Beijing. June 3, 1989. The night was hot, humid … and long; very long. As dusk reluctantly gave way to the darkness, the 109-acre Tiananmen Square looked like a gigantic, steaming cauldron; the heat trapped by the concrete slabs during the day, painstakingly evaporating into the evening’s somewhat cooler air. From the distance, scattered lampposts […]
A child is the mother’s heartstrings. This old Chinese saying expresses how a mother is heartbroken at the thought of her child suffering physically or mentally. Zhuoxuan, the 16-year-old son of detained Chinese human rights lawyer Yu Wang, is under house arrest. I can’t imagine the sadness of this mother. Based on my life experience […]
In China, there is a popular idiom that loosely translates as “black and white are reversed”; it means that facts are twisted and distorted to the point that black is white and vice versa. Recently, the Chinese government accused some brave lawyers of inciting subversion, and threw them in prison for the “crime” of defending […]
The still unknown Tank Man defying a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Photo by Jeff Widener, AP I graduated from Peking University in 1989. Just a few years ago, when I arrived in the U.S., a friend of mine asked me about Tank Man. “Tank Man?” – I shook my head; he could have […]
Chinese New Year is coming soon. It reminds me of my first and also last reunion with the old girls and old boys from high school before the 2008 Chinese New Year. As we chatted and drank tea, the organizer, who used to be our class monitor, causally said, “Yuanming will never make it to […]