Summer 1999. I am in Beijing. A friend of mine asks me to describe Beijing on this, the dawn of the new millennium, ten years after the "disturbances" of 1989.
Are the ghosts of the massacred still floating around, silently asking for the recognition which, 10 years later, is still denied them?
If so, I don't hear them. I hear only the living.
Early one morning I ride out to pre-dawn Tiananmen Square to watch the elaborate flag raising ceremony that takes place every morning. It is dark when I leave my apartment, but I ride quickly so I won't miss the ceremony. The sun rises early and quickly here -- another reminder that Beijing is built on the edge of a giant desert.
Tiananmen is not a comfortable gathering place; no grass or weeds poke through the cement tiles that extend in all directions from the center. Children do not play roller hockey under the gaze of Chairman Mao (
Although dawn has not yet risen, there are already many people filing through the metal gate surrounding the square, milling around along with the many soldiers who are busy scanning the crowd, for who or what I am not sure. I sit down on the cold stone ground and wait for pre-destined time when the ceremony will begin. As the first light of dawn filters through the haze, the streetlights go off and the lights in the politburo are switched on.
I am contemplating the synergy of this -- the seamless switch from man-made light to natural light, when I hear shouting coming from the eastern corner of the square. A woman is screaming something, the same sentence over and over, a question.
"Weishenma sha wo erzi? Nimen weishenma sha ta?"
"Why did you kill my child? Why did you kill him?" she shouts.
The woman is about 50 years old, though it's hard to tell in the early dimness that separates day from night.
Her accent marks her as someone from outside of Beijing, and her clothes give her the appearance of a country bumpkin.
"Why did you tear out my womb.Why did you kill my child?" she screams.
A number of people turn to look at her, but a larger number chose to remain safely oblivious. Soon, soldiers have moved in, forming a kind of half circle around her. The woman does not seem frightened, she begins shouting louder: "Why did you kill my child! Everyone is watching now! You don't dare hurt me!"
I want so much to try to extricate this woman from this situation, believing (and perhaps not falsely) that the presence of a foreign guest might be enough to convince the soldiers to just let her walk away. The soldiers themselves look like they'd prefer an easier, softer way.
"Come on, Mama," I want to go and tell her, nodding politely to the soldiers as I pull her away, just another dumb untouchable foreigner behaving inexplicably. "Come home and eat breakfast."
But I am frozen, and can do no more than to bear silent witness as more soldiers arrive and the woman is hustled into the tunnel that runs underneath Beijing's Changan Road.
The Chinese national anthem begins playing over crackling speakers, and as the red flag of the PRC slowly rises with the sun, I begin to cry.
Unable to watch the ceremony any longer, I turn away from the flagpole and walk out of Tiananmen and into the forbidden city.
Joshua Samuel Brown is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colorado.