Tiananmen Square remembered 20 years later

I remember the crackdown at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, like it was yesterday, though it’s now been 20 years since the Chinese government crushed the student pro-democracy movement.

At 16 then, I was only a few years younger than most of the students on the square. While they were protesting, I was busy cramming for exams at a cloistered Catholic high school in colonial Hong Kong,

I remember feeling torn between tugging at the bond that bound us all and fleeing from their fate. I must now study even harder, I told myself, and that would be my ticket to the West. I would not take part in marches.

A few years later, I did flee by forging a new life in Chicago as a college student and then a newspaper reporter.

Still, I would mark every June 4 in my private thoughts. And I am by no means alone.

The collective memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown has not faded with time. Tried as they have, Communist China's leaders have so far failed completely to erase from the public consciousness the bloody squashing of the student-led pro-democracy movement.

That's because there is no getting away from history – be it for a government or an individual.

One might be tempted to think that China did get away with mass murder. The brutal repression has yet to be recorded in any Chinese-language history textbook, not even in Hong Kong, the only place on Chinese soil where freedom of speech is protected. Most young people in mainland China would draw a blank on this still forbidden topic.

But enough people in China still know about it, and the government remains infamous internationally for having fired on the protesters on June 4, 1989.

For my part, a year and a half ago, I decided to go cover China as a foreign correspondent for American outlets.

Before then, I’d never considered venturing into the land where my grandfather was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and perished a few months before I was born.

And as I settled into a gleaming glass-facade modern residential tower on Chang’an Street in downtown Beijing, I tried to picture where the tanks once rolled. The square has since been fenced off. My bag was searched when once I got lost and closed in on the periphery.

As a Chinese American, all I want is to use my bilingual and bicultural background to get at some truth in a country so rife with paradoxes and denials, endeavors and ambitions. That is my responsibility as a journalist. And I hold those in power in China responsible for delivering the political truth about the 1989 crackdown.

I hope I'll live to see the day when the student protesters get vindicated. That day will come, sooner or later, because there simply is no way to hide from history.

Violet Law is a freelance journalist. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.