Book Review - Tiananmen Square

In China, any reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, 35 years ago this summer, is forbidden. There are no official acts of remembrance; the identity and fate of the student who famously stood alone in front of a line of tanks remain unknown. 

Lai Wen — who is based in the UK but uses a pseudonym because she still visits China — was there during those events, and her autobiographical debut novel culminates in an extraordinary account of the student protests. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, Lai and her family are living in a working-class part of Beijing. Lai’s mother is sharp-tongued, while her cartographer father is meek and unassuming. We learn that he was persecuted during Mao’s cultural revolution. One day he takes the teenaged Lai to a covert “memory wall”, where “people put up letters . . . Accounts. Stories of what happened to them.” When Lai returns to find the wall smashed to rubble, she muses, “This was life’s inevitable corollary; that imagination would always be papered over by propaganda, that the poets and peacemakers would always be stamped out by those who had force on their side.” 

Lai first incurs the wrath of the authorities as an eight-year-old child, when she and a group of friends ignore the curfew imposed on Beijing residents for the visit of a high-ranking US official. Lai and another boy, Gen, are picked up by police and treated brutally. The shattering of their world serves as a bond — “Gen and I had entered that police building together” — and instils in Lai an all-consuming fear that never really goes. 

At 13, Lai is befriended by an old bookseller, who introduces her to a translation of Orwell’s 1984: “Perhaps [he] had wanted to fill my adolescent life with the wonder books can bring. Or perhaps he wanted me to make the connection between the society in which I lived and the world Orwell evoked.” But despite all that she’s experienced, Lia believes the oppression endured by her father’s generation “belonged to a past that I was too young to have known”. 

When they meet again at senior school, Lai and Gen start a relationship, both enrolling at Peking University, a place where “difference and diversity could be housed together, allowed to breathe and flourish”. Lai wins a scholarship, but cannot afford to live on campus. She watches in dismay as Gen becomes involved in student politics and they drift apart. Yet Lai begins to find her own way when she is befriended by the charismatic Anna, whose drama troupe stages guerrilla performances around campus, including Brecht’s Mother Courage as part of the burgeoning student protests in the spring of 1989; Lai is tasked with adapting the play. The courage of the protesters is conveyed in vivid prose: Lai’s fear is “overcome by this rushing sense of solidarity and compassion, for these were young people with little power, prepared to risk everything”. 

Tiananmen Square is a deeply humane account of a horrific act of state violence that the Chinese authorities have attempted to erase from history. As well as being a compelling coming-of-age tale, it’s a powerful act of remembrance. The author reminds us of a fundamental truth about the student campaign, sometimes forgotten: “We wanted reform, yes, but the majority of us were patriots too.”

Originally published by the Financial Times