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Health & Fitness

Remembering June 4th, 1989

These are my personal memories from June 4th, 1989. I had been teaching in mainland China and was in Hong Kong when I heard the news of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

This is part of the June 4th, 1989, journal entry in my book, "Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird."

One month ago, I was walking alongside the May 4th Youth Day parade of college students of Hangzhou, China.  On June 4th, I again walked in a demonstration with Chinese people.  But these were Hong Kong Chinese, and we were all in mourning for the many students killed in the Beijing nighttime massacre the night before.

As I walked alongside, a marcher called to me, "Join us," and held out his hand.  I immediately thought of that other young man in Hangzhou who had said those same words to me on May 4th.

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I joined the black-clad Hong Kong mourners.  Young and old, children, and even babies were there.  We sweated together in the heat of the June sun.  We passed the shops and skyscrapers that line Hong Kong with armbands, headbands, holding banners, chanting, or simply walking.  On the roads not closed to traffic, cars and taxis honked continually and flew black flags from their antennas.  People on the sidelines clapped, or made "v" signs with their fingers, or joined the marchers.  One tiny, wizened Chinese woman waved a black flag angrily with tears in her eyes.

Most everything was in Chinese, but then I heard the familiar song in English, "We Shall Overcome."  That brought me back to other demonstrations and movements I had witnessed -- the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s.

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I had left China a few days earlier.  I had been missing my China life, and my diligent, sincere students.  They had been excited about the demonstrations, about some action at last in their rather monotonous and hopeless existence.  There had been speculation that the movement for freedom and democracy was growing, dying, or going underground.  Even the peasants in the remote countryside had heard about the hunger strikes and sit-ins in Beijing and other cities.

As I stood on a Hong Kong street watching the news on a small television set placed by a local vendor above his shop, I watched the faces around me register stunned disbelief as they saw film clips of the tanks rolling down Beijing streets.  With horrified fascination and disgust, they listened to gunshots and saw wounded, dying, and dead people.

These Hong Kong Chinese are indeed a strange counterpart to their mainland brothers and sisters.  They will unite politically in 1997.  In contrast to my students, these well-fed, very westernized Chinese marched in Reebok sneakers and designer jeans with Gucci belts.  They munched McDonald's hamburgers, and many carried radio-tape recorders plugged into their ears.  The Hong Kong police looked authoritative in snappy uniforms adorned with a gun, nightstick, and walkie-talkie.  I thought of the contrast they made to the nervous, baggy-uniformed drab Chinese police who look like little boys dressed up in their father's clothes.

The Hong Kong Chinese care about the mainland Chinese, and genuinely want to help them, but the gap is so very wide from so many aspects.  I thought how hard it would be for my students from the countryside -- thin, poorly-fed and poorly-clothed -- to imagine decorating a car with banners and driving down the street honking and waving as a show of solidarity with Chinese students in China in their struggle for freedom and democracy.

I cried for the students I knew in Hangzhou, and for those I hadn't known in Beijing.

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