The Globe and Mail: Tiananmen: two men, two countries, one tragedy
 A Chinese protestor blocks a line of tanks, calling for an end to the violence and bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
‘The emotional impact is still there and is still devastating'
Sonia Verma and Mark MacKinnon
Toronto, Beijing — From Thursday's Globe and Mail, Thursday, Jun. 04, 2009 09:08AM EDT
When dawn breaks on this June 4 day, a diminutive, middle-aged teacher named Professor Chen will quietly leave his new home in Beijing for a routine day at work.
In Toronto, a scruffy, slightly younger man named Leon Tuo will rise to an equally unremarkable day, at the Chinese-language daily where he works, hoping to go unnoticed.
The two men live half a world apart and will not speak, but each will hold the other close to his heart, their lives forever linked by the quiet but crucial roles they played in the dramatic events that unfolded in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago Thursday.
It's a bond that extended into self-imposed exile, spent largely in Canada, where they struggled to move on with their lives while coming to terms with their past.
From a distance, China marched on, but for them – and a handful of other witnesses who came to Canada – the clock stopped on June 4, 1989.
Back then, Mr. Chen was a professor of political science at Beijing University, locally known as Beida.
Mr. Tuo was his third-year student, a “typical teenager,” who spent his spare time listening to Hong Kong pop and dreamed of one day graduating into a government job to serve his country.
 For The Globe and Mail
Leon Tuo poses for photos in Toronto, May 30, 2009. Twenty years ago he was a student at Beijing University and had a man die in his arms. Tom agreed to have his photo taken, on the condition that his identity is somewhat obscured. He is worried about a backlash from the pro-China community here, as well as consequences for his parents, who still live in Beijing.
On campus, the mood was already roiling. Students frequently took to the streets to vent frustration with the slow pace of China's political reform.
Escalating protests in 1987 triggered the fall of Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party chief, accused by other Politburo members of empathizing with the students calling for change.
At the time, Prof. Chen and Mr. Tuo kept their distance rather than risk their careers.
That changed when Mr. Hu died of a heart attack two years later and students poured into the streets to mourn.
Mr. Tuo, then 20, was one of the first to lay a white paper wreath at the foot of the Monument to the People's Heroes. Prof. Chen, then 35, visited the square between classes to advise his students as tensions grew.
At one point, he intervened to pull three of his students off their knees after they went to deliver a petition to Premier Li Peng and were rebuffed.
“That was the moment for me that it became something bigger,” recalled Mr. Tuo, dressed in jeans and a khaki jacket and blinking back tears in an east end Toronto coffee shop last week.
“We had been taught that students are the key to the country. Why were we being ignored?” he asked.
The Beida faculty's decision to remain uninvolved changed on April 26, when the state-run People's Daily newspaper ran an editorial that denounced the protesters as part of “a planned conspiracy” to sow disorder.
Angered, Prof. Chen and many of his colleagues joined the students in the square the next day for what would be one of the most triumphant moments of that spectacular spring – hundreds of thousands of protesters jamming the city's main boulevards in a peaceful show of defiance.
“Maybe there has been no demonstration of this kind in the history of the world,” Prof. Chen said, speaking Wednesday at a café near Renmin University in Beijing.
He and his fellow professors marched at the front, linking arms as if to protect the students behind them, including Mr. Tuo.
The students never returned to class. Prof. Chen joined the Tiananmen protests full-time, sleeping on the concrete ground for days on end.
“ I witnessed something that many young people [in China] don't even believe happened”
When his students announced they would go on a hunger strike, he bought them their last lunch. Mr. Tuo starved himself for 100 hours before he collapsed. Martial law was declared on May 19 and he returned to the square with the crowd.
On the morning of June 3, Prof. Chen left Tiananmen Square for the first time in more than 10 days. He wanted to go to see his parents – dyed-in-the-wool Communist Party members – to reassure them of his health and try to explain the protesters' actions.
When he arrived, he received news that a military vehicle had hit and killed three people near the square. Knowing how volatile the situation was, Prof. Chen headed back. On his way, the soft-spoken professor was kicked to the ground by a police officer when he tried to intervene in the arrest of a student.
Terrifying reports began pouring in from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “Some students came shouting, ‘They're killing They're using machine guns'“ he recalled.
“One of them showed me a wound on his hand, but I still didn't believe them because there was no reason for the army to shoot.”
Prof. Chen saw a line of soldiers kneeling and firing their rifles at random. He watched a young man nearby fall dead to the ground.
Mr. Tuo was standing on the sidelines. Four young men rushed toward him carrying another man, a teenager, limp and covered in blood.
“They gave this young man to me and I managed to stop a taxi and I took him in my arms to the hospital.”
“You just followed the blood to find the ER,” he said. “I was trying to find a bed for that young man. I could not even find a place on the floor. People were lying on the floor. I was not quite sure if they were dead or alive but you could hear the people crying, screaming for help and out of pain.”
The man in Mr. Tuo's arms was already dead. “It was my first time to be so close to a dead person and I was 20. I dare not touch him. I just hold his hand. … You could really feel a life just perish. I could feel his hands getting hard, getting cold. It's so real, it's so real. Even then, the blood still drip down. He died, and the blood still drip down. I do remember his face, even now.”
Mr. Tuo spent the night in the hospital, hoping to find the dead man's family. They never came. He returned to the square, where Prof. Chen had returned with thousands of others in a final show of defiance.
Shortly after midnight, loudspeakers around the city began blaring warnings for citizens to stay indoors or suffer the consequences. At 4 a.m., floodlights on the square suddenly switched on and soldiers came pouring out of the adjacent buildings.
“We weren't heroes, we were scared of death. But I had to be there because my students were there,” Prof. Chen said.
Eventually, the students agreed to withdraw peacefully from the square. But as they marched home in defeat along Changan Avenue, Prof. Chen saw seven people crushed to death under a tank.
“I witnessed something that many young people [in China] don't even believe happened,” he said.
Life returned to normal, at least on the surface. Mr. Tuo returned to The Beijing Children's Hospital every day for a week. A picture of the dead man's face was posted on the wall with a dozen anonymous others.
His body was never claimed, and was later collected by the city for disposal. “I assume his family will never know how he died or where he is,” Mr. Tuo says.
Prof. Chen was called in for interrogation a month later. University officials offered him a deal: Sign a statement that he regretted opposing the Communist Party and he could resume his teaching post.
Nearly all of his colleagues signed the bogus confessions to save their careers. Prof. Chen refused. When Mr. Tuo returned to class that October, Prof. Chen had already been purged.
The students were ordered to write essays denouncing the protesters, stating that the crackdown never happened.
Mr. Tuo complied, graduated, and took a marketing job with Sony. He never spoke of Tiananmen Square, but decided to quit China for Canada a few years later: “I could never feel at home after what happened,” he said.
A few years ago, in the lobby of a downtown Toronto hotel, he ran into his former teacher. More than 15 years had passed. He looked exactly the same.
Prof. Chen was a nightshift housekeeper. Mr. Tuo wept: “He was someone who had shared the most important days of my life.”
After he left China, Prof. Chen had earned a PhD in political science and a Master's degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. He couldn't find work, so when his student visa expired – he refused to seek refugee status in the United States – he decided to try his luck in Canada, settling with his wife in North York, juggling temporary jobs to make ends meet.
He had two children, and his entire family held Canadian citizenship, but the struggle to settle in Canada took its toll.
“The biggest difficulty in Canada is that it is hard for people to find jobs in their profession, not just for me, but for all immigrants,” he said.
Mr. Tuo also struggled, but in different ways. He found work as a journalist at the Toronto bureau of Sing Tao, a Chinese newspaper headquartered in Hong Kong.
For 20 years, he hid his involvement in the Tiananmen protests, fearing the powerful pro-China community in Canada would disown him, or that his family in Beijing would be targeted.
Prof. Chen also was silent. The only way he was able to escape the memories of June 4 was, in some ways, by returning to China.
His prime motivation for moving back was for his children to be educated in a more competitive environment.
“I don't think they can compete with Chinese children who study 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Prof. Chen said, laughing.
Teaching again, this time at a private school, he marvels at how much has changed – at least on the surface.
“Twenty years ago, we couldn't sit here and drink coffee in a café like this,” he said, sitting at an Italian-style café in the same neighbourhood as Beijing University.
The professor is, at heart, still the dissident who stood shoulder to shoulder with his students 20 years ago. He rails against how students today lack the ideals of a generation ago, and challenges the government's assertion that the Tiananmen crackdown, messy as it was, has somehow paved the way for two decades of runaway economic growth.
“You cannot draw the conclusion that from the crackdown, we got faster economic growth. Maybe with more political reforms we would have an even better situation. The ends cannot justify the means,” he says.
However, his days of trying to change China are over. He may live in Beijing at the moment, but he gave up his Chinese passport years ago and considers himself a Canadian now.
Meanwhile in Toronto, his former student, Mr. Tuo, remains a haunted man. His feelings are more acute and complex than friends and relatives who remained in China, he says, as if frozen in time.
“I cannot enjoy the summer until June 4. I am amazed to find out that the emotional impact is still there and is still devastating,” he said. |
发表于 2009-6-4 11:39
Tens of thousands of people pack Hong Kong's Victoria Park for a candlelight vigil on Thursday. They were marking the 20th anniversary of the Chinese military's crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (Vincent Yu/Associated Press) Chinese police aggressively deterred dissent on Thursday's 20th anniversary of the crackdown on democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, amid calls by Hillary Clinton and even Taiwan's China-friendly president for Beijing to face up to the 1989 violence.
Paramilitary soldiers patrol Thursday near the Tiananmen Gate, on the northern end of Tiananmen Square. (Elizabeth Dalziel/Associated Press) Plainclothes officers aggressively confronted journalists on the streets surrounding the square, cursing and threatening violence against them.
A man walks in Hong Kong's Victoria Park on Thursday. The poster behind him shows an iconic image from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, of a lone activist blocking the advance of a column of tanks. (Vincent Yu/Associated Press) Wu'er Kaixi, in exile since fleeing China after the crackdown, travelled to Macau on Wednesday to turn himself in to authorities in a bid to return home.
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