Woman With a Country : Dissent: Exiled student leader Chai Ling risks death if she follows her heart back to China. Now, she wants to carry the message of Tian An Men Square to the world.

The International House of Pancakes in Alhambra was crowded with breakfasters at mid-morning on a weekday. So hardly anyone looked up from their silver-dollar pancakes when the small, slim woman trailing a translator, a reporter and a photographer walked in.

But in one corner of the restaurant, a look of shock and then joy registered on the faces of a middle-aged Asian couple. They rushed over to the woman, shyly shook her hand and asked for her autograph in the same awed way that most people would greet a famous politician or film star.

While Chai Ling may not be a recognizable name or face to most Americans, she is a heroine to many for her role as the primary leader and pasionaria of the Chinese Students’ Democracy Movement--the student-led protest that riveted the world and riled the Chinese government one year ago this month, ending in the massacre of hundreds of demonstrators by army troops and riot police.

It’s been a long and painful journey for the 24-year-old Ling from Tian An Men Square in Beijing to this coffee shop off the San Bernardino Freeway, a journey filled with fear and blood, outrage and exile.

A one-time model young Communist, she has been No. 4 on the Chinese government’s “21 most-wanted” list of criminals ever since she gave an impassioned speech in the square last May that helped mobilize the support of the Chinese public for the student demonstrators, who elected her as their commander. After the government crackdown, she spent 10 months in hiding--facing execution at any moment--until she and her student leader husband, Feng Congde, who is also on China’s most-wanted list, arrived safely in the West in April.

Now living in France where the couple has received political asylum, Ling is winding up a five-city trip to the United States, her first. She has spoken with Vice President Dan Quayle, conferred with Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national security adviser, addressed a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and added to tension in Sino-American relations by urging that the Bush Administration link the granting of trade concessions to improvements in China’s human-rights record.

On Thursday while Ling’s plane was delayed, Asian students at Cal Tech patiently waited two hours past the scheduled start of her speech, which she delivered in Chinese. Friday night, she was guest of honor at a reception at the home of actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Robert Downey Jr.

Watching her wolf down a plate of French fries smothered in ketchup, her favorite American food, anyone would have a hard time believing Ling has seen and done so much.

But when she talks about the democracy movement, her strong will makes her appear ageless. For this woman without a country is also a woman with a mission: to make sure the world never forgets those who died for freedom and those in her homeland who struggle for it still.

“I think the Chinese people feel terrible about what your government is doing. And the American people, too,” says Ling, who reluctantly turns to her translator for help when her English fails her.

“I’d like to tell you a small story. Recently, I went to upstate New York and stayed in a small hotel. I was drinking in the bar when an American came over and asked if I was Chai Ling. He said he had watched TV day and night and when he saw what happened in Tian An Men Square, he cried. And he said he now feels ashamed of the American government policy towards China.”

She pauses to consider the plate of fried eggs which the waitress has just placed in front of her. “I don’t think I can change the policy. Because it’s not me who has ties with China. I just want to tell the world what happened in China that night, and why it happened, and why it continues to happen now.”

The oldest of three children, Ling was born in 1966 in the northeastern province of Shandong. Both her parents were members of the Communist Party, and she naturally joined the Central Communist Youth League, which singled her out as a “model student” while in high school.

It wasn’t until she entered Peking Normal University, where she studied child psychology, that Ling became politicized. In early 1987, she joined the first massive demonstrations for democratic reforms in nearly 40 years. And though her status as a college student would have guaranteed her a position among China’s elite, she chose to risk it all by speaking out.

“I was afraid at first,” she admits. “Because I know that in China the minimum jail sentence for counterrevolutionaries is 17 years. But it wasn’t my turning point. It was the government’s turning point.

“My generation grew up since the Cultural Revolution. And because of economic reform and the open door policy, we saw many things. We saw the inequality of the Chinese system, we saw the corruption among Chinese officials, we saw the censoring of the Chinese people. We saw all this, and we felt a responsibility. For most young people wanted to do something for their country because this type of patriotic feeling is a tradition among Chinese intellectuals. But the corruption and inequality in the system was so widespread that students felt hopeless.”

Like many Chinese students, she says, “I knew I had two choices. One was to leave the country and do my graduate work at an American school, which was the secure route because I knew I’d have a safe personal future. The other choice was to stand up and fight and join the movement. And I knew that if I did that, my future would likely be imprisonment.”

In the end, she says she realized there was no choice. “Because I really love my homeland. But most people think only of their own future, and not their country’s.”

At first, she was merely one of many who joined the April sit-in at Tian An Man Square, which the students had organized to protest the government’s indifference and delays in responding to their demand for more freedom. And she was among the handful who began a hunger strike. But then, on May 12, she decided that “I must do what I believe, which is to stand up for the Chinese people, to say what is right and what I believe is right.”

So she delivered an impassioned speech that became the manifesto of the hunger strikers, and, later, the last will and testament of the Students’ Democracy Movement. Her words resounded with some of the same arguments that this country’s founding fathers uttered in urging rebellion against the British. It was as if Betsy Ross had joined the American Revolution not as its seamstress but as its spokeswoman. “This nation is our nation, these people are our people, this government is our government,” Ling told the crowd. “If we do not speak, who will? If we do not act, who will?”

So pivotal was her speech that tape cassettes of it were distributed nationwide, and hundreds, followed by thousands, of Chinese students and workers began participating in the Tian An Men Square protest.

Almost overnight, Ling was elected commander-in-chief of the Students’ Democracy Movement even though Chinese culture traditionally keeps women in positions secondary to men. But, Ling recalls, she felt almost no discrimination. “Only a feeling of love and equality, because for many people this was the first time in their whole life that they shared the same feeling about the future of our country. So that’s why it didn’t matter who was talking, a woman or a man. It was totally new.”

And it was as their leader that she stayed in Tian An Men Square during the night of June 3 when the army troops and riot police advanced on the demonstrators. It was she who told the last 5,000 students remaining a story about a clan of a billion ants who had to escape a terrible fire on a mountain by holding onto each other and rolling down, even though the ants on the outside would burn to death. Then, on the morning of June 4, she led the remaining students out of the square and back to the university before she went underground.

She describes her 10 months in hiding in China as “a very, very painful period when I agonized over what had happened and what I could have done differently to prevent it.” She still has nightmares of the bodies of children. She hid in the homes and offices of “many strangers and organizations who still helped me even though they knew the punishment was immediate execution,” she marvels. “That, more than anything, I think, shows the depth of feeling in China about our revolution.”

Finally, some “really heroic figures” in the French government helped her gain asylum in that country. Because she is an “enemy of the state,” she cannot get word to her family still in China with whom she has not spoken since the early days of the student protests. When her name appeared on a list of hunger strikers, her father tried to get a message to her, she says, but she was never able to answer him. Recently, when a French photographer taking her picture told her of the Western custom of Mother’s Day, she broke down and wept.

She is sobbing even now.

“I love my father and mother very deeply,” she explains, haltingly. “I feel sorry that at the moment I cannot fulfill my responsibility towards my parents. But as a Chinese, I feel I need to do what is right for the Chinese people.

“It is difficult to be here eating pancakes when my thoughts are back in China,” she says, glancing around at the breakfasters who, concentrating on their food, seem oblivious to her emotion.

“The demonstrations by the students are still going on. No matter how much pressure is put on them by the government, it will continue. Maybe even stronger.”