Monday, September 12, 2005
The Gate of Heavenly Peace
There is a memorial sculpture on the east face of the Student Administration Council building in Hart House Circle at the University of Toronto. On June 4th, 1989, tanks and soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army were advancing towards Tiananmen Square, where nearly a million people, including more than half of all college and university students in Beijing, where peacefully protesting against corruption and for freedom of press. The soldiers shot into the unarmed crowd with machine guns, killing hundreds to thousands.
I was old enough in 1989 that I remember this event happening. I was old enough, when I first saw the memorial – a thick slab of black tar with a tank track under a crushed bicycle and a Chinese slipper – to start crying. There’s no issue that has more of an emotional grip on me than this one. For me, this trip to Beijing was, I’d say, almost entirely about visiting Tiananmen Square, and I had been playing over and over in my head what might happen when I finally got there.
The square, whose name means, “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” was very cold, and a sharp wind blew across it. I walked with my tour group leader who told us to pose for a souvenir photo, with the gate in front of the Forbidden City in the background. The gate includes a massive picture of Mao flanked by two slogans, which were translated by my guide as, “Long life for all the citizens of China. Long unity for all the citizens of the world.” I couldn’t stomach it, so I disappeared into the crowd until the photo taking was over. Then we had 20 minutes to poke around. I wanted to just sit and be, but that would have been way too dramatic in the middle of this particular square, so I went to a corner, the north-east, past the underpass staircase to the Forbidden City, where nobody was walking, where I wouldn’t look like a protester (I wasn’t), where I could sit and be, and I sat and was. I took out my green pen and wrote, “I’m sorry” on the stone where I sat. It will wash away with the next rain. A few minutes later, a police officer on the other side of the traffic fence apparently found my sitting there a little weird. I got up and walked back to the group, and we walked through the underpass to the Forbidden City. That pen exploded in my pant pocket on the plane ride home. It will not wash out.
I was old enough in 1989 that I remember this event happening. I was old enough, when I first saw the memorial – a thick slab of black tar with a tank track under a crushed bicycle and a Chinese slipper – to start crying. There’s no issue that has more of an emotional grip on me than this one. For me, this trip to Beijing was, I’d say, almost entirely about visiting Tiananmen Square, and I had been playing over and over in my head what might happen when I finally got there.
The square, whose name means, “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” was very cold, and a sharp wind blew across it. I walked with my tour group leader who told us to pose for a souvenir photo, with the gate in front of the Forbidden City in the background. The gate includes a massive picture of Mao flanked by two slogans, which were translated by my guide as, “Long life for all the citizens of China. Long unity for all the citizens of the world.” I couldn’t stomach it, so I disappeared into the crowd until the photo taking was over. Then we had 20 minutes to poke around. I wanted to just sit and be, but that would have been way too dramatic in the middle of this particular square, so I went to a corner, the north-east, past the underpass staircase to the Forbidden City, where nobody was walking, where I wouldn’t look like a protester (I wasn’t), where I could sit and be, and I sat and was. I took out my green pen and wrote, “I’m sorry” on the stone where I sat. It will wash away with the next rain. A few minutes later, a police officer on the other side of the traffic fence apparently found my sitting there a little weird. I got up and walked back to the group, and we walked through the underpass to the Forbidden City. That pen exploded in my pant pocket on the plane ride home. It will not wash out.
# posted by Old_Cat @ 3:43 PM 
