Twenty years ago on June 4, 1989, the Chinese military took brutal action against student demonstrators in Beijing's Tianamen Square. Many Americans who watched the unthinkable atrocities can only recall watching the People's Liberation Army tanks running over students. It seemed an impossible nightmare, just a movie on our television screens. At least, until we watched the recorded events of September 11, 2001, in New York.
Lake with No Name: A True Story of Love and Conflict in Modern China is Diane Wei Liang's memoir of that time in China, of her own role in the Student Democracy Movement (SDM) and of the friends and lovers who stood beside her and made history on that terrible day. She was born in Beijing, but spent part of her childhood with her parents in a labor camp in a remote region of China. In her university years, she took part in the SDM and protested in Tiananmen Square. She graduated from Peking University. She has a Ph.D. in business administration from Carnegie Mellon University, taught ten years, and now writes full-time and lives in London.
Beijing University, 1986. The Communists were in power, but the so-called Harvard of China was a hotbed of intellectual and cultural activity, with political debates and "English Corners" where students eagerly practiced the language with each other and longed for democracy. Nineteen-year-old Wei had known the oppressive days of the Cultural Revolution, having grown up with her parents in a work camp in a remote region of China. One winter they subsisted only on cabbages that they had harvested in freezing weather. The level of poverty described is almost unbelievable for "modern" times.
As a student at Beijing University, Wei immersed herself in study and spent her free hours writing poetry beside the "Lake with No Name" at the center of campus. It was there that Wei met Dong Yi, her first "true love." Unfortunately, he was pledged to another, and Wei's love sublimated into a deep friendship that smoldered for years with a passionate longing. Intertwined with the romance were the dissident activities that the Chinese government eventually labeled "anarchist".
Article comments