May 35th

I know there is no such date on your calendar, but it is on mine. In fact, such date exists on the calendar for any Chinese who remembers what happened in 1989.

How could I explain why a government would kill thousands of unarmed students? How could I explain why a government would destroy thousands of families when they only asked for a less corrupted government? How could I explain why the death of thousands of souls cannot appear in the history textbook in China? I wish I knew the answer, but I don’t.

It started with the death of the premier Zhou in April 1989. Students then started mourning about his death in Tiananmen Square, an important landmark in Beijing. Students, particularly those studied in universities, started to comment on the government. The most general comment was the level of corruption. As the criticism began to gain momentum, the state newspapers, People’s Daily, identified such criticism as a sign of revolt. This column did not go down well with the students, and they began to camp in the area and initiated a hunger strike. Just in case you did not know, Tiananmen Square is at the centre of Beijing, which is a political landmark and tourist area.

By May 1989, the movement in Tiananmen Square started attracting international attention. Back then, I was in grade 6 and I saw a huge number of Hong Kong people protested for the first time in my life. To be precise, over one million people protested (the population was only six million in the city). Given the development of situation, we knew something bad was going to happen.

On June 4, I cried for the first time while I was watching a TV news program. At such a young age, it was beyond my comprehension that anyone would kill civilians when the whole world was watching. It was 1989, not 1914. I thought I would never see that kind of killing in my lifetime, and I thought WWII was the end of genocide in human history, but I was wrong. I could not be more wrong.

When you live in a country ruled by dictators, press freedom is nonexistence. In short, June 4 does not exist when you search on Baidu (the equivalent of Google in China). To overcome this kind of barrier, someone came up the idea of May 35. Hence, May 35 was searchable on the internet in China last year, but I do not know how long we can get away with it. After all, there are more than one million internet polices in China – you cannot hide for very long when so many Big Brothers are watching.