A fascinating subject we touched on in class that was a significant event between 1976 and today is the Tiananmen Massacre. It’s compelling how a government like China could conduct these horrible things and have the same leaders in place. I also thought it was essential to understand the whole history and the steps needed for something like this to happen. The most riveting part about learning about this event is how I perceived the events. Before this class, I only knew of the Massacre from one image: the man standing before the tank, but little did I know of its rich history. A picture is worth a thousand words, but there was way more to the image I didn’t understand, and I could learn the rich history.
When Americans hear the words “Tiananmen Massacre,” images pop into their head, like the man standing in front of the tanks or students parading the streets while military members watch over them. It is exciting how, as technology advances and history is made, it can be documented in other ways instead of through writing. An event like Tiananmen Square was able to blow up and become such a global concern because of technology. “Whatever genre we invoke, recollections of Tiananmen almost always employ a political lexicon, for above all, the episode has come to be enshrined as a political myth, the grand clash between totalitarianism and democracy at the near-end of the Cold War era”(Kong, 2012). With such significant trauma and horrible things conducted by the Chinese government, most people struggle to fathom reality. This creates first-hand accounts that could be a stretch from reality.
A study was performed to see what happened in these firsthand accounts and how realistic they are. The information was taken from “It should be clarified
from the outset that by “Tiananmen fictions” I refer not to works by those who personally participated in the demonstrations or witnessed the massacre and then converted their memories into autobiographical stories”( Kong, 2012). In some cases, people were fact-checked and only used their accounts from what they said on TV and heard on the radio. An example is two writers, Gao Xingjian and Ha Jin, who were not even in the PRC when the Tiananmen Square events occurred but still wrote books about accounts of that day. The events of Tiananmen Square, even 20 years later, we’re still spun off. The event has been clocked in myths, making it hard for people to understand what happened that day. “An overdependence on the witness can lead to a moral and intellectual complacency on our part, where we feel obviated from the need to probe further for history’s continuities, meanings that exceed mere facticity to impinge on our present and future” (Kong, 2012). The excerpt aims to question what has been said about Tiananmen Square and believes it to mess with its historical importance.
The article I found aims to look for Tiananmen Square’s truths and debunk false statements from the trauma theory. “While recent work by several critics adopting the overarching frame of historical trauma has been valuable for our understanding of twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture (Yang, Chinese; B. Wang; Berry), including the Tiananmen authors I address here (G.Xu; Schaffer and Smith; Schaffer and Song), my study aims to supplement
this perspective by drawing out the multifaceted and shifting complexities of Tiananmen fiction” (Kong, 2012). The diasporic impression is entangled with the non-witnessing theory. The problem with events that are recounted is the struggle to find if sources are credible and if they were there on the day of the events. The events of Tiananmen Square can be described as diasporic event that has been retold and rewritten multiple times to the point where fantasies were created about the events. These fantasies bend the truth and create fake scenarios because of traumatic events. The idea of a traumatic event happening to a person can be too much for the mind to handle, and people sometimes exacerbate the truth, leading to fantasies. In other cases, people hear witnesses.
Another critical aspect of these events is the language used. Tiananmen Square was the center of cultural production, with the spark of multiple countries discussing the possibilities. “I concentrate on the interlingual exchanges
between Chinese and English writings of Tiananmen because these are
the languages I work with, and because of the dominance of English in
the current international publishing industry” (Kong, 2012). After the events, the English language blew up in China. This occurred because of the mass amount of media that blew up.
Kong, Belinda. Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square : The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture. Asian American History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
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