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Jump to navigationJump to searchTiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes by Lun Zhang, Adrien Gombeaud, Ameziane and Edward Gauvin (translator) (view source)
Revision as of 19:28, 19 May 2020
, 19:28, 19 May 2020no edit summary
I never really followed the events of Tiananmen Square with much attention when it was playing out – someone in the second half of their teens has other priorities, you know. I certainly didn't know of the weeks of protests and hunger strikes from the students before the massacre and the birth of the Tank Man image, I didn't know how the area had long been a venue for political protest, and I didn't know more than a spit about the people involved on either side. This book is practically flawless in giving a general browser's context for the whole season of protests back in 1989.
It's that context that leaves me to agree with the foreword, that this is not an autobiography, neither of its author nor his''fictional twin''. But it's by no means a worthy, wordy background to it all, for we see the extended activities of the students. We see them unable to attend the state funeral of someone they held dear (''...the people could not enter the Great Hall of the People…''), we see the rabble-rousing editorials in the state newspaper that was the most rabble-y thing about the whole affair, and we see the whole protest begin to wind down, just before the tanks come in.
The design of this graphic novel, a little staid and journalistic at first look, I thought, is ideal too – showing a fine balance between the personal and the political, between the objective and the subjective, between the reportage and the memoir. But it's the text that did it for me, hitting what seemed a perfect tone in conveying the whole thing. For a translation based on the memories of someone speaking their second language, it really works. I expected the horrors typical of books like this, as shown in this oh-too-recognisable extract from elsewhere:-
Character One –''I shall tell you something obvious in the full knowledge you know it, because the author doesn't know how else to tell the reader it.''
Character Two – ''I shall respond in suitable fashion to pretend this exposition did not happen, and that we are conversing like real characters would.''
