Remembering June 4

"On that warm June 4 morning, Mr. Liu carried off the corpses of protesters, their blood spattering his shoes. Their sacrifice was too painful to face, much less reconcile.

Thursday marks 20 years since hundreds of students, workers and average citizens died in an army assault on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in the center of Beijing. Inside China, the day is a nonevent; even oblique references to June 4 are taboo.

For the outside world, Chinese officials this year offer a tenable excuse: the protests, they say, threatened China’s stability. With stability restored, China produced an economic miracle that has lifted scores of millions from destitution.

For veterans of the June 4 movement, however, reconciliation is seldom so tidy or superficial.

...

He suffers nonetheless. He is appalled by the notion that China’s success was erected on the bodies of Tiananmen demonstrators. He struggles with the inability of Tiananmen’s ideals to gain more than a toehold in his homeland. And he despairs at the oft-expressed thought that his fellow Chinese have made a devil’s bargain, trading the freedom that he and his fellow protesters sought for a chance at a car and a bigger apartment.

'You can raise pigs to be very strong and very fat,” he said. “But a pig is still a pig. And a pig has no rights.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/world/asia/04protester.html?hpw

I sit in a tea house in Chengdu watching people go about their busy, prosperous lives, and this article so eerily rings true. Forced and selective amnesia setting in on a nation that is not allowed, does not want, does not care to remember a bloody, failed movement. My dad called to say he was frisked by armed soldiers when he tried to enter the square today, so eerily like 20 years ago when he saw his friends fall, but the atmosphere is more 'stable', more 'harmonious' today. When he walked out, people on the streets asked him why there were so many people in the Square today. It has only been 20 years. It was a day that saw idealism leave my parents, the beginning of many abandoned dreams. I think of the bodies that never walked out of the Square, those wronged spirits that haunt it, all the things that repeat because people forget. But I'm among the few thinking these things today.