Another June 4th, another year of ignorance and forgetting. I don't know how many people still remember that bloody night of massacre, but I just want to use my own story to recall this dark page in my country's history. For the good conscious and compassion we have lost for a long time. This is not an open page on my blog and I will only repost it on the anniversary day every year, because I don't want to use my experience to evoke hatress. It shall be narrated for the goodness and peace. Let us pray, and learn our lessons from the past, and hope, for our future.
--TZ
In Memory of Tiananmen Square Massacre
It was the best of times, It was the worst of times, It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of discredulity. it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness. it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to the heaven, we were all going direct to the other way.
And yes, this was the year of 1989 in China, when all the passion, sadness, patriotism, anger, disillusion and chaos were tangled together, burned, soaked in blood, buried, then the remains of our memory had been flushed away by the torrent of time. It seems that there is nothing left, after all we are only dust of history. However, as some insignificant people witnessed that big event, still remembering the fire in the dark night, listening to the cry from the remote unknown places, sometimes we wake up from our nightmares, haunted by the bitterness hiding at the bottom of our heart, then it might be necessary to call up our conscience and sensitivity, to speak out, to tell the story happened so many years ago.
In 1989 I was only a high school student. It was April 15, when the former Communist Party Head Secretary Hu Yaobang died of heart attack, thousands of university students swarmed to the Tienanmen Square to mourn the democratic reformer. Finally, the dissatisfy to the government burst out and became a protest, then developed to a massive fast of the students.
In that days the university students were treasures of this country. They were the small group of lucky people chosen from a dozen competitors, passed countless tests and exams, then had the access to the university, where they not only learned knowledge, but also opened their eyes to the whole world, learned how to think, and started to think about the future of their country. In one word, they were special. They were called the elite of China. Suddenly this group of students became the center of the world. They were yelling to the whole country, to against corruption and dictating, and to fight for a better future of our country.
I was not in the university at that time, but I was one of the earliest high school students who went to the Tienanmen Square. I was glad to think that I was, or at least was trying to be one of the elite democratic warriors. It was the late April, when the Square was occupied by the students in fast, I went there in the morning, with camera on my shoulder. The students were all enclosed by temporary fences in an area as big as a soccer playground as the campus, at the entrance there was a student working as the guard. He stopped me, and I noticed he was slim and tall, wearing neat Chinese Zhong-shan suit with a Beijing University Badge on his chest. He asked me politely whether I was a university student and I said no, but I was a high school student. He seemed excited and amazed, asked me if the high school students were standing up to join them. I told him: "not yet, but if you let me in and take pictures I will show them to my classmates, then the high school students will join you university pioneers." He smiled and asked for my student card, I showed my card to him. Without another word he opened the entrance and moved aside. The protesters' campus was full of tents, mattresses and services booths, divided by narrow path. Students from different universities and colleges stayed in their own designated areas, either lying down or sitting. It was early in the morning, most of them were still sleeping, with very thin quilts on the top, in the chilly breeze of mid spring, some of them looked very weak. I knew that many of them were on a fast protest and hadn't eaten anything for days. I had three rolls of films with me and took as many pictures as I could. When I left the square, I heard the radio overhead speaking to the crowd: "I have a good news for everyone: the high school students are going to join us! ... ..."
Two days later the high school students really joined the protest, of course not because of my pictures. My pictures only had a impact on my own classmates but not on the whole city. However, not only the students, teachers, business men, workers, even the policemen and government officials joined the big protest. People were yelling for their belief, crying for the fainting hungry students, cheering to strangers for the comradeship they had in the protest. It was the biggest chaos ever happened since the culture revolution. It was also a safest time in many years. Citizens were self-disciplined, there was no robbery, no theft, even little argument on the street, because our people were obsessed by our political idealism.
The government sent troop in the city on May 23rd, but it was blocked by the angry citizens. Hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles stayed outside the city, unable to move an inch forward. On May 29th there were rumors that the government would air drop nine divisions into the city, over a million citizens stayed out their home, anxiously guarded on their streets, looking upward into the dark sky. I was one of them.
That was a false alarm. The troop didn't take any action until June 4th. It was an unforgettable night. I was lucky not on the Square, when hundreds of tanks, thousands of soldiers surrounded the unarmed students, fired and crashed their bodies under their iron caterpillars, but I did see it, because my home was on the top of a high rise building on the main Chang-an Street, where the troops marched into the city. The citizens used dozens of public buses in the middle of the road, trying to stop the tanks, but the tanks just run into the buses, the iron monsters crushed the buses and forwarded, left a sea of fire on the street. Two of the military vehicles were disabled by the fire, one was a tank and another one was a truck. The truck was loaded with military medications. Thousands of ampules exploded under the high temperature, those cracks resembling the sound of gun shot. It mixed with the real gun shot from far away, the shot continued for the whole night. From the shot of machine guns I knew the troops were slaughtering on the Square, leaving thousands of dead students; soldiers were running in every minor streets in the city, searching protesters, chasing them, and sending their directly to the hell. A few protesters were still fighting back with bricks, stones, rods and gasoline bottles. Some soldiers were killed, they would later be denominated as republic heroes and commemorated forever, while the thousands of slaughtered students and citizens mourned by their families, unnamed, and then forgotten as the time passed by, only leaving hatreds to the survivors. The buses and military vehicles were burning downstairs, there was also some burning from remote places, shining upon upwards, casting a blood red in the dark sky. What did we see from the blood color?
The government imposed a martial law to the city after June 4th, and classes resumed on June 7th in the schools. I was back to my classmates. The first class happened to be political class. Usually we studied Marxianism, and I was the student representative of the class. Before the class my teacher found me and asked me what we should do, I said I will listen to you. Then she showed me a cassatte copy of the Sound of America. At that time this was strictly banned. We managed to find a recorder from the teacher's office, placed it in the front of the classroom, and I became the temporary D-J of the class. I told the class that at the beginning we should mourn for the dead for three minutes, then all the students and teacher stood up, the class was in a dead silence. Three minutes later I inserted the cassette into the recorder and played. The Sound of America told us many truth about the night in June 4th, that many innocent people were killed, but not like the government said, they were escorted home; that their bodies were burned and buried in some secret place, that the new Head Secretary of the Communist Party were also under house arrest, because he insisted to used peaceful method the resolve the crisis. Many girls crouched on their table and burst into tears, the boys were clenching their teeth and fists. After the class some of the students rushed to the playground, yanked the national flag down and made a speech in the playground. The students were stimulated to excitement. One of the girls went home and told this story to her father at dinner, her father happened to be the chief officer of Beijing Police Station, he reported to the government immediately. If this happened before the military control it was only a common event, but under the military law it was a typical anti-revolutionary activity, and this was the class later come to be known as the famous or infamous "National Flag Event" in Beijing.
Three days later the Chinese National Security Bureau sent two agents to the school, and the teacher, the student who yanked the national flag and I were all under interrogation. I won't have any comment for these interrogated days, the only memory I want to recall is that we were fighting, trying to protect the teacher, who took all the responsibility to the event. The agents were annoyed by our in-cooperation and finally slammed the table in front of me, and I slammed back to him.
Many years passed, and this bitter memory has become a mock in my mind. Only the passion and patriotism are still trying to reverberate me from inside. People had different endings after 1989: My teacher, who used to be the chief politics teacher and team leader in my school, was sent to teach geography instead, which she knows nothing. The student who dragged the flag down was about to go to the US for university study, this event postponed him for several years, but finally he got the life he wanted. I was sentenced the title of "anti-revolutionary student leader" to my profile, in China in 1989 this meant you would have it with you probably for your whole life, when every business, every school was controlled by the government, this political scar will trouble you for the whole life. Fortunately, thanks to my dear school and head master, my name was cleared with an innocent record on my profile. Actually I doubt our teacher was also protected by our school, she should feel lucky that she could still work as a teacher.
In 1992 there was a big celebration in my school for her 66 anniversary. I went there. From far away I saw my teacher waving at me. Smiling at each other, I heard she had already went back to her political teacher's position, reinstated as the team leader and chief teacher, back to the classroom, to teach the students what real democracy was. The world was changing, the Prime Minister who ordered the troop to fire now has stepped down, people are talking about freedom everywhere, but the corruption and dictating haven't got better. The massacre has become a faint memory in some people's mind. We are forgetting, but also learning. Someone told me that the Chinese people need democracy and freedom, we have to fight, I said yes. Someone told me that our country need development, we can't sacrifice our economy and send our country to chaos again, I also said yes. Maybe we have been fighting so many years and don't really realize what is most important to us, maybe after so many years we suddenly figure out that we have gone back a circle to the same spot many years ago, maybe things are changing silently without our notice, maybe we are also changing and get more and more tolerating and numb, or maybe, for the history, there shouldn't be so many chances for us to say "maybe".
TZ
April, 2008
