Trackbacks from the Past...
Recently I discovered a whole bunch of Hong Kong bloggers who are like long-lost friends to me in the way they write and feel about Hong Kong.... "Omigod these people are ME" was my first reaction when I started reading their posts and profiles. All these bloggers have the great good fortune to be real life friends with each other - I know this because all their blogs are linked (that's how I found them one by one, by clicking on their links) and the fact that many of the posts on these blogs referred to the things they did together, as well as the messages they leave on each others' blog. It's almost enough to make me green with envy because these people would have been my very dear friends too if I had the fortune to grow up in Hong Kong with them, for the simple reason that they think and feel about events in Hong Kong and the world pretty much as I do and their passion for art and literature and the fact that they are sensitive to, and are earnest about, social and political issues of the day.
Reading their posts have been opening up a whole new world for me, helping me to connect with Hong Kong in a way that no email/letter correspondences with my childhood pals ever could. This is especially precious to me because I have been away from Hong Kong for so long - almost seven years, in fact. (It's pretty scary when I do count up the years - I feel so old... and so out of touch almost...).
I made some comments on SeeChuen's blog in particular that I want to link back here, for they captured some of my precious memories and feelings about Hong Kong...
Trackback URL : http://www.seechuen.com/blog/bblog/trackback.php/328/17612/"Like many of the posters here, the Tianamen Square massacre is not something that I could easily forget, especially because I was at such a young age (11) at the time.
I remember the 1 million people march in support of those student protestors, the patriotic and pro-democracy (these two concepts are not mutually-exclusive you know) song that we learnt from our teachers in school (anyone remember the "Love Freedom, For Freedom" song?), all the white-on-black stickers around the lifts in the lobby of my housing estate, the t-shirts with the pictures of the student leaders' faces on them, the "Statue of Liberty" made by the student protestors themselves (the workmanship of which I remember as being quite rubbish frankly)....
More importantly however, I remember how shocked I was, how we all were, by the actual massacre of the student protestors by their own government. In addition to the above iconic scene, I remember the sound tapes from someone inside the Square that captured the panicked screaming of the students as the tanks began to arrive. I remember how the news described black smokes rose from the Square shortly after the massacre, that the many many students trapped in the Square were simply vanished, as no coffins were brought out, only smoke... I remember how the government tried to clamp down on any news coming out of Beijing. I remember the four-word editorial in a Leftist newspaper, that gave voice to the speechlessness we all felt. I remember how there was no schools on that day.
The key thing I remember, was the deep deep shame, even as an eleven year old, of being Chinese. "Chinese won't fight Chinese" is something that I was taught, but it clearly wasn't the case there. For the government to turn on its people in such a brutal way, no amount of white-washing of history afterwards would cover those "blood-soaked colours"....
History is often a story of the victors. To bid us to forget brutal history, as recent as something that happened only 17 years ago, is to bid us to forget that there are multiple sides to historical events. That's the reason why we must not forget June the Fourth. The state might like us all to gloss over that black dot of history in building up its narrative of a stronger and better China, but to forget history as sordid as that of the Tianamen Square massacre to fit historical events into this state-sanctioned narrative is to deny the sacrifices made by the students and residents of Beijing for a better China - one that is progressive and humane precisely because it does not forget."
Trackback URL : http://www.seechuen.com/blog/bblog/trackback.php/311/18395/"But I'm soooo jealous about all the books you have. I kind of pride myself on keeping up with reading quality Chinese lit even though I live overseas (Ireland to be precise), but I haven't got any of the books that you've up on your bookshelf. The closest I came to is Eileen Chang's, I have about five of her books but not "First Pot of Incense"... This is one of the times when I feel I really miss HK, wondering what I could have been reading all these years if I hadn't moved overseas....."
Labels: blogging, comments on others, Hong Kong, politics, reading