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Apr 15

I’m on an extended visit back to my hometown, Vancouver, a Canadian city full of Chinese. Chinese is the second-most commonly used language after English. My wife and I were running around a Chinese mall for fun to practice Mandarin and buy some Chinese DVDs when we overheard Chinese people talking about us in Mandarin saying, “Those foreigners are speaking Chinese!” I thought it was funny that even in Canada, Chinese people would call white people “foreigner” (in this case: “外国人”).
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Apr 15

One year ago, Buxi asked me to write something on 6/4, and I did not get around to do it, but promised that I would do so this year, the 20th anniversary.  At the reminder of Admin a few weeks ago, I started to think about this “action item”.  I pulled out a diary/report that was written within the weeks after 6/4/1989,  the report was 50 some pages long.  It did not have any dust on it since it has been sealed in an envelope.  Twenty-year is a long time, the paper has turned completely yellow-ish, but reading through it still brought out a lot of emotion and a lot of memories.

After some thought, I decided that the best way to write about 6/4 is to simply translate parts of the 20-year old diary for it truthfully recorded what a 22-year old student experienced, observed, heard, thought, believed and felt at the moment.  Twenty years has gone by, the author, like most of the 6/4 students, has moved on and has since lived a more or less fulfilling life unrelated to 6/4. Along the way, he has learned a few things,  has had opportunity to reflect upon the past, and his political views may have evolved along the way.  But in memory of the 1989 student movement, I felt that the best thing to do is to trace back to the time as it occurred.  I am sure that we will then have a discussion as to how we look at the events in Spring 1989 today.

So here is – Part I, from April 15th, the day Hu Yaobang died, to the day of hunger strike.
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