PERSONAL STORIES: Two Americans recall the terror of Tiananmen Square

Crackdown changed my family’s life forever.

Twenty years ago today Chinese tanks blasted their way into Tiananmen Square and my life was changed forever. Only an elementary school student, I then dimly understood the significance of a historic drama that was transfixing the world.

But the aspirations of protesting students in Beijing struck a chord with my parents. Having experienced famines as children and seen their professional careers ruined when Mao shut down all schools, my parents were for a few weeks hopeful that China was finally turning a corner.

When the Communist government decided to shoot unarmed civilians, my parents were enraged. As the last bodies were cleared from the streets, they resolved to leave China so their only child did not have to grow up under a dictatorship.

Fast forward to 2009. The sacrifices that accompany every act of emigration are behind us. I have begun my career as a corporate attorney.

In the meantime, China’s export-led growth model has generated tangible prosperity without loosening the grip of the regime that had committed the Tiananmen atrocities. Thanks to an effective system of in-school indoctrination, the young educated elites of China have been transformed from the government’s severest critics into its most zealous apologists. In the eyes of the young nationalist Chinese, the Tiananmen crackdown was justified and their government can do no wrong.

The conventional wisdom is that, as a person of Chinese heritage, I should rejoice in China’s success and perhaps, given my language skills, benefit from it.

But I am not so sure. I am distressed by the gap between rhetoric and reality. According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s economy, on a per capita basis, ranks only 109th in the world. Given the Communist Party’s history of lying to the outside world, one has to wonder how much its portrait of the new China is a Potemkin village.

On my days off I stop by Manhattan’s Immigration Court to volunteer my legal services to asylum applicants from China.

The difference between my life and theirs is vast. I am a product of American higher education and I am protected by my blue-covered American passport. However, I am their humble student and we are united by our shared story of migration. They teach me that swaths of China remain impoverished.

In both the United States and Britain, China is the top source country for asylum requests. These little-noticed official statistics are a potent antidote to the hyperbole surrounding China’s so-called rise to superpower status.

Through my pro bono work, I learn that the government of China routinely punishes its citizens for, among other things, speaking out against local officials, forming unions, practicing their chosen religions and having more than one child.

My clients have never heard of John Locke and are unlikely to have read the Federalist Papers. But they have an instinctual appreciation for freedom.

Discussing the wave of school collapses that had followed last year’s earthquake in western China, one client mentioned that had Chinese reporters been able to freely write about suspected construction flaws, many young lives would have been saved. Another client praised Mexico’s honesty in dealing with the swine flu epidemic and recalled her government’s bungled cover-up of SARS cases. Hearing words like these convinces me the spirit of Tiananmen is still alive.

Every time I leave Immigration Court I count my blessings. When the young people of China sought to change their country in 1989, they were massacred.

When the young people of America sought to change their country in 2008, we helped elect Barack Obama. To me, this is what separates a great country (for all its imperfections) from one that pretends to be great.

Perhaps the talk about China being the next superpower can wait for the day when the Chinese people can freely elect their own leaders and are no longer so desperate to go abroad.

Michael Wang, a former Atlanta resident, now practices law in New York City.

Dark days taught me the power of words

By Sylvia Krebs

This is a year of anniversaries for China.

Some commemorate historic events of great national pride. Others recall dark spots on the country’s memory. Among the former is Oct. 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The latter includes June 3-4, the 20th anniversary of the government’s suppression of demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

My husband, Ed, and I were teaching in Xi’an in 1989, and the run-up to June 4 created a profusion of memories.

Discussions with my students wandered from the political implications of the demonstrations to the latest rumors and jokes.

We rode our bicycles among students from many colleges and universities, marching to rendezvous with others at the provincial government building until city foreign affairs officials blocked our way.

I watched everyone from teachers to students to the boiler room manager rush to watch the almost daily parades.

We shared the excitement of our students and friends when Beijing residents turned back the military units sent to clear the square days before the crackdown.

Then on Sunday morning, June 4, Ed woke me with the news that the People’s Liberation Army had turned on the people. Different, darker memories followed that fateful day.

We watched Chinese television, listened to Voice of America broadcasts urging Americans to leave and wrestled with a decision.

Should we leave, as most foreigners were doing, or should we stay?

We stayed because we were the only foreign teachers, and our leaving would close the language center.

And we stayed because we’d come to like and respect our colleagues and students.

Nonetheless, apathy infected our classes, and I often wondered why we were still there.

But one vivid memory emerges from the dull morass.

During the term my listening class had suffered through a miserable collection of tapes cued to an equally miserable set of essays.

But in that boring material one piece stood out, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

One day in mid-June, I told the class we would listen to the King speech so that they could get the flavor of it and assured them there would be no exercises or test questions.

They put on their headphones and settled down to listen with their usual poker faces.

I donned my own headphones, listened with the thrill I always get from King’s words and wondered what the students were thinking.

At the end of a tape the students usually took off their headphones mechanically and waited to see what would come next.

Not so this time.

They literally jerked off the headphones, and the room exploded with their excited response.

After a few minutes, the noise subsided, but the excitement did not.

We spent the rest of the two-hour class talking about King and discussing their favorite parts of the speech.

If only for that day, words and their passionate presentation banished apathy from one classroom.

Throughout the recent interminable presidential campaign I often thought about King’s speech and its impact on those Chinese students.

In our semiliterate, cynical society both words and dreams are easily dismissed by some — as President Barack Obama certainly learned.

In the face of that, I treasure the memory of one day when the power of words lifted a group of young people out of their dismal present and into the possibilities of the future.

And I know once again that whatever governments might do, people-to-people contacts across cultures — in this case, teacher and students — can uncover the similarities that contribute to real international understanding.

Sylvia Krebs, who lives in Douglasville, has taught in China seven times.