This is a brief essay I originally wrote on an old-school typewriter in late August 1989. Reformatting it here for the 21st century and resisting the temptation to edit my younger self. – AJW

September 12, one hundred days after the Beijing massacre, has been proclaimed a day of mourning by the leaders of the Chinese pro-democracy movement. We need this day, to help us remember. Memories are weak, especially for tragedies in distant countries, and they have little resilience against the silence which totalitarian governments consistently use to quicken the process of forgetting. A little over a year ago, 3,000 students in Burma were killed when the government brutally suppressed their pro-democracy movement. The country has essentially been closed off to foreigners ever since, and so with no one to remind us of the continuing terror there, we forget.   

Throughout China this spring, people discovered a sense of hope and possibility which had been absent since the early 1950s.  I remember how elated a friend was after she joined a demonstration in mid-May. “This is the first time in my life I’ve done what I really wanted to do!” she exclaimed. But her hope for freedom died with the workers and students on Tiananmen Square.   

As I was leaving for the airport a week after the massacre, she handed me a note. In it she expressed the despair that was felt throughout the country after the events of June 3-4. “My country has lost so much, too much,” she wrote. “I don’t know if what is flowing from my heart is tears or blood, and I don’t know which month or which year, if ever, it will stop.”  

On September 12, when we mourn those who died for freedom in China, we should remember those who are suffering today under what the government calls “normalcy.” The leadership’s claim that “everything is back to normal,” means that fear, silence, and hopelessness have returned. Another friend, an avid reader, wrote recently in a letter: “I don’t really feel like reading anymore, and it’s no use anyway. China––this lousy place––70 years have passed [since the May 4th Movement] and it hasn’t changed at all. Who’s to say that it won’t be the same in another 70 years? I’m exhausted; I’ve lost all my energy.” 

“Normal life” doesn’t make it into the newspapers. Until the students and workers reappear on the front pages –– and they will–– it’s up to us to remember, as one student put it, that “the people are ‘dying’” today in China. On this day of mourning then, we should grieve not only for the dead, but for the living, too.  They must not be forgotten.