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In the fall of 2008, my sophomore year at Harvard, China’s premier came to visit and gave a speech. Urged by the officials of the Chinese embassy in D.C., we gathered in the central quad of campus to welcome the delegation. We were each holding a tiny red flag printed with five stars, provided by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association of our school. Most of us felt obligated to join the welcoming crowd, because the delegates, even though we disliked them as officials, were from our motherland.
There were more than four hundred of us, all dressed formally. Young men were in suits and ties and leather shoes, and women in colorful clothes, since the official instructions had urged us to treat the premier’s visit as a festive occasion. I was wearing a long floral dress with a cloth belt cinched around my waist. Some in the crowd were from MIT, Boston University, Tufts, Brandeis, UMass, although for attending the premier’s speech in the auditorium, one had to have a ticket, which was not given to regular students like me. But I wasn’t that interested anyway, I had too much schoolwork to do.
A slender woman in a pageboy—she was in her early forties, and looked like a visiting scholar—stood away from us, alone. She raised a placard that declared: “We Won’t Forget the Tiananmen Square Massacre!” The massacre, if there’d been one, had taken place almost two decades before, and I was amazed that the woman was still bent on making a protest about it today. As the solitary protester, she began walking around among us, but no police stopped her despite hundreds of them being around. Many of us were angry at her. What a drag! What a crazy woman! Some called her an idiot. One man yelled that she was a professional China-basher. A few of us tried to intervene. My friend Rachel, wearing a polka-dot dress, stepped out and said to the bespectacled protester, “I grew up in China and never heard of such a massacre. Why help Americans demonize our country like this?”
The skinny woman said with a Hong Kong accent, “You’re too young to know the truth, it has been erased from the public memory by the Chinese government.”
Joe Ma, Rachel’s boyfriend, pitched in: “You’d better knock it off, all right? You’re a pathetic liar, and nobody believes you. I lived in Beijing for many years and never heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Look around, see who believes you and your nonsense.”
“I won’t just forget what happened and I want to tell the truth. I was there and saw the killings with my own eyes. I was stained with the blood from a young boy who was killed in Tiananmen Square. My nose still can smell his blood, and my ears still hear him crying.”
“Shut your trap!” Joe bellowed, flinging up his hand. “There were no random killings at all. Even if the insurrection was squashed with force, it was the right choice, and it later earned an economic boom for China. See how strong and prosperous our country is today.”
“But the Chinese people are still living under tyranny and oppression. They deserve freedom and human rights.”
“Get out of here!” Joe cried. “The top priority of human rights is to let people have a decent livelihood, which our country has managed to provide for our people.”
“No, the Communist regime oppresses our people, treating them like dumb animals in a corral. Besides, people earn their livelihood, which isn’t something given by the state.”
“Bitch, go away!” a female voice cried.
“Fuck your mother!” a man barked at the protester.
“Stupid cunt!” came a female voice.
“What a loser!”
The middle-aged protester said calmly, “You’re all college students here and ought to be more civilized. Haven’t you learned more words than those obscenities?” I was also surprised by their using our mother tongue this way, lapsing so suddenly into such vulgarity.
My pulse was beating as I watched them, and I pushed the butterfly hair clip I was wearing for the occasion up above my ear. I worried they might manhandle her, but two officers came up and stopped the squabble. It couldn’t go on anyway, as the premier’s retinue was already appearing at the front gate. The quarrel quieted down, and a few in the crowd turned their phones vertical to snap photos. The solitary protester raised her placard higher and waved it while we were fluttering our little flags and crying “Welcome!”
The smiling premier raised his hand and waved at us as he passed by, his legs slightly bandy. He was escorted by his aides and bodyguards. Behind him was a petite young woman in a navy suit and black pumps who must have been his interpreter.
Later I came to learn more about the solitary protester. Her name was Liu Lan. Some students dug around online for more information on her, which they shared with us. She worked at a Hong Kong media company and was currently a visiting fellow in the Nieman program for journalism at our university. People in my social circle called her a traitor and a diehard China-basher. But deep down, I was fascinated by her. She was bold and headstrong, to say the least.
I looked more into Liu Lan online and found some video clips of her. In the photos of her youthful days, she looked elegant and was kind of a beauty, with bright eyes, smooth skin, slender limbs, and a soft voice. She looked like a typical college student, mild and maybe even frail. But she had been an activist of sorts even then and given a speech at every memorial meeting held in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park on the anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy. In one interview she broke down, sobbing wretchedly. Then she collected herself and went on to tell her experience in Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989:
“We were sitting on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square and meant to block the army from advancing to harm the students. There were more than one thousand people in the crowd, most of us sitting on the ground. The soldiers, all wearing helmets and carrying assault rifles, were facing us. Both sides stood confronting each other. Then some workers appeared, all toting wooden clubs. One of them shouted at us, ‘Hey, get up and run. Those bastard troops have started killing civilians. Don’t stay here waiting for death.’ I was a media major at Hong Kong Baptist University and had been assigned to lead the students from Hong Kong to join the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. But we were caught in the violent clashes and had no idea what to do or where to go. We just joined the local citizens who had come out on the streets to stop the army. We sat among them on the ground.
“A few moments later I rose to my feet and went up to a young commander of the troops in front of us. I grasped his hand and begged, ‘We’re students from Hong Kong. Believe me, officer, those in the square are not counterrevolutionaries. They are the brightest youths of our country, and they’re peaceful and just demonstrating for a more liberal and fair society. They are doing this for all of us. Please don’t harm them, don’t open fire on them!’ I couldn’t hold myself any longer and dropped to my knees in front of the officer, who looked at me with watery eyes but said nothing.
“When I rejoined my fellow students, a boy in his early teens turned up, bawling and telling people that the army had just shot his elder brother. He kept crying, ‘Brother, brother, where are you?’ I can never forget his hoarse voice, which sounded like an old man’s in spite of his young age. Some people in the crowd were sobbing with him and calling the soldiers fascists. Then the boy grabbed a club from a man and broke out running after an army truck while yelling ‘Brother, Brother!’ He meant to avenge his brother. We tried to stop him but couldn’t.
“Two hours later, after we had been dispersed by the soldiers, I ran into the boy in Tiananmen Square again. He was bleeding from several gunshot wounds and had been carried over by two workers. I helped them load him into an ambulance; my shirt was stained with his blood. I was so overwhelmed that I blacked out. So they put me in the ambulance too. On arrival at a Red Cross emergency clinic, I came around and saw two wounded soldiers lying nearby. A nurse went over to check their injuries and treat them, but some people stopped her, shouting that they were murderers and didn’t deserve any medical attention. Then a doctor, a middle-aged man, said loudly, ‘Stop interfering with our work. Even though they’re soldiers, they’re still human beings. Our job is to save lives.’ That shut everyone up.
“The makeshift clinic could only treat the wounded preliminarily, and most of the victims had to be transferred to hospitals nearby. When an ambulance came, a female doctor ordered the medics to put me into it together with three wounded people, I said I was not injured and was fine now. But the doctor just told them, ‘Take her with you too.’ I kept protesting but was interrupted by the doctor, who said in English, ‘Child, we need you to get away and tell the world what has been happening here. Otherwise, people in other places cannot know the truth.’ Obviously, she spoke English because of fear. She was afraid that those around us could know her intention and might stop me and even inform on her. I promised her that I would spread the truth.”
Liu Lan sobbed again. A moment later, calming down some, she added, “In Benevolent Hospital, some armed soldiers turned up to arrest the wounded counterrevolutionaries. The doctors stopped them, saying the real counterrevolutionaries were all in the bicycle shed, which was being used as a stopgap morgue and was already crowded with dead bodies. I sneaked away. Ever since that day, I haven’t stopped telling the world about the massacre. If they had put another wounded person instead of me into the ambulance, that person would likely have survived. In other words, my life must have been saved at the cost of another life, so as long as I can breathe, I won’t stop acting as a voice speaking for those victims!”
That explained why she had shown up in the central quad of our campus to protest alone the other day. I half believed her—her truth might just be another version of what had happened. I emailed the link to her interview to Rachel and Joe, curious to see how they would take it. Joe wrote back, saying Liu Lan was just a crazy woman who couldn’t see any positive side to our country. Rachel also said Liu Lan might be a liar. I tended to agree with them. I had grown up in Beijing and often passed Tiananmen Square. I had never heard about the massacre either, though in history class we were once told that there’d been a rebellious mob who intended to overthrow the government, but who were subdued mostly by peaceful means.