Gradually, the events of 1989 receded from center stage. Everyone was busy earning university degrees or getting rich, as if nothing had ever happened. Even today, the Tiananmen crackdown remains one of the biggest taboos in modern China. Beijing has been attempting to expunge our collective memory through the worship of a soaring economy. But this most traumatic of memories has never truly faded. It continues to live among the people, despite Beijing’s determined efforts to suppress its history. all traces of blood on Tiananmen Square had been scrubbed clean and the bullet holes cemented over, but in the nooks and crannies of the city the story passed from person to person. Around 2003, a friend bought a documentary about the crackdown in Hong Kong. In no time we all made copies. One day I watched it with some friends in a bar in the southern city of Guangzhou. One scene in particular struck me. A youth lay prone on a broad avenue amid the sound of intermittent gunfire. We thought he was dead, but then he suddenly began crawling in a circle. He did not dare stand up, but he didn’t want to stay where he was, pretending to be dead. Crawling was better than doing nothing. “If I were there,” said a migrant worker from Sichuan Province who was standing behind us, “I’d have carried him to safety.” nytimes/2014/05/23/opinion/23iht-edmurong23.html?_r=0
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 09:48:31 +0000
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