21

I've thought about it for years, and I just don't know exactly how I feel about June 4, 1989. Over time, I've come to understand it as something not so easily understood. It used to be something pretty visceral, an ideological foundation, and a big part of a since-discarded ambition to play a part in shaping the future of China. Now, though it has never in my mind become defensible or justifiable, I cringe a little whenever that horrible moment in time is used to characterize China as a whole. Tiananmen, I want to remind people, has been around a long time.

I remain confused.

Maybe all I should say is that there is this statute right outside Georgetown Law, that I've seen almost every day for much of the last three years, because it's right where I get off the bus, and it's the Goddess of Democracy, the one created by students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a sister to Lady Liberty. And so many times when I've seen it, I've thought, when I'm ever in DC on June 4, I'm going to go and pay my respects, the same way I do in Hong Kong, at the annual candlelight vigil that is the only open commemoration of the Tiananmen Square protests on Chinese soil.

One hundred and fifty thousand people showed up at the Hong Kong vigil last night, the most ever recorded by the police, even more than in 1990, and after even the organizers said there would be a steep dropoff from last year's gathering, which was huge because it was the twentieth anniversary. I write about it every year, because it amazes me every year, tens of thousands of normal people who sing songs and light candles, literally both a beacon and island of freedom for the world's oldest civilization. I'm not sure anything makes me prouder to say I'm from Hong Kong.

So this afternoon, being in DC, on June 4, I took the bus to that statue outside my school. I stood for a while and sat for a while, and explained to curious passersby why there were several bouquets of flowers there today. A few teenage Ethiopian-American girls giggled over whether it was similar to a university protest in Ethiopia a couple years ago, and asked me to take their picture for them. The woman of a scruffy couple smelling of alcohol said, "They shouldn't do that, kill people for protesting." Later, a few sentences into my explanation, it suddenly clicked for one motherly Hispanic woman. "Yes, June," she said. "I remember."

Not long after, a few Chinese men parked around the corner and started setting up some chairs and a banner, for what would be a simple remembrance later in the evening. One of them asked me, in English, if I lived nearby, and I said no, and then in Chinese, I just graduated from school here.

"I'm from Hong Kong," I said.

"You must have been still small then."

"Yeah."

"Lots of people in Hong Kong still remember, right?"

"Yeah, tens of thousands, every year."

"All these years later, they still remember."

They still remember. I think that's all I really want to say. I still remember, and I will keep remembering, and for a very simple reason, much simpler than all the difficult historical and political nuances. It's the same reason that I think first drew me in. It's this: if I had been a college student in Beijing in 1989, I can't help but think I would have been there.