- This is me.
Dressed in black for camouflage,
I thought would be night battles.
- [Young Rose] Somebody's dead!
- [Rose] Minutes before
this footage was shot
I just climbed over a tank.
- [Young Rose] Guns and sticks to us.
- [Male Reporter] What
did the students do?
- [Female Reporter] Do you
think anybody got killed?
- [Young Rose] Many students were killed.
- [Female Reporter] But,
how do you feel right now?
- Feel right now?
I'm very angry.
- 30 years on, I'm still angry!
Hey, I was 20 in 1989.
Imagine millions of people
were out in the streets
including kindergartners,
elementary school students
chanting slogans about
democracy and press freedom.
And the hunger strikers were
on hunger strike for weeks
and the government did not respond,
and I thought that was a historical event
I couldn't afford to miss.
By 1989, at least two
generations of Chinese
had already had a taste
of the western culture
because of the Chinese Communist
Party's open door policy,
and the students and the civilians
occupied Tienanmen Square for
almost two and a half months.
Some of them are like me,
are willing to die for democracy
until the troops and the tanks came in,
flattening the tents and the
Goddess of Democracy statue
and then beat us up and forced us out.
(yelling)
(birds chirping)
(piano playing)
30 years later, June 4th,
the date of the massacre still remains
the biggest taboo in China,
and people are blocked on the internet
from knowing the truth.
The Chinese government
deliberately has not
released the death tolls.
I suffer from PTSD,
and I've trained myself
to control the pain
and not to feel too guilty
because I suffer from survivor's guilt.
Art, to me, is my meditation.
A kind of force to help me set myself free
and to help me heal,
help me express,
help me channel my anger,
my frustration.
I moved to the United States
from Hong Kong in 2005.
I feel, as a survivor
who can write and speak English very well,
it's my duty to keep telling
the world what happened back then.
I'm an ordinary person,
a small potato,
but I won't shut up.
I will just keep talking about it,
raising the awareness of Tienanmen
and other human rights abuses
in China and elsewhere.
It's like the slogan in the subway,
"If you see something, say something."
Seriously, this is my slogan now.
If I see something, I
got to say something.
Well, any issue racism,
health care, gun violence.
I got to remind people,
Hey, I'm speaking up.
I'm okay, right?
Tienanmen could happen to
anybody, anywhere and at anytime.
(calm violin music)
