Can you remember a day before your life started? Born in 1992, I didn’t start remembering June 4th in 1989 until 2007.
4 June 2007 began as just another Monday. At my Beijing high school, every Monday we had a flag-raising ceremony on the sports field, a teenage version of what went on in Tiananmen Square every morning, amateur but just as dedicated. At the ceremony, a model student would be chosen to say a few words. When it rained we stayed in our classrooms, and the speech was broadcast on the classroom television through the internal network. On 4 June 2007, around late morning, it was raining in Beijing. Our school’s TV studio had nothing but a blue backdrop. It was dull to look at. Those speeches were always dull anyway.
Except on 4 June 2007. That day, the speaker was a boy a year younger than me. The tip of his hair was wet from walking in the rain. No one was paying attention to what he was saying on TV; some of my classmates played on their phones under the desk, some closed their eyes to get some rest. At one point his voice started to sound more excited, and just when that excitement alerted us to pay attention, the broadcast feed was cut off. The TV screen was blanketed in the same blue as the backdrop, and a white “no signal” block bounced around from edge to edge. We looked at each other, quietly asking each other, “what happened?” Right before he got cut off, the boy was saying something like “we should remember this day.” There was a mention of “six-four”, of “students”, words that meant nothing to us, and would continue to mean nothing if his speech didn’t end so abruptly.
Six-thousand students at my school, on June 4, 2007, went on to find out, I assume, individually and discreetly, what “six-four” meant. Google and YouTube were still available in China then. There, I learned about the Tank Man, Zhao Ziyang, a young man with glasses on a bicycle who said, in accented English, that “it is my duty”.
Since I left China in 2010, I’ve been free to remember June 4th every year. I wonder if my peers who never left the country, after the past decade, still remember it as much as I do. If they don’t, they are not to blame—it is not our memory to begin with, and they’ve lost the means to make it ours. But I can’t stop imagining what China would be like today if they were allowed to remember too.
In May, I received this code from TaoBao.
Was it a relief to know that TaoBao’s verification codes were not yet subject to censorship? If my high school friends saw it, would they even recognise it?
How to cite: Lin, Mengyin. “Just Another Day: Mengyin Lin.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/mengyin-lin.
Born and raised in Beijing, Mengyin Lin is a Chinese writer living in the United States. Mandarin is her mother tongue and she writes in English as her second language. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in swamp pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, Pleiades, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023; her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times. She is the winner of the 2023 Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the 2023 swamp pink Fiction Prize, and the 2022 Breakout Writers Prize. Visit her website for more information.
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