How it looked to the cops was hard for the Americans to imagine, but the widow Yu walked toward them with this American black man in attendance and the white one with the camera close behind.
She started talking to the senior cop, with Wise’s microphone between the two of them, speaking calmly and politely, asking permission to enter her home.
The police sergeant shook his head in the universal No, you cannot gesture that needed no translation.
“Wait a minute. Mrs. Yu, could you please translate for me?” She nodded. “Sergeant, you know who I am and you know what I do, correct?” This generated a curt and none too friendly nod. “What is the reason for not allowing this lady to enter her own home?”
” ‘I have my orders,’ ” Chun translated the reply.
“I see,” Wise responded. “Do you know that this will look bad for your country? People around the world will see this and feel it is improper.” Yu Chun duly translated this for the sergeant.
” ‘I have my orders,’ ” he said again, through her, and it was plain that further discussion with a statue would have been equally productive.
“Perhaps if you called your superior,” Wise suggested, and to his surprise the Chinese cop leaped on it, lifting his portable radio and calling his station.
” ‘My lieutenant come,’ ” Yu Chun translated. The sergeant was clearly relieved, now able to dump the situation on someone else, who answered directly to the captain at the station.
“Good, let’s go back to the truck and wait for him,” Wise suggested. Once there, Mrs. Yu lit up an unfiltered Chinese cigarette and tried to retain her composure. Nichols let the camera down, and everyone relaxed for a few minutes.
“How long were you married, ma’am?” Wise asked, with the camera shut off.
“Twenty-four years,” she answered.
“Children?”
“One son. He is away at school in America, University of Oklahoma. He study engineering,” Chun told the American crew.
“Pete,” Wise said quietly, “get the dish up and operating.”
“Right.” The cameraman ducked his head to go inside the van. There he switched on the uplink systems. Atop the van, the mini-dish turned fifty degrees in the horizontal and sixty degrees in the vertical, and saw the communications satellite they usually used in Beijing. When he had the signal on his indicator, he selected Channel Six again and used it to inform Atlanta that he was initiating a live feed from Beijing. With that, a home-office producer started monitoring the feed, and saw nothing. He might have succumbed to immediate boredom, but he knew Barry Wise was usually good for something, and didn’t go live unless there was a good reason for it. So, he leaned back in his comfortable swivel chair and sipped at his coffee, then notified the duty director in Master Control that there was a live signal inbound from Beijing, type and scope of story unknown. But the director, too, knew that Wise and his crew had sent in a possible Emmy-class story just two days earlier, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, none of the majors was doing anything at all in Beijing at the moment—CNN tracked the communications-satellite traffic as assiduously as the National Security Agency, to see what the competition was doing.
More people started showing up at the Wen house/church. Some were startled to see the CNN truck, but when they saw Yu Chun there, they relaxed somewhat, trusting her to know what was happening. Showing up in ones and twos for the most part, there were soon thirty or so people, most of them holding what had to be Bibles, Wise thought, getting Nichols up and operating again, but this time with a live signal going up and down to Atlanta.
“This is Barry Wise in Beijing. We are outside the home of the Reverend Yu Fa An, the Baptist minister who died just two days ago along with Renato Cardinal DiMilo, the Papal Nuncio, or Vatican Ambassador to the People’s Republic. With me now is his widow, Yu Chun. She and the reverend were married for twenty-four years, and they have a son now studying at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. As you can imagine, this is not a pleasant time for Mrs. Yu, but it is all the more unpleasant since the local police will not allow her to enter her own home. The house also served as the church for their small congregation, and as you can see, the congregation has come together to pray for their departed spiritual leader, the Reverend Yu Fa An.
“But it does not appear that the local government is going to allow them to do so in their accustomed place of worship. I’ve spoken personally with the senior police official here. He has orders, he says, not to admit anyone into the house, not even Mrs. Yu, and it appears that he intends to follow those orders.” Wise walked to where the widow was.
“Mrs. Yu, will you be taking your husband’s body back to Taiwan for burial?” It wasn’t often that Wise allowed his face to show emotion, but the answer to this question grabbed him in a tender place.
“There will be no body. My husband—they take his body and burn it, and scatter the ashes in river,” Chun told the reporter, and saying it cracked both her composure and her voice.
“What?” Wise blurted. He hadn’t expected that any more than she had, and it showed on his face. “They cremated his body without your permission?”
“Yes,” Chun gasped.
“And they’re not even giving you the ashes to take home with you?”
“No, they scatter ashes in river, they tell me.”
“Well” was all Wise could manage. He wanted to say something stronger, but as a reporter he was supposed to maintain some degree of objectivity, and so he couldn’t say what he might have preferred to say. Those barbarian cocksuckers. Even the differences in culture didn’t explain this one away.
It was then that the police lieutenant arrived on his bicycle. He walked at once to the sergeant, spoke to him briefly, then walked to where Yu Chun was.
“What is this?” he asked in Mandarin. He recoiled when the TV camera and microphone entered the conversation. What is THIS? his face demanded of the Americans.
“I wish to enter my house, but he won’t let me,” Yu Chun answered, pointing at the sergeant. “Why can’t I go in my house?”
“Excuse me,” Wise put in. “I am Barry Wise. I work for CNN. Do you speak English, sir?” he asked the cop.
“Yes, I do.”
“And you are?”
“I am Lieutenant Rong.”
He could hardly have picked a better name for the moment, Wise thought, not knowing that the literal meaning of this particular surname actually was weapon.
“Lieutenant Rong, I am Barry Wise of CNN. Do you know the reason for your orders?”
“This house is a place of political activity which is ordered closed by the city government.”
“Political activity? But it’s a private residence—a house, is it not?”
“It is a place of political activity,” Rong persisted. “Unauthorized political activity,” he added.
“I see. Thank you, Lieutenant.” Wise backed off and started talking directly to the camera while Mrs. Yu went to her fellow church members. The camera traced her to one particular member, a heavyset person whose face proclaimed resolve of some sort. This one turned to the other parishioners and said something loud. Immediately, they all opened their Bibles. The overweight one flipped his open as well and started reading a passage. He did so loudly, and the other members of the congregation looked intently into their testaments, allowing the first man to take the lead.
Wise counted thirty-four people, about evenly divided between men and women. All had their heads down into their own Bibles, or those next to them. That’s when he turned to see Lieutenant Rong’s face. It twisted into a sort of curiosity at first, then came comprehension and outrage. Clearly, the “political” activity for which the home had been declared off-limits was religious worship, and that the local government called it “political” activity was a further affront to Barry Wise’s sense of right and wrong. He reflected briefly that the news media had largely forgotten what communism really had been, but now it lay right here in front of him. The face of oppression had never been a pretty one. It would soon get uglier.
Wen Zhong, the restaurateur, was leading the ad-hoc service, going through the Bible but doing so in Mandarin, a language which the CNN crew barely comprehended. The thirty or so others flipped the pages in their Bibles when he did, following his scriptural readings very carefully, in the way of Baptist, and Wise started wondering if this corpulent chap might be taking over the congregation right before his eyes. If so, the guy seemed sincere enough, and that above all was the quality a clergyman needed. Yu Chun headed over to him, and he reached out to put his arm around her shoulder in a gesture that didn’t seem Chinese at all. That was when she lost it and started weeping, which hardly seemed shameful. Here was a woman married over twenty years who’d lost her husband in a particularly cruel way, then doubly insulted by a government which had gone so far as to destroy his body, thus denying her even the chance to look upon her beloved’s face one last time, or the chance to have a small plot of ground to visit.