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Belinda Kong is a professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture.
I grew up in Hong Kong. I came to the US when I was nine. My family was living in Miami when Tiananmen happened. So yeah, I was 13. I was a kid, you know? I remember—so my family was working-class at the time. My father was working in a Chinese restaurant as a waiter, and because of his health issues I would help him out on the weekends.
I remember seeing news footage of Tiananmen on TV. The two kids of the restaurant’s owner, they were a few years older than me so they were already in high school, and the son in particular I remember being quite upset and kind of talking about it in the restaurant.
ABC News, June 4, 1989
But I was a kid and I didn’t follow news, I didn’t follow politics at the time. I think when it happened, I really wasn’t very clued in. So for me Tiananmen was very, very belated in terms of significance.
NBC News, June 4, 1989
My mother died when I was young, when I was three, so I never really knew her, but she was born in Shanghai in 1945, so the year the war ended, to a Taiwanese mother. And so my father and his generation were all born in Malaysia, and it wasn’t until the next generation, like when they were a bit older as adults, that some of them then immigrated to Hong Kong. By the time of my generation all of us grew up in Hong Kong.
Paula Tsui
New & Selected
Songs
"Season of Wind"
Cantonese-language pop music from Hong Kong ("Cantopop") exploded in popularity in the 1980s—this song is from 1981.
Author and newspaper editor Jin Yong is best known for writing wuxia (martial arts) novels. He is the bestselling Chinese writer of all time.
When I was growing up in Hong Kong I always just thought of myself as a Hong Konger. So I think my frame of reference for Chinese-ness had been mostly Jin Yong, TVB, golden age Cantopop, a very specific historical social formation of Chinese-ness based in 1970s, 80s Hong Kong culture and the way it got exported into the diaspora in the 90s and early 2000s.
Founded in 1967, TVB is best known for airing serialized dramas, including adaptations of Jin Yong's works.
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My father and I and my brother moved from Hong Kong to America, then my father went back to Hong Kong, and then I ended living with my aunt, his younger sister, and her husband, who’s white and is a former Navy sailor. So, pretty Republican family, you know, conservative family. And it’s not a heavily kind of literate, or you know reading culture at home. So most of then my reference points for things outside of the home space would have come from school.
My default language for counting and for doing multiplications is in Cantonese, because that’s how I learned the multiplication table, it comes more naturally than English.
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I remember first entering into the American school system and just like sitting in class and not understanding anything. You know, taking those standardized tests and just like bombing the comprehension sections. And it wasn’t until I discovered reading literature for pleasure on my own—you know I started to, and I think I was a very spongy reader, like I just absorbed whatever style I read.
I got interested in creative writing for myself and actually for a long time, for that period I wanted to become a writer. And I actually didn’t read for pleasure as a kid in Hong Kong, so reading got associated with English for me and it was kind of my way of finding my way in the world. It was very disorienting and I kind of did feel like I was kind of closed in on myself for a lot of that period of my life, so reading was really like an escape. It was a way that I felt like, Oh, okay, now I’m kind of accessing this new world and new language.
Literature has been my path to finding so many things meaningful. I didn’t set out to be interested in Tiananmen, and it wasn’t like I was researching anything involved with democracy movements or protest movements or human rights. I think it really was through literature.
So I was a PhD student at Michigan, the University of Michigan, and writing my dissertation. But I came across Ha Jin’s The Crazed when it first came out, and what kind of captivated me at first about the novel was the plotline. It’s about this relationship between this Chinese graduate student and his mentor. And the mentor had a stroke and eventually died, but it coincided with Tiananmen as the backdrop.
It also coincided at the time when my dissertation adviser—who I also hugely admired—but before we could actually start work on the dissertation, he developed cancer and died. And so I think it kind of, I came across that book at a time when it just seemed eerily paralleling my own experience. Then I got interested in the book, and I started looking more into Tiananmen and started just kind of reading.
So Ha Jin entered into it, he was another discovery from that stage. Mo Yan at the time, The Republic of Wine had just been translated. I looked into Wang Shuo because my advisor had recommended it, and I discovered Gao Xingjian, whom I actually really dislike. I think dislike is like a very mild term for how I feel about him. We don’t need to get into that.
I remember just falling in love with Kingston and The Woman Warrior. I remember just being like completely swept off my feet. Just being kind of drunk on her style, and thinking, Okay, I need to write on this. I started to read kind of across the language line and to try to thread together Chinese lit and Chinese-American lit. So I think in a way Tiananmen became kind of the thread that I arrived at in order to tie those writers together.
So I would say maybe actually researching Tiananmen was maybe another kind of subtle turning point for me, where I started to kind of become more, or redefine Chinese-ness for myself in a way that centers on the mainland narrative. Which I really hadn’t done up until that point.
And the more I did, the more I got taken by, more than anything the idealism, like the goodness that drove people into wanting to march in support, the hunger strikes, doing what they could in support of the students’ cause. And I remember at one point reading an interview with Chai Ling, and I forget even what that source was now, where she said, Yeah, protest doesn’t work, a million of us marched in Beijing and it didn’t work.
"Commander-in-chief" of the student movement, Chai Ling was #4 on the government's most-wanted list after June 4th. She fled to Hong Kong and eventually settled in the US, where she now advocates for the abolition of the one-child policy. After her conversion to Christianity, she publicly forgave the perpetrators of the massacre.
And I remember just feeling like, just a kind of mix of emotions. Like, tremendous admiration for the outpouring of support on people’s part on the one hand, the belief that you could change society and the government by coming out. And yes, that tremendous sense of disillusionment from one of the leaders of the movement afterward.
I think the more, later on, even after or as I was writing the book, or even later after the book and I taught Tiananmen and amassed more materials on it, that has never faded with me, that I still remain very inspired by it as an example. I’m still not one of the people who are cynical about the movements. I still look back on it and I still believe in that kernel of idealism that drove people to march, to do something for a cause.