Death of a Symbol

"Are you with VOA?" The young man was dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt, the jacket open and pulled back by the shoulders of the people in the dense crowd around us.

VOA - Voice of America. People had been asking me about VOA and the BBC for days now, as everyone seemed to be listening to these shortwave stations to get acurate news about the situation in Beijing. I had to disappoint the student like all the others that had made the same assumption because of my foreign face.

In front of us, as we had both turned back to face the roadway of the Garden Bridge, was a spectacle as it had not been seen in many years in Shanghai. Hundreds of thousands of protestors were streaming into the city's downtown, crossing Garden Bridge in one long marching column. The march was surrounded by essentially everyone else in the city, spectators crammed onto sidewalks everywhere.

Protestors and spectators at the north end of the Garden Bridge

These marches had been going on for days, but this morning, on the 20th of May 1989, the government had declared martial law in Beijing and today's march was by far the largest. Shanghai was completely shut down and everyone was out in the streets.

I had slowly worked my way back towards my hotel near the far end of the bridge and I had gone upstairs to watch the march from the windows of the dormitory where I was staying. As I stood at the open window and watched, a group of students in the dense throng of protestors appeared from around the corner, holding up a brilliantly white Statue of Liberty, with her raised arm holding a white torch.

The Statue of Liberty as it is disappearing - in hindsight, with some irony - behind the Russian Consulate

It was as if a shockwave had passed through the crowd below me, as all heads swung around and the voices were raised as people shouted slogans and cheered - the statue had become the focal point of the crowd.

Here, the Statue of Liberty was not a symbol for the USA or for capitalism or the western way of life - none of the protestors would have been able to define any of these things accurately... no, it was a symbol for the freedom of expression. These protestors had found a common voice and they were exhilarated with this newfound power - they could make their government listen!

They were so incredibly eager to express themselves and their question to any foreigner they could find - "Are you from VOA?" - showed that they full understood that this newfound power only works if their voices are heard everywhere.

And here they were. Holding up a copy of a statue that none of them had ever been able to see in person, a symbol for their freedom to express themselves.

A month later I had to wonder what had happened to the students that had created the statue and that had marched it through Shanghai. They might have paid with their lives for this one moment of freedom and glory.

I wonder now, 36 years later, what statue a future generation of protestors in some faraway land will hold up.

And what statue should my son hold up? It seems increasingly likely that the kids of the US will have to claw back their basic rights to free expression, their rights to decide their own fate and what happens to their minds and bodies.

What statue will they hold up?