Three decades after atrocities split my family, I dream of day we will be free
Yesterday marked 30 years to the day since I sat with my family in front of a small television screen at my grandmother’s home in Hong Kong. I was nine. I sat cross-legged on the floor, beside my mother, who held me firmly. As we watched, I felt her grip tighten. At several points she embraced and kissed me and I felt her tears on my cheek.
From April 1989, all of Hong Kong watched the growing unrest in Tiananmen Square as students memorialised the late Hu Yaobang, a reformist General Secretary ousted in
the “struggle against bourgeois liberalisation”. During these weeks I returned home each day to find my family around the television, closely following developments.
Even BBC World had stopped playing music on the radio to report on what was happening. I recall watching images of young people with headbands laying wreaths next to a black and white portrait. Even as a child I could sense something momentous was happening as everyone in Hong Kong seemed to be gripped by the drama.
But most of all I felt its importance within my own family. Our identities are complex and we, as Eurasians, were seemingly caught between two worlds. While we spent holidays abroad and spoke English, half of our family had come to Hong Kong as Chinese refugees fleeing the Communists. One of my aunts was married to a staunch Communist and another to a Chinese Nationalist. My mother had married into an English family and had tried to raise me as an Englishman, but I wore the identity like ill-fitting clothes. My heart felt Chinese. The 1989 demonstrations completely divided my family. Arguments became more common, especially among my younger uncles. As the weeks passed, the tensions only heightened. One uncle laughed and shook his head dismissively, complaining the students were merely causing a nuisance and that this was not the way to act.
My grandmother had lived through the Japanese occupation and the death of her husband. She had a steel about her – an emotional numbness. Later I would discover much of her family had been murdered by the Communists and that she hated them. Yet she said not a word, least to my uncles who forever sang the praises of the CCP. Fear, as I would learn, often outweighs hatred.
Lu Xun, arguably the greatest Chinese writer of the 20th century, described “the state of numbness” as necessary when the only alternative is “increased suffering and pain” and when even “hope for the future” brings little comfort. Still my grandmother cried that Sunday.
We all cried. I cried as a child. I sensed the distress, the pain and the hurt. There were other emotions I could not understand and so could not feel: of shock, grief, fear, panic, anger and rage. However, I knew what I was feeling and what I was witnessing happen on screen was profoundly wrong. The shaky clips and noise, the shouting and the crying, all carried with them a resonance.
What happened on June 4 1989 taught me, before I ever knew of or cared for politics, that a nation and a people are not defined by a government, let alone by one party. I felt how deep my Chinese roots lie, but also how different a China existed in Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong we watched from afar but it felt close to the bone. Though no one from our family took part in the demonstrations, my grandmother still cried when the troops moved in. Did it mark the extinction of genuine hopes for reform within China? No one in my family trusted the party. It came as little surprise that within two years, and despite British assurances, my parents and my siblings would be the only members of our family still in Hong Kong.
We must not forget those that died and the events that traumatised a people. Let us carry forward with us the hope of everyone at Tiananmen that day, and watching around the world, that China and the Chinese people may one day live lives free of the yoke of oppression, free from fear and united by a shared dignity.
Evan Fowler is editor of Hong Kong Free Press and a political exile in London