Dr. Jones' Blog query

"Imagine that you are the daughter of one of Xiu Xiu’s female compatriots at the village where they started out. You were born in 1975 in Beijing, and you have grown up there hearing the story of Xiu Xiu from your mother and her friends and acquaintances. When the Tiananmen Square protests begin in 1989, you are thirteen. Do you take part in the protests? Why or why not? What are your thoughts about the protests against the backdrop of what you know of China’s past, especially the Cultural Revolution and Xiu Xiu’s experience?"

I did not see this film, but based on the film I watched (Chinese Seamstress) and what I know about this time in our history, I’m going to respond accordingly.

Even at the age of 13, I was very much a rebel in my own country. Having heard my parents talk about their many trips to China, if I’d been a young Chinese woman in 1986, I know, without a doubt, that I would have taken part in the protests, and knowing the gene pool from which I was created, my parents (quietly) would have been rooting for me to be among those fighting for human rights. I would not, however, have been as brave as the unknown rebel, also known as “tank man”.
(Source: http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/rebel.html
This is an excellent article.)

I suppose I'd have disappeared among the 1 million others but I would have been there, that's for sure.

A quote from the above link states, "But the man with the tank showed us another face, so to speak, of the camera and gave us an instance in which the image did not cut humanity down to size but elevated and affirmed it, serving as an instrument for democracy and justice. Instead of making the lofty trivial, as it so often seems to do, the image made the passing eternal and assisted in the resistance of an airbrushed history written by the winners." I couldn't have said it this eloquently as a 13-year-old, but I'd have been feeling it just as intensely.


This event/picture is particularly symbolic, representing the dynamic thinking of the Chinese youth/rebels and the static, rigid, controlling ideas of the Chinese Communist Party.
After chatting with college-aged students in Beijing in about 1996, my parents were amazed how outspoken these young Chinese people were, while they were working in hotel lobbies or in restaurants. They did 2 things that surprised my parents: one: they were brave enough to speak out to Westerners about their optimism for a life better than the generations before them and two: they spoke out about how opposed they were to communist thinking. They even admitted that talking about these things was such a risk because the Chinese government was known to plant spies all over to catch young rebels when making such remarks. One young woman even asked my parents if they were spies. She still expressed her optimism and dislike for the communistic thinking and doing.

Since I saw the movie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, the seamstress strikes me as one of the young Chinese women my parents engaged in conversation. She had such a free spirit and once she became “educated,” we know that she’d go forth into the world and make a difference. If I’d have been her young friend, or Xiu-Xiu’s friend, I might have been a bit too young to have encountered Westerners like my parents, but I’d still have been there in my thinking and when I got a bit older, I’d have been there in protest as well.