![]() ![]() After 11 years of constant trips to the police and the local court, Tang was given a photo by police of her son’s body, his face bruised and his nose covered in blood. The police never explained how Zhou died in their custody. As she recalls it, her father’s hair turned white overnight. “It was a sleepless night,” she told the Observer. Zhou’s sister, Guoyun, who was 20 at the time, remembers her parents sobbing in the next room. After two months, they received confirmation he had died. After a few days, the family learned he had been detained by police. And they were saying, a politician may have done a lot of things, but the only things that people remember most is when humanity shines.Amid the chaos, Tang went looking for her son, talking to his former classmates and their relatives. They are sharing memories of him now, her to me, and her friends to each other. He didn’t play the game with Howard, he didn’t race to the bottom. Howard at the time, as opposition leader, that was the first wave of anti-Asian sentiment. “His time was before John Howard’s time, and before Pauline Hanson’s time. It is something my mother feels only in retrospect. It will never be true.’ I think perhaps I was believing because of the those earlier events, the June 4th announcement.”Īs the tributes to Hawke keep flowing, his staunch opposition to racism recurs, because it feels like it has been missing. And all the other people just laughed at me, and said ‘How could you believe such a statement. “Even later on, when I was working in a cafe as a waitress, I heard the radio, he was saying ‘no Australian children should be living in poverty by 1990’ – I truly believed. “I immediately liked him so much,” she says. “Now is not the time,” I say).īut Hawke of course, is still the original, and a giant. (“I still preferred Keating, he was more serious and had more vision,” she says. ![]() This explains why she keeps mentioning Keating. She became a professor of economics at the University of Sydney. “I was almost 30 years old and wanted to do everything in one go.” She had waited for years with the uncertainty. I was born in 1994, and she went back to uni as a new mother. But that changed everything for us.”Īfter 1993, Paul Keating transferred the visas to permanent residency. When your degree is not recognised, you don’t know where to go. “At the time, a lot of people really, really felt we had no hope in our life. “Because our degrees weren’t recognised, we felt devalued,” she says. She had a bachelor’s in material engineering, but it did not matter. It is the bittersweet blessing of the second-generation migrant that I didn’t realise that until now, and took it for granted my entire life.Īt the time, degrees from Chinese universities were not recognised. The importance of tiny slips of paper with years of life on them. Migrants understand how precarious life can be at times like this. We were really in a dark tunnel for those six days, until he made the announcement.” “I felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel, for our lives. We had a very busy life! We were working two jobs. She can’t remember, and tells me to stop asking. Which allowed us to work, and Medicare access.” They let us stay for four years, unconditionally. ![]() “And that was very touching, we saw the human side of him. “At the time, immigration law was very strict, we saw no way we could stay in Australia and we didn’t know where to go. “When I walked off the dais,” Hawke said later, “I was told: ‘You cannot do that, prime minister.’ I said to them, ‘I just did. He cried and he didn’t consult the cabinet. And he told the country what they said, how the tanks “reduced them to pulp”. Hawke made the announcement six days later. ![]() That sort of feeling, you’re so scared, you try and hold on to your family members. I remember all of a sudden, it felt as if I was in a war. And when the students were occupying Tiananmen Square, we thought China had hope, and we might go back. “Out of the blue that morning the news came that tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, and there were shootings and there was bloodshed and all of a sudden we just felt, when we saw the news, our hearts just shrank all of a sudden. We thought China was going to move into democracy. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR had dissolved, Gorbachev visited China. “The students were occupying the square for a lengthy period, and the government didn’t do anything. “Before Tiananmen we found it very exciting,” she said. ![]()
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