remembering tiananmen

Today, the Guardian posted a poignant editorial titled Remembering Tiananmen.

To me, this event brings back jumbled memories of 3rd grade in Mrs. Hennessey’s class. None of us were really old enough to understand what was going on, except that the Chinese government was killing students, and that was scary. Mrs. Hennessey asked me, the only Chinese kid, what I thought about that, and I babbled about how I thought it was Deng Xiaoping’s fault. My precociousness kinda surprised her, but all it’d really meant was that I had read through the Newsweek issue (we were a Newsweek family; to this day, I can’t stand Time) and remembered some key words. Mrs. Hennessey got smart and followed up with “why?” to which I had no response other than, “bla bla bla” aka nonsense, and she was smart enough to realize that I but was still a little young to really grasp the geopolitical implications, and so dropped the matter.

Fenby puts Tiananmen in an interesting historical context, given the advent of the Beijing-hosted Olympics.

Deng could have taken a different decision, to seek a reasonable way forward, admitting criticism and debate to try to solidify a regime which needed to grapple with the wider issues raised by the economic reform he had unleashed. It would have been difficult and messy, but it was not out of the question, and would have given him a unique place in history.

By putting the primacy of monopoly power first, the aged patriarch closed off a key avenue of potential progress for China [...]

On a more personal note, it’s a little scary to think that I am now old enough to have lived through — and remembered — some major history: Tiananmen, the fall of the Berlin wall, 9/11. It’s weird, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK; the moon landings, Vietnam, all that stuff has always been history book material for me, disconnected and dry. But the stuff that I lived through and remember seems so much more significant, independent of its actual historical importance.

Perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to intellectualize the adage of those who cannot remember history being doomed to repeat it, but so hard to actually internalize. We’re only human, after all.