Hope Shattered - Dreams Destroyed - On the 20th Anniversary of Tienanmen Square Massacre

I am surrounded by weeping students in the quad of Beijing University. It’s the evening of June 5th, 1989. Mournful funeral music sweeps from speakers across the campus. The banner in front of the campus gates, in black characters on white cloth laments, “Tienanmen bathed in blood. The whole world weeps.”

By now the world knew what those milling about us had experienced in the hours before. The Peoples Army did fire on students. Tanks rumbled through the streets and the square. Bodies were bullet ridden and crushed. Soldiers were captured, strung up from light posts and burned while the crowd cheered. Buses were parked together to form barricades. One side or the other torched them. Sporadic skirmishes and resulting deaths would continue for another day. But the outcome was immutable. The student led foray for freedom had failed. The Party won.

Now cadres of students come into the weeping cauldron, returning from the morgue with news of whose bodies they found and who was still unaccounted for
.
My two sons and I are the only Americans in the crowd and so the target for unrealistic pleas. “Can’t you contact Pres. Bush? Can’t the US military intervene? Will the free world just stand by and let hope be crushed?” It was a cry not only for themselves, but also for their fallen colleagues and their now under suspicion parents. It was the unrealistic plea for some kind of rekindling of the flame of hope which had been definitively quenched.

We weep with our new student friends. We wince as we they show us wounds in their bodies. We remember with mixed feelings the female student friend of John who was safe in the country-side. The day before, her mother had come and physically carried her out of the square where she had been on a hunger strike. We know we cannot reach our family back home but are confident we will get there. Other student friends will not make it home. Without a doubt many others will make their homes in prisons. It seemed almost secondary to think of two years of John's work reflected in Chinese to English translations now stored "somewhere" on campus. Yet in the magnitude of the suffering, death, and shattered hopes those concerns seem minor. Many have died. More will. It's a long long road to freedom for too many