Tears for the Children of Tian An Men : LEGACIES A Chinese Mosaic <i> by Bette Bao Lord (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 245 pp) </i>

China captured the attention of the world last spring when foreign journalists and camera crews assigned to cover the historic meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping witnessed an even more historic confrontation between the Chinese people and their aged leaders. For weeks, Western viewers watched anxiously, riveted by the televised spectacle of youthful hunger strikers lying prostrate in Tian An Men Square, of army troops immobilized by outraged citizens, and finally of a lone man in a white shirt attempting to halt an advancing tank.

Among the shocked viewers of the Democracy Movement’s final brutal suppression was novelist Bette Bao Lord, who had left Beijing just four days earlier. Mrs. Lord had been awaiting the chance, after three-and-a-half years engaged in the diplomatic duties of the American ambassador’s wife, to begin writing. She wanted to “piece together the puzzle” and make sense of the searing experiences recounted by an array of friends and informants. She also wanted to unravel the contradictions apparent in her own “China Passage.”

Clearly, her attempt to penetrate the experience of contemporary China also was the quest for her own roots, the tracing of a road not taken. After an absence of 27 years, she found to her astonishment “a kinship that binds inalterably.” Thus began an intensely personal search for the life she might have led had she not left Shanghai with her parents in 1946 at age 8, to attend primary school in Brooklyn and later marrying her tall, blue-eyed classmate at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. Throughout her stay in China, even on the final drive to the airport, she would peer into crowds, “searching for a woman around 50 years of age, not tall, not short, not stout, not slender: me.”

Suddenly, after June 4, the compiling of this already engrossing collective biography acquired a new focus and a new urgency. Perceptions shifted dramatically after the Communist Party, in the most brutal public gesture of its 40-year rule, ordered the People’s Army--once the agent of the nation’s deliverance--to open fire upon a stunned and outraged populace.

The Deng Xiaoping government had repeatedly encouraged the belief that “leftist mistakes” would not again be tolerated in the reformist era that followed the Cultural Revolution. But when the leaders’ personal power was threatened, the excessive violence all too familiar from the Maoist years resumed with a vengeance. For Bao Lord as for all Chinese intellectuals, earlier instances of cruelty and repression assumed a startling retrospective continuity.

Alone among the proliferating accounts of the Democracy Movement, this moving narrative locates China’s most recent tragedy in the context of individual experience. Fresh from two months as a special consultant to CBS News, Bao Lord takes us on a compelling journey into China’s personal past to discover the wellspring of the Beijing spring. “Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic” weaves an intricate tapestry, drawing together painful memories of earlier disillusionment with the renewed sense of betrayal and hopelessness in the present. Evocatively written, laced with wit and bitter humor, terrifying in their candor, her stories of broken lives reveal the human consequences of China’s once glorious effort to usher in a bright socialist future.

The style of “Legacies” is novel and daring. Headnotes to each chapter chronicle the major events of 1989, forcing the collision of past and present. The juxtapositions are unsettling, as are the antiphonal voices. A description of the events of April 27, for example, when huge demonstrations surged past police lines in central Beijing to proclaim the patriotic intent of the student movement, is followed by the testimony of “The Joker.”

“With repetition,” remarks this self-styled expert on farces, “even the most tragic of circumstances can be reduced to absurdity.” Stronger and more talented than his high school classmates, he tried repeatedly to clamber up the ladder but met only humiliation and harassment, beginning with his revolutionary decision in 1967 to flee to North Korea, just when others were escaping to Hong Kong and Burma. “At age 19, I had taken in everything that I had been taught. Kim Il Sung was truly a beloved father. His was my promised land.” Nine years in jail followed, but still he remained optimistic. It took 20 years as a free man for him to appreciate the comparative peace and safety of a prison.

Another chapter opens with Zhao Ziyang’s pre-dawn visit to hospitalized hunger strikers on May 18, before turning to the experiences of “The White Dog.” This senior physician, trained in an American missionary school, had welcomed the Red Army, hadf worked selflessly for the promised new society, and had been voted a model doctor until the Cultural Revolution, when he was imprisoned as a spy.

From the sidelines he “witnessed the political turmoil that engulfed the hospital . . . (a) hypnotic fervor so primitive, so extreme, that it seemed to me as if China had reverted to a time when the nation was not yet civilized.” The saga of his beatings and temporary madness, of his mother’s death after the depredations of the Red Guards and his father’s suicide, affords a devastating glimpse of the treatment of China’s medical profession during the years when politics took command.

The legacy of the Cultural Revolution runs like a threnody throughout these vignettes. Almost zealously, Bao Lord presents the experience of victims as well as perpetrators in an effort to fathom the ordeal of the cataclysmic decade from 1966 to 1976. Clearly many within China shared her concern and entrusted their lives to her pen. On their behalf, she could achieve, they believed, the crucial task of remembrance that would help to prevent the mindless political struggles of the past from returning. Even in early 1989, no one could foresee the next convulsion.

Bao Lord’s Chinese mosaic, however, contains not just despair but the seeds of hope. It describes not just loss but also meaning deeply felt, not just failure but a stirring record of dedication, endurance and even happiness.

It is on such a note that “Legacies” closes. A few months before leaving, Bao Lord had received a visitor who brought a gift wrapped with string and newsprint. His offering, he apologized, was worthless, yet also priceless. Inside she found the threadbare blanket cover, carefully laundered and mended, that had warmed the young man for 10 years in prison. “I want you to have this coverlet,” he explained, “to remind you that no matter what the future may hold for me, even then I knew happiness.”

One leaves this remarkable narrative wondering what the future will hold for all those whose hopes were once again shattered on June 4.

The visitor who brought the coverlet to Bette Bao Lord later managed to smuggle a cassette to her in the United States. Its closing words were:

“I can’t seem to think things through. Here I am thirty-nine years old and I can’t think things through. Even before last spring my work had never gone smoothly, but now that the arts have been placed under the Ministry of Propaganda again, the prospect is bleak.

“Why is it always the arts that suffer? After forty years of Communism, why has China, whose culture is replete with great men of letters, not produced a first-class writer? How stupid of me to want to work in this field. Contradictions, more contradictions.

“The same goes for reforms. To implement them, one must have power. But China governed loosely is chaotic and China governed without democracy cannot progress.

“I can’t think it through. All my life, it seems, I haven’t thought it through. I guess this is my fate. Besides ranting at the gods, what can one do?

“I hope to receive your calls more often, but as the time of our separation lengthens and our lives change in opposite ways, can we still talk as easily and as profoundly as once we did?

“I wish you good books. I wish your parents excellent health. I wish your husband happiness in his work. What else can I wish?

“You are of another world.”