Remembering Tiananmen

Thirty years ago this spring I got engaged to be married. I met my future husband while teaching. We bonded over our mutual love of literature. Together we picked out an engagement ring for me, a Burmese ruby studded with diamonds. We spent a lot of time visiting the registry office and getting our paperwork in order. We planned a small wedding, with close friends and colleagues. Both of our families were far away. We were caught up in the swell of the time, the late 1980’s. On our first date I wore leggings, slouchy, soft leather boots from Roots, and his sweater, hand-knit by a favorite aunt.

But we were living in Beijing and the student uprising of the spring of 1989 unfolded in a burst of adolescent excitement in our midst. Within biking distance of our university in western Beijing were many of the country’s top schools – Peking University, People’s University, and Qinghua. When the marches to Tiananmen began, every day the parade of people swelled in size as they headed south to the center of the city, to the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the political heart of red China.

Peter and I joined the students and learned the local protocol for demonstrations. Five or six across, women in the center of each row, protected by male students on the outside, their outstretched, linked arms forming a human chain. I learned to sing the Internationale and to chant Long Live the Students in Chinese.

It wasn’t my revolution. Once I heard an old woman sobbing, saying it would never turn out well. She had seen it all before. I thought she was exaggerating. What could possibly go wrong?

On May 24 I received a letter from the Canadian Embassy, written “in confidence” and couched in reduced Canadian emotion: “The ambassador is watching the situation in Beijing carefully. He sees no immediate cause for anxiety but considers that it would be prudent to take certain precautions. He stresses that, above all, everyone should remain calm…and avoid crowds.”

There were an estimated million people gathering in Tiananmen daily by that point – including construction and factory workers and groups of handicapped on motorcycles. Every artery of the city was clogged with demonstrators. If there had been a rainbow flag back then, it would have been flying.

By early June the patina had worn off and the climate grown frosty. Tiananmen stank like a sewer. The makeshift tents the students had built were collapsing, trash was strewn everywhere. The students were in a permanent state of hunger and fatigue. Our friends from Germany, ur-foodies, who had their champagne and wine shipped from Berlin to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian, cooked in huge batches for their own students and delivered meals on wheels to the student squat. Gorbachev landed but instead of a hero’s welcome, his motorcade was diverted to avoid passing under the portrait of Mao on Chang’An. Directly opposite the Chairman the students had erected the Statue of Liberty.

On June 2 I learned my teaching contract would not be renewed.

On June 3 a warning sign was posted at our university, exhorting us to stay indoors all night. Our friends had a car; four of us took off towards the center of the city. There was an eerie emptiness until we pushed through to the center, where we saw armed personnel carriers hurtling toward Tiananmen. We turned back – it was too dangerous. Anyone brave enough to be out that night told us to “Tell the world!” what their government was doing to their people.

Some days after June 4, a Steve McQueen lookalike in aviator shades showed up at the campus of our university. “Any Americans here?” he asked. No, they had all left.

We spent that summer in Germany and France and returned to Beijing in September 1989, where we finally got married.