Book Club: Forbidden City

Forbidden City by William Bell

“Lau Xu spun around, his arms flung skyward.  Before he fell the AK 47 spit flame again and the burst blew Lao Xu off his feet.  His body slammed to the pavement, one leg caught under him, arms flung wide, his head twisted at an impossible angle.  His blood began to run onto the road, a dark stream in the red life.  Frozen, I stared at his still form.  The thunder roared again.  Someone beside me fell to the sidewalk.  Someone fell against me, knocking me heavily to the ground on my back.  Someone fell across my body, her head on my chest, facing me.  There was a dark flower in the middle of her forehead.  The flower slowly grew larger, the dark liquid trickled from it, flowing into her staring eye and across her cheek and onto my chest.  I shrieked and struggled, pushing her slack body away as other bodies fell around me.” Forbidden City by William Bell

the history:

Forbidden City is a piece of historical fiction based on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.  The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, culminating in a violent conflict referred to in the West as the Tiananmen Square massacre and in China as the June Fourth Incident, were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People’s Republic of China beginning on April 14 1989.  Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world.

The protests were sparked by the death of a pro-market, pro-democracy, and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to mourn.  By the eve of Hu’s funeral, 1,000,000 people had gathered on the Tiananmen Square.  The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyism as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government’s authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change and democratic reform within the structure of the government.  The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which remained peaceful throughout the protests.

The movement lasted seven weeks, from Hu’s death on April 15 1989 until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on June 4 1989.  On May 20 1989 the government declared martial law.  However, the demonstrations continued. After deliberation among the Communist leaders, a hard-line approach was chosen and the government ordered troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square.  In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the Chinese government left many civilians dead or severely injured.  The number of deaths is not known and many different estimates exist.  According to the Chinese government, 241 dead and 7, 000 wounded; unofficially, as high as a couple thousand.  A strict focus on the number of deaths within Tiananmen Square itself does not give an accurate picture of the carnage and overall death count, since Chinese civilians were fired on in the streets surrounding Tiananmen Square.  In addition, students are reported to have been fired on after they left the Square, especially in the area near the Beijing concert hall.

Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the Chinese press.

review:

Forbidden City is a tale of a 14 year old boy Alex Jackson, who accompanied with his news cameraman father visits China in 1989.  Alex is a diligent student of military history, particularly Chinese history and he is fascinated by what he sees around him.  All is going well, until university students decide to protest against government corruption.  The Chinese government is not happy with what they are seeing, therefore in a crude act of dishonour towards their country, they send out thousands of troops to execute the demonstrators, however, this also results in the death of thousands of other innocent people not involved in any way.  Alex’s father who has the executions on tape tries to send them to Canada; however, the attempt is not one which is successful.  Eventually Alex is separated from his father and is caught between a civil war.

Written by Toronto-born, William Bell, Forbidden City is a coming-of-age story that focuses on personal and societal freedom and the struggle for human rights in Communist China.  Through our protagonist’s experiences, he learns that in war, injustice often wins over good intentions. Consequently, he comes to understand the depth of the courage and conviction of the students demonstrating for more freedom.  Despite it being a teen novel, this fictionalized account of the tragedy of Tiananmen Square is as engrossing as it is appalling.  This is a blood-and-thunder story, and William Bell tells it with gusto.  Incidents are piled on one another and the city’s background descriptions are very convincing.  Bell’s descriptions of the action in and around the Square are vivid and heartbreaking.  There are moments when the searing force of this fragment of recent history shines through that made you felt like you were really there.  The story was marvelously realized.  Perhaps it was from the immediacy of using first-person narration or the vivid description of the unfolding events.  Whatever the case, there was a certain ring of truth about some elements of the story that resonates long after putting this novel down.  This is an excellent tale, well recounted, and tells the story of the protesters that were forever silenced by their own government.

The novel is currently banned in mainland China because of its mention of the Tiananmen Square protests.

http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780770428136

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