Our current president’s recent trip to Asia had me thinking about my own journey there. So I dug up all of the black & white images I took during my trip to China in December 1990. I scanned them and uploaded them to Flickr. I was obsessed with China at the time, mainly because of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 1989. I was (even then) a New York Times freak.
I will never forget when I read the first stories from Nicholas D. Kristof in mid-April of that year, where he wrote daily in increasingly excited text that students had veered from mourning the death of an obscure (to me) Chinese leader, Hu Yaobang, to a full-out assault on the front door of the Chinese equivalent of the White House. And that the protesters were not leaving the square. And that news was stunning. So I followed the story all the way to the end.
I was crushed. Really emotionally disturbed by the whole thing. More than one person in my life has told me that I have at times cared more about what’s going on at the other end of the world (Beijing, Sarajevo, Rwanda, etc.) than what’s right in front of me. I guess it depends on what is in front of me.
Certainly, as a father now, I cling to my children with a fierce protection and interest that could never rival what I feel while holding newsprint. But in 1989, the students of the square were my fantasy. They looked to us in the U.S. for their symbolism and language with the Goddess of Freedom and Democracy, but I envied them so much. It was one year into the presidency of the first George Bush, and I was still bitter that a CIA Director was our leader. I wrote a lot of poems< in those years.
I was just learning to define myself as a poet. I would read the paper and write a poem. It was natural. I was aching for something substantial to do. I had no war to attend or resist, I had a comfortable, arty life that included plenty of education, food, drug, and alcohol. I envied them their sticks and outrage. I wanted to commandeer buses like they did. They were lucky. On June 4th and 5th, they were decisively attacked. It was a massacre.
I fired up an indignant handwritten missive and went down to the Chinese Embassy on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. There were no people outside, no TV or protests. All I did was go up to whatever floor it was on and knock on the door. It looked like a converted dentist’s office, all waiting room and glass partition. I waited. A Chinese man came out and I quietly sputtered a formal demand that the massacre cease and that the entire leadership of China resign. And do whatever else the students wanted. He was very Asian and polite, sucking in short bursts of air as I spoke. He gently refused to take my letter from me. I tried to hand it to him again and again. Polite refusal to accept it. We sat side by side on a nice couch. I laid my letter on the table and said goodbye to him.
My obsession with China and the students didn’t dissipate. I wrote a play, “The Goddess Speaks.”, that we produced in the summer of 1990. It included a 14-foot replica of the Goddess of Freedom and Democracy. Hooded Figure #4 ripped open the belly of the Goddess and pulled out a blood bag, pouring it over the Seeker of Freedom. It was great. But I wanted to go to China. And I did, that winter. More on that later.