When I made a trip to my home in Zhejiang at the end of May, I had no idea when the protests would end. But I took the train back on the afternoon of June 3, and as I woke the next morning on our approach to Beijing, the radio was broadcasting the news that the army was now in Tiananmen Square.

The protests quickly subsided amid the gunfire. Students began to abandon Beijing in droves. When I left for the station again on June 7, there was hardly a pedestrian to be seen, only smoke rising from some charred vehicles and—as my classmates and I crossed an overpass—a tank stationed there, its barrel pointing menacingly at us. The train compartment was filled with college students fleeing the capital, and there was not an inch of space between one person and the next.

I disembarked at Shijiazhuang station and spent the next month holed up in a hotel. Every day the television repeatedly broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody. Then one day, the picture on my TV screen changed completely. The images of detained suspects were replaced by scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. The announcer switched from passionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students to cheerfully lauding our nation’s progress.

Today, few young Chinese know anything about what happened at Tiananmen Square, and those who do only say vaguely, “A lot of people in the streets then, that’s what I heard.”

... contd.