My mother wanted to stay in America. She would say later that when she got off the plane, she felt like even the air in America was free. My father thought we should go back to China. After all, the Chinese government had given him the scholarship to come to America to get his PhD, and he was supposed to go back and use his knowledge to help the motherland. This was the argument my parents were having, over and over again, in the spring of 1989. I was six years old and we were living in a tiny basement apartment in Athens, Ohio, where they were graduate students at Ohio University.
My father had left China when I was only 100 days old as part of the first wave of Chinese scholars to study in America after the end of the Cultural Revolution. He lived with a group of other Chinese students, and they saved money by never turning on the heat in the winter and driving an old car with a broken transmission that couldn’t go in reverse. After two years, he saved enough to bring my mother. She babysat, delivered pizzas, waitressed in a Chinese restaurant, and managed to get her own scholarship from the university. When I was three and a half years old, they sent for me.
I fell in love with America the first time my parents took me to a mall. I had never seen such an incredible, amazing amount of stuff before. We were still using food ration coupons in China. I wanted to stay here, forever. My mother also saw America as rife with opportunity. My father knew that this was a better life, but his sense of duty was strong. He might have won the argument.
But then on April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang, one of the only outspoken liberal reformers of the Communist Party, who had been forced to resign for his views, died of a heart attack in Beijing. 100,000 university students showed up for his funeral in Tiananmen Square. And they stayed. It was the beginning of the 1989 student democracy protests.
I would watch the news with my parents and see the hundreds of thousands of students and workers sitting in Tiananmen Square. I was too young then to understand why they were there. But now I think they were there for the same reason that my family came to America. Whatever they were calling for—greater political freedoms, less corruption, better economic conditions—what they were really asking for was the chance to have a better life.
The Communist Party declared martial law in Beijing on May 20. It was a tense time. My uncle was an art student in Beijing, and he was going to the square. My father was becoming increasingly upset at how the leadership was handling things. And then it was June 4, and we found out what had happened in Beijing the night before. The army finally moving in. Clearing out the square. Shooting people dead in the streets of Beijing.
My uncle in front of the Goddess of Democracy
My mother was frantic, until she found out that my uncle was safe. I found my father sitting in the living room, writing furiously on a Chinese medicine patch, the adhesive kind coated with Tiger Balm that my mother would stick to my arm when I “caught wind” in my joints. I asked him what he was writing. He read it to me. It said in Chinese, “Deng Xiaoping is a…” then a bunch of rude words about the paramount leader of China that I was too young to understand. Then he stuck the bandage on his forehead and brought me with him to the university. We joined a group of Chinese students and their families marching around the center of campus. I remember holding my father’s hand and walking behind a stroller tied with balloons. It was my first political protest.
We stayed in America because of the Tiananmen Square massacre. President Bush signed an executive order allowing Chinese students who were in the country during the democracy protests to stay. Congress passed a law allowing us to become permanent residents. That all made it easier. But I think we would have stayed now, regardless. I believe my father’s views on his obligations to the Chinese government had changed.
I sometimes think about what my life would have been like if we had returned to China. I was at the Liberty Bell a few months ago, and a group of Chinese tourists was watching a documentary on the history of the bell. The Liberty Bell, said the documentary, reminds Americans of the people around the world who are still struggling for their freedom. And there was footage from the Tiananmen Square protests. One of the girls turned to her friend and whispered, “Is that China?”
My parents are gone now, and there are so many things I don’t remember, so many questions I wish I had asked. I’m left with hazy memories that seem almost like a dream. I look at photos of the Tiananmen students, so young and skinny, hungry with hope, with those white bandages filled with slogans tied to their heads. And I think of my father, marching, with his bandage stuck to the middle of his forehead, holding my hand.
Tags: childhood, china, history, politics, protests, shelley zhang
Related Posts
“His Career Will Be Absolutely Fine”: On Telling People About Being Molested
The Silencing Of Cecily McMillan
The State of Abortion Access in New Brunswick
I’m Politically Incorrect, and I’m Proud Of It
How To Make Your Kid’s Childhood Magical 
“Like Wearing Pants to Church”: Mormon Feminists Testing the Waters
Obligatory OU Oh Yeah! as I was also a Bobcat and now back to reading the rest (and later probably thinking that this comment was not exactly appropriate…)
That was powerful and I’m glad you uncle was safe. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you! And I have many photos of me as a kid posing with random people from the infamous OU Halloween parade.
Oh I bet that’s pretty hilarious! I haven’t been back to visit in a few years and my heart always yearns for Athens, such a great town.
It’s so bizarre for me to contemplate, also, that Chinese people who weren’t alive or were too young to remember Tiananmen Square just don’t know about it. I don’t mean to sound ignorant, but I honestly wonder–don’t the parents of 20-somethings in China tell their kids about it? The way my Mom tells me about being at protests in the ’60s?
Not if they find the whole thing too traumatizing or not “worth” (the physical/political price of) sharing, even in secret. I heard a piece on NPR about it weeks ago, but there’s a recent one here.
You might talk about it to very close family or friends. But many people choose to forget as a way of coping. My parents lived through the Cultural Revolution, which was awful, and they almost never talked about it, especially the parts where people were killed and tortured. Plus the communist party makes you afraid to talk. When my mother went to China in 1993, Beijing family members said to her, in a very hushed way, that what happened on June 4 wasn’t what the government said it was (aka a counter-revolutionary riot put down peacefully by the military). They did not know that the rest of the world already knew the truth. You can’t imagine the scale of the “patriotic education” campaign that the party put in place to erase the memory of this event.
Exactly, I can’t imagine it, so it’s really illuminating to hear about this as it’s experienced by people who lived through it. Thanks for answering my question and especially for writing this fantastic essay.
Thanks for asking, and for reading.
This is really interesting, and thank you for the wonderful essay. I am not Chinese, but lived in China as an expat as a teenager. We were there during the 10th anniversary, and it was a very eye-opening experience. As I recall, we couldn’t get the international news channels that day. It was not something people talked about, and as a foreigner, you wouldn’t ask, lest it get people into trouble.
Thanks for sharing that. Sounds like you were in China during a very interesting time, as well.
‘Choosing to forget’ as a coping strategy has a storied history.
I’m excited about a movie, ‘The Last Reel’, that should be out this summer, on the theme. Plot: Cambodian teen discovers the partial reels of a movie her mother was the star of, before 1975…and remakes the closing reel, which had been destroy by the Khmer Rouge. Of course, her parents have never told her anything about ‘the Pol Pot time’, as it’s now called–they have lived for 4 decades in fear of being found out, but were they victims, collaborators or both? They chose to forget and so did everybody they know. It’s just too hard.
My roommate is Cambodian-Chinese and her family escaped Pol Pot. I will let her know about this movie.
When I was 15, 15 years ago, I went to an international peace education camp formed of delegations from around the world. There was a delegation from China, and they literally did not know anything about Tianamen Square, other than as a physical place. We did an activity that was like “this is the dirty stuff from our country’s past” (Germany had it rough, I tell you what). After China’s presentation, which was more like “yay the Communist Party” a few members of the audience tentatively brought up the cultural revolution and Tianamen Square, and there were very blank looks from the delegates.
It was my impression that heavy duty media control had something to do with lacuna. Without at least some freedom of the press, how do you learn about these things? You might not. They were certainly not taught in school. The kids in the delegation were almost certainly from families in favour with the party, so would also have not heard criticism of government at home, I imagine.
It was a pretty interesting moment for me.
Wow, thanks for sharing that story.
I am from Australia. Over the years I have asked as many Chinese students as I could as to how they could not know anything about the Tiananmen Square massacre. The hardest thing for me to swallow was that the Chinese Communist Regime had turned the whole thing into a big lie. It has got to be the biggest lie this century. One student had said they were told only one student had died from the incident so he couldn’t understand what the big deal was. Another had trembled with fear after he had spoken to me for fear I would report him to the Chinese Consulate and we were standing on free land. Another had said his parents wouldn’t allow him to ask any questions because the neighbors might hear and they would be reported to the authorities and taken away. Another one had said his parents had a VCR on the incident but the family were forbidden to even refer to it. I could go on and on. Hopefully this will give you some idea of what it is like to be living under the Chinese Communist Regime for the last 60 odd years in China.
And here in Australia, our history with Indigenous people is pretty horrendous as well–and something that was only very briefly addressed in the media and our schools until relatively recently. I finished high school in 1993 and the curriculum barely brushed over it. Obviously, it’s a very different issue to not being able to speak for fear of retribution from the government as in China, but even in a society where knowledge should be a whole lot easier to come by, it doesn’t mean people will discuss it.
this article talks a little bit about how the topic is dealt with in China: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dangerous-…
The first round of arrests centered on a group of activists, dissidents and lawyers who held a “June 4 commemoration seminar” at a private home in Beijing on May 3 . Posing for a group photo, their expressions were neither defiant nor celebratory, but solemn — as if they were preparing themselves for what lay ahead. Within days, five of the 15 participants were in criminal detention, accused of “picking quarrels and creating a disturbance.” One veteran journalist, Gao Yu, never even made it to the seminar, having been arrested beforehand on charges of leaking state secrets. Nine others, including Zhang Xianling, who lost her 19-year-old son to an army bullet in 1989 and whom I profile in my book, were detained for questioning, then released. Of the seminar, a state-run newspaper, the Global Times, wrote dismissively, “It is obvious that such an event, which is related to the most sensitive political issue in China, has clearly crossed the red line of law.”
This piece is beautifully written–thank you for sharing! I can relate to this feeling of dissonance (in a much smaller scale) with regards to the VN War; there’s something really strange about how an event that is so life-changing to you and your immediate family can be so distant for others, particularly those who still live “back home.”
This was wonderfully written. This is totally beside the point, but I love the image of your dad writing rude things about Xiaoping on a bandaid stuck to his forehead — it’s like wearing your politics on your sleeve turned up a notch.
This is so moving and marvelously told. Thank you.
This is so moving and marvelously told. Thank you.
And here in Australia, our history with Indigenous people is pretty horrendous as well–and something that was only very briefly addressed in the media and our schools until relatively recently. I finished high school in 1993 and the curriculum barely brushed over it. Obviously, it's a very different issue to not being able to speak for fear of retribution from the government as in China, but even in a society where knowledge should be a whole lot easier to come by, it doesn't mean people will discuss it.
Thank you for sharing this piece. It’s beautifully written, very moving, and you’ve communicated the immediacy and anguish of the event so well.
I feel so sad that your parents were unable to return to the place of their birth. I remember Tiananmen Square, but I was 13 when it happened and while I don’t think I could completely comprehend the situation, I definitely felt the sense of rebellion and protest. I still find the images we have of it to be so moving and yet inspiring.
Thank you for the kind words. In a strange twist of fate, while I was trying to find pictures for this story, I stumbled across two rolls of film that my uncle had taken of the Tiananmen Square protests. I had never seen them before, and they hadn’t been printed in 25 years. I posted some of them here. http://thechinagirls.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/nev…
How awesome! Thank you for the link! The photos are really incredible. What a wonderful surprise for you.
I also just noticed you got Freshly Pressed for that post, as well! Good work!
Thank you for your story and for sharing your uncle’s photos. Crying at my desk right now for … well, everyone and everything.
These pictures are truly amazing. Thank you.
These pictures are spectacular, and your essay is so great – thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.
Thank you for sharing this piece. It's beautifully written, very moving, and you've communicated the immediacy and anguish of the event so well.
I feel so sad that your parents were unable to return to the place of their birth. I remember Tiananmen Square, but I was 13 when it happened and while I don't think I could completely comprehend the situation, I definitely felt the sense of rebellion and protest. I still find the images we have of it to be so moving and yet inspiring.
How awesome! Thank you for the link! The photos are really incredible. What a wonderful surprise for you.
I also just noticed you got Freshly Pressed for that post, as well! Good work!
Intense and incredible. Your writing is very good, I hope we see more from you!
I came here via those amazing photos (though I’m an occasional Toast reader anyway), but it’s the family side of this piece that touched me the most. Even though I’m a white American balinghou, I’m also a kid from a college town whose dad passed away some years ago, and somehow something about the way you look back so sensitively at your parents as young adults really resonated.
Anyway, I’ll be following your blog!