Photograph: June 22, 1984

by Darien Hsu Gee

Of course we would go. We cut jagged strips from dishtowels to wrap around our heads—my mother stayed home. In Tiananmen Square, three weeks earlier and 7,200 miles away, other headbands bore phrases like liberty and hunger strike and denounce butcher regime and all power belongs to the people. Days in, student protestors sprawled limp on well-trodden paths, burnt eyes cast on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the Great Hall of the People. Almost a million bodies packed into 109 acres of city square, a portrait of Mao gazing from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. June 4 had come and gone, image after image a totem to that day—the stark white 33-foot Goddess of Democracy, born from foam and paper mache. CNN’s Bernard Shaw’s breathy voice—Fifty-eight minutes from now, the government will pull the plug on all transmissions out of this nation. The lone man, plastic shopping bags in hand, fixed in front of a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

Back home in Houston, we did what we could. We marched past the Chinese consulate, calling out our own words, fists in the air. Freedom! Democracy! In the only photo that remains of that day, my father and I stand together, my left hand sweeping sunscreen onto his cheek. My gaze is on him and he, as usual, is looking elsewhere. What was I feeling, being with this man who was still a stranger to me? Surprise, I think, that we were there together. Love, perhaps, in hoping we were the same.

Darien Hsu Gee is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House that have been translated into eleven languages. In 2021, her collection of micro essays, Allegiance, received the Bronze IPPY award in the Essays category. She received a 2019 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship award for Other Small Histories and a 2015 Hawai‘i Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence for Writing the Hawai‘i Memoir. She lives with her family on the island of Hawai‘i.