Something you shouldn't see

Beijing’s heavy atmosphere presses down on the city’s inhabitants. The humidity grips my skin. Each breath feels coarse, somehow incomplete. I stare directly at the falling sun, its red haze incapable of straining my vision. Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army lower their flag as another day passes, before the eyes of hundreds of tourists and locals, and under the vacant gaze of Chairman Mao’s portrait.

My family leave the square past the guarded checkpoint standing opposite the national museum. We decide to make our way to the main shopping street following signs that mercifully have English translations under the Chinese characters. We merge into a crowd making the same journey, walking through an underpass beneath the ten-lane Chang’an Avenue. Hundreds of cars thunder overhead in each direction, mixing with the voice of the crowd that echoes off the featureless walls.

We emerge on the other-side of the avenue which at a glance has suddenly become more familiar from this vantage. I stop and look out into the parallel rivers of cars, as I come to realise the significance of this spot.

I look left up the road and see a hotel on the same side of the avenue, old with balconies, a rare feature for inner-city hotels nowadays. Balconies that were once connected to the hotel rooms of the world’s press as they witnessed with their eyes and cameras the chaos of the People’s Liberation Army turning their weapons on the people who instinctively retreated from the reoccupied square. Some are cut down in the attempt.

The avenue would lay dormant for some time, nobody would venture out, the message was clear. The press stayed put too, restricted by martial law. However when the army sought to reassert their control over the city they were obstructed. A lone man with plastic shopping bags in his hands stood resolute as a convoy of tanks bared down upon him. He would not let them past. He flung his arm, gesturing for them to leave. The tanks would manoeuvre awkwardly, wriggling almost comically as they tried to shake this man off but he would keep obstructing them; side-stepping into their path, clambering over the metal beast and banging his fist on its armour in rage.

The eyes and cameras of journalists from around the world witnessed every moment of it.  What the world would see would become ingrained in their psyche, a symbol of defiance in the face of oppression. The man who symbolised it remains unknown to them all, dragged into mystery by some anonymous figures soon afterwards.

As I focus my eyes through the intertwined flows of cars to where this earth-shaking event happened its silence shakes me. I look around at the crowd of locals, indifferent to the noise from the avenue, heading in their own directions as they go about their own lives.