s Daily open on the mixing board, and unless he’s dreaming, it’s filled with photos of the protesters in Tiananmen Square. He’s looking at a two-page spread of students from the Central Academy raising a forty-foot Goddess of Liberty statue opposite the portrait of Mao at the Jinshui Bridge.

Bracketing the photos—snaking through the entire giant edition—are articles about what an evil dickhead Mao was. The one Teng can see, about the Great Leap Forward, has the phrase “thirty million starved to death.”

To Teng, whose parents were theater actors in Beijing before the Cultural Revolution, and lucky-to-be-alive subsistence laborers in a television factory in Xiaoqiang after it, the fact that Mao was an evil dickhead isn’t news. Neither is the fact that students in Beijing are protesting, or that the rest of the city is supporting them. Tiananmen Square is six kilometers south of here. His roommates have been going every day.

But for the People’s Daily to admit shit like this? The Daily is the official newspaper of the Communist Party. It’s in homes in six hundred and fifty cities in China alone, and probably half that number again around the world. And yesterday you could have read it cover to cover with no idea that the protests—or the past forty years—had ever happened. Or that Mao was anything but a god.

Plus, it’s not like the Democracy Movement has somehow taken over the People’s Daily. This edition is the paper as the Party allowed it to be. Which means the Party thinks it has already lost. Which means it has.

It raises some interesting possibilities.

So far, Teng has stayed the hell away from Tiananmen. It’s been one thing for his roommates, whose fathers are all Party members, to go, and to come back raving about the excitement, and the people bringing them food, and the sleeping side by side with girl revolutionaries in silk-scarf tents, talk about Heavenly Gates.^[61] It’s been another for Teng to play that game.

The possibility that Teng will someday become a lawyer and a Party member is the only hope his family has. His parents in Xiaoqiang are destroyed. His older brother, having been born while the city’s rotting central power plant was still dropping coal ash on the streets like snow, has the intellect of an eight-year-old. Teng, born two and a half years later—and a year and a half after the People’s Hydroelectric Plant of Sanjiangyuan came online, when suddenly there were a lot fewer babies in Xiaoqiang who looked like his brother—owes them.

And it’s not like he hasn’t taken risks. For a year now he’s spent two hours every morning playing music vaguely evocative of the American civil rights movement on a radio station he rebuilt himself. Granted, the era of the American civil rights movement was also the era of Mao, and Teng tends to play the most inoffensively boring music from then he can find. Also granted, swapping the tubes out of an RCA 1-K Standard Broadcast Transmitter wasn’t much of challenge for someone literally born in a communal television factory—provided they were born after the People’s Hydroelectric Plant of Sanjiangyuan came online. But people have ended up on some pretty bad lists for less.

And Tiananmen’s a classic bust, with an evil past. The place was built by Emperor Yongle, for fuck’s sake.^[62] Even Deng Xiaoping got arrested there in his student days.

Still, there’s an image forming in Teng’s mind he can’t quite shake.

Teng’s radio station, though the size of a large closet and sweltering from the heat of the tubes—more reasons, probably, why the university stopped using it—has two working phone lines. And even if Teng’s never done anything with it beyond announcing song titles, there is a microphone here: a PB-44A from 1933, heavy as an iron.

He could take to the air. Get news by phone from the Square, or from anywhere else the revolution starts happening. Send it back out with some Doors behind it. Become the voice of the student movement, influencing, if not the odds of victory—it’s too late for that—then the shape of whatever comes next.

How risky would that even be? What are the chances there’ll be a crackdown now? How would one even work? According to the Daily, even the Beijing police are now on the side of the students. The Party would have to send in the Army—the People’s Army. Which would have to fight its way in from the outskirts of the city, while citizens lay on the pavement and turned over buses to stop its tanks and transports.

And to what end? To continue making China, outside four favored cities, into a factory state? To keep the poor damned and Party members free to do whatever they want, to whomever they want, while setting prices for whatever they want to buy or sell? Who would fight for that?

Plenty of people, he reminds himself. Corruption only bothers the people it holds back. And it doesn’t hold back everybody.

Teng forces himself to imagine the consequences if he joined the movement and it wasn’t successful. If there was a crackdown, and the crackdown won.

Let’s say he spent the next three weeks here in his studio, constantly relaying information. He’d be hoarse and hallucinating from the heat and lack of sleep by then, but probably also elated. And let’s say the Party then sent in the Army—and that the world, for its own corrupt reasons, allowed it to do so. Teng would probably first hear the gunfire through the phone lines, doubting it was real. Then hear it on the streets as he was fleeing.

Teng does his best to picture hiding out at a friend’s house in the northwestern suburbs, unsure whether what’s keeping him awake despite his exhaustion is that the high school next door is being used to extract confessions, and the screaming goes on all night, or that the reward for him is now a hundred thousand yuan, and the friend isn’t that good a friend.

He tries to picture sneaking into a “confession class” for people whose crimes were less serious than his—something that itself could get him shot—just to get his passport stamped so he could buy a train ticket. So he could return home, a complete failure, to his devastated family in Xiaoqiang.

What would happen then? He would be permanently unemployable, even by the television factory. He’d have to take on black-market technology work, which would require entirely new skills. Most likely computer skills, since doing maintenance on illegal computer networks—another thing that could get you shot—might be the only way to make enough to eat.

Of course, if that happened, absurd as it is to think about, and Teng somehow survived, it’s true he might end up with some skills that were fairly unique. The ability to design and manufacture multi-protocol Internet routers, say. Or, when the state of the art improved some, single-protocol ones.

If things went well, he might even end up with skills so unique that his usefulness—first to local Party members, then to Party members in Beijing, and eventually to China itself—would begin to outweigh his crimes. Who knows? Someday he might be able to operate openly, as the CEO of his own company. Called, say, Industrial Cao Ni Ma. And become so preposterously wealthy that—within twenty-five years of Tiananmen Square—he could turn down a ride to the International Space Station, not because of the money the Russians are asking but because his brother is afraid of heights. Or accept, just as casually, an invitation to hunt lake monsters in Minnesota during the only Year of the Water Dragon that will fall within his and his brother’s lifetimes.

In his radio station, with its dusty, fragmenting cotton sound insulation, Teng mocks himself for being timid. None of that is ever going to happen. The People’s Daily has spoken.

“Wild Thing” is coming to a close. In seconds the arm will skip, done.

Instead of reaching for another single, Teng pulls back the sliders on both turntables. Hefts the microphone over from on top of the Ampliphase cabinet. Clicks the “on” button to test it, and hears it spark in his headphones.

And, just like that, he joins the rebellion.