MCLC: Stories of Tiananmen

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: Stories of Tiananmen
***********************************************************

Source: China Digital Times (6/25/12):
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/06/that-year-these-years-stories-tiananme
n/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+chinadigitalt
imes%2FbKzO+%28China+Digital+Times+%28CDT%29%29

That Year, These Years: Stories of Tiananmen
By Li Xuewen
Translated by Little Bluegill

Original text here 
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2012/06/%E9%82%A3%E4%B8%80%E5%B9%B4%EF
%BC%8C%E8%BF%99%E4%BA%9B%E5%B9%B4%EF%BC%9A%E4%B8%8E%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E6%9C
%89%E5%85%B3%E7%9A%84%E6%95%85%E4%BA%8B/.

That Year, I was twelve years old and in the fifth grade. The happiest
part of my day: I would come home from school, turn on our battered
black-and-white TV and listen to my older brother, who was a student at
the local teacher’s college, passionately detail the day’s happenings in
Beijing. Scenes of waving flags, young faces and screeching ambulances
flashed across the screen, brimming with energy and a feeling of meaning
and weight.

That Year, the summer was especially hot.

After school, my friends and I walked through the pockmarked roads of our
village. We no longer goofed around like before. By that time, a few of us
buddies had started to talk about the big affairs of the country. “Let’s
write a letter to Zhao Ziyang,” I suggested.  My friends replied, “You
write it. Your essays are very well written.” But I had no idea what I
should write. I just had this vague notion that we should do something.

My father came home from our county seat. He said that someone had tried
to hand him a flyer as he was riding his bike down the street. He didn’t
take it. It was not long before he had peddled away.

Father was the principle of the village elementary school. In the past, he
had never been admitted to the Party because of his poor family
background. He cried loudly about this in the past. He was afraid.

Later, the youthful energy on TV became a bloody scream.

July was torrid. My older brother, who had graduated by then, hadn’t come
home.  Father became worried and went to the school to look for him.

As Father stepped off the bus, the head of my brother’s department was
there waiting for him. The department head’s first words when they met
were, “Your son was sent to be re-educated.”  When he heard this, Father
collapsed on the ground, foaming at the mouth.

Holding my father in his arms, the department said over and over, “It’s
okay. It’s okay.”

When Father came home, he told the family that my brother was a student
leader and had taken students to protest in the streets. Five students
from his college were sent to be re-educated, and my brother was one of
them. He would probably not receive his diploma and wouldn’t get a work
assignment.

I had a vague sense of pride for my brother, but the despair in Father’s
voice troubled me.

A month later, my brother came home. He wasn’t the cheerful person he once
was. Rather, he was silent. Everyday he would wander around the village
fields, brooding with a furrowed brow. No one knew what he was thinking
about.

Father forced my brother to go to the County Board of Education every day
to inquire about work assignments. My brother was the first person from
our village to attend college, and Father had endured many hardships.
Father wanted my brother to leave the village and get a job.

My brother often quarreled with Father. Later on, my brother was finally
assigned a job and went to town to be a middle school teacher. Eventually
he tested into graduate school, got his doctorate and became an assistant
professor at a prestigious university.

Some time later, as my brother and I were reminiscing about the past, he
told me that during the protests, they were passing a military district.
Many of the students wanted to rush in, but as student leader my brother
did everything in his power to stop them.

Perhaps it is because of this that he was eventually assigned a job.

By chance, I once ran into the head of my brother’s department. He told
me, “Your father is a good person. Your brother and the others are
hot-blooded youth.”

That summer, something took root in the heart of a twelve-year-old boy.

The memories of that year influenced the rest of my life.

One day in 1995 when I was at university, I ran into an old classmate and
started talking about Tiananmen. He mentioned he had a whole batch of
photos from that time, all taken by his brother. I was excited and asked
him to bring them for me to see. I saw the Goddess of Democracy standing
gloriously aloft the square, and a sea of people wearing white bandanas.
“These pictures are treasures. You must take good care of them,” I
implored my classmate. He didn’t seem to feel the same
way. “If you like them, take them.” I hurriedly stored them away, as if I
had discovered rare jewels.

After graduation, I was assigned to be an elementary school teacher back
home. Once, as my colleagues and I were chatting about the events of That
Year, a female colleague noticed how impassioned I was on the subject. She
snorted, “You’re so excited. You know, in ’89 I was a senior in high
school. None of us could take the college entrance exams because of the
student protests. I went back home to work on the farm. Now I’m just a
private tutor.”

I was speechless. It was only then I realized the events of that year had
altered her entire life.

It was also at that time I began spending entire nights listening to the
Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. I heard many more Tiananmen stories.
I also began reading books like He Qinglian’s The Trap of Modernization
and the Liu Junning’s edited volume Public Forum. I became a liberal.

In 1998 my younger brother opened a bookstore. He sold pirated books from
Hong Kong and Taiwan that he bought at a market in Wuhan, including titles
Like The Real June Fourth, Tiananmen and the memoirs of people like Wang
Dan and Feng Congde. Those books sold like crazy. Most of the people
buying them were retired workers from state-owned enterprises. They never
haggled. My younger brother was quite brazen about it too, strutting about
as he put those books on the shelves. Eventually, a teacher reported our
store in a letter to the Hubei Daily, saying we were selling vast numbers
of reactionary books.

People from the cultural center stormed in holding copies of the Hubei
Daily and confiscated all of these books.

Since we couldn’t sell them in the open, we started selling them
discreetly. In the winter, my younger brother and I hid copies of the
illegal books in our thick cotton coats. Whenever an old worker would come
asking about them, we would slide the books out of our coats make a sales
pitch. We sold many books this way, and my younger brother was very
pleased with the money he was earning.

It wasn’t long before my brother came back from a trip to Wuhan looking
very dejected. The book market had been shut down for selling pornography.
We had no way to bring in new copies.

Our store never sold those books again.

Around the dinner table one day, we were discussing June Fourth when my
brother-in-law, who worked as a local government official, said, “You read
those reactionary books every day, crying out for justice, but do you ever
think about what it would be like if the crackdown never happened? What
about this decade of economic growth and the life our family enjoys today?
Stability trumps all!”

I left the table, furious.

On June 4, 1999, I fasted and wrote an essay titled “Thoughts on the Tenth
Anniversary of June Fourth.” This marked my passage into spiritual
maturity.

In 2000 I moved to Hangzhou. Living in a dormitory at Zhejiang University,
I took the graduate school exams. On the school web forum, students were
downloading a documentary titled Tiananmen, which had gone viral.

In Hangzhou I met Fu Guoyong
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/fu-guoyong/>. In his simple apartment,
I listened to him recall his story. That Year, he joined the student
movement. He gave a public speech on Tiananmen Square. He met his wife.
Then he was arrested, put on a train, shackled from hand to foot, thrown
in jail. His mother went gray overnight. His wife, who was a top student
at Beijing Normal University, never gained recognition at school because
of her anti-revolutionary family. He showed me pictures of his wife and
child visiting him in jail, the three of them with pure, resplendent
smiles on their faces.

It was the most beautiful photo I had ever seen.

One day in 2002, a friend arranged for me to visit the student leader Wang
Youcai <http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/wang-youcai/>. Wang was sent to
jail for organizing the Democratic Party of China. His wife, Hu Jiangxia,
was at home. Making wide detours to avoid being followed, my friend and I
wound our way to Wang Youcai
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/wang-youcai/>’s house in Hangzhou’s
Emerald Garden neighborhood. At last we met Hu Jiangxia and had a  lively
conversation. Not long afterwards, I heard Wang and Hu filed for divorce.
Some time after that, Wang was sent to the United States through
negotiations between the Chinese and American governments. Eventually, Hu
Jiangxia also made her way to the U.S.. I heard that they remarried.

In Hangzhou, there was a boss of a large company who asked to borrow my
copy of Wang Dan’s prison memoirs. He kept it for a long time. Only later
did I realize that in That Year he had been the chairmen of Zhejiang
University’s autonomous student council. The summer of That Year, one of
his toes was broken off. He changed course and went on to become a
successful businessman.

In 2003 my friend and I began hosting an academic salon at Sanlian
Bookstore in Hangzhou. According to Fu Guoyong, this was the first time
since the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement that an open, grassroots
activity was publically hosted in Hangzhou. We invited Fu Guoyong to give
a lecture. That was the first time he spoke at a public gathering since
leaving prison.

In 2005, I started graduate school in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan
Province. During class one day, the teacher suddenly began speaking to us
dozen or so students about June Fourth. He said some of the events of That
Year were perfectly pure, others extremely foul. Our teacher was a
graduate student in Beijing at the time of the crackdown. He personally
experienced all that happened that summer. I was shocked to hear this. He
wasn’t merely a professor. He was the principal of the school—a bona fide
official. This was the first time I heard someone from inside the system
speak openly about June Fourth in a classroom.

After class, I excitedly shared my own June Fourth story with several
classmates. A few female students born in the 80s listened to me
wide-eyed, as if they were listening to fantastical stories from some
strange, far-off land. “Is it true, what he’s saying?” they asked the
class monitor, who had been standing nearby listening. He nodded his head.
“It’s true. It’s all true. I was there at Tiananmen at the time. I even
slept there a few nights.” Our class monitor was born in 1968. He had
taken part in June Fourth.

Still, those young classmates couldn’t believe it. “How come we never knew
anything about this before?” they asked with a sigh.

My roommate Old Yang was a graduate student in the Fine Arts Department.
He was born in the 70s, a party member and a university lecturer. One
night, as we lay awake talking, he told me about a student from his
village who went to Tsinghua University. During June Fourth he
disappeared. Twenty years had passed, and no one knew anything about what
had happened to him. If he was alive, no one had seen his face; if he was
dead, no one had viewed the body. He was the only student from that
village to ever attend a prestigious university. “I hate the Communist
Party,” Old Yang spat.

That Year, a professor from my department supported the student protesters
in Yunnan. He shared with me what happened when he lead the students. They
scaled the university walls and took to the streets, shouting protest
slogans. After the June Fourth Massacre, the professor organized Yunnan
Province’s first protest march. As autumn came, his actions caught up with
him. He was suspended from teaching and put under investigation. With
documents piled before him, his investigators demanded he admit his
crimes. His students protected him, saying they marched of their own
volition, without any encouragement from their teacher. He kept his job,
but he began to fall in love with one female student after another. He
divorced several times, becoming dissolute. Although he should have been
made department head long ago, he was never promoted. Once, at a banquet,
he berated the Party in front of all the university leaders. “The Chinese
Communist Party should have collapsed back in 1989! They should have died
out a long time ago, damn it!”

The room fell silent.

The other professors say he turned into a different person after June
Fourth, cursing the Communist Party and womanizing his students.

My graduate adviser was an old professor and a member of the Democratic
Party. After June Fourth, the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee organized
a forum with democracy advocates. “I’ve never understood how June Fourth
was handled,” he said in a speech there. “Why did the government have to
do what it did?” Twenty years on, he still couldn’t make sense of it.

In 2009, I graduated and stuck around campus to take the university’s
employment test. I received the top score. The Yunnan Security Agency
opened a political investigation on me because I had previously published
a few articles on foreign websites. That was the first time I ever dealt
with security officials, and it filled me with dread.

A deputy director from the security agency asked me, “What are your
thoughts on June Fourth?” I paused, then said, “June Fourth doesn’t
concern my generation. It’s very complicated.” He stared at me for a long
time, then retorted, “You mean you don’t think the decisive action taken
by the Party in that year was the reason for our prosperity and success
today?”

I remembered the argument with my brother-in-law. They had the same
logic—the same inhumane logic. I stayed silent. I didn’t dare refute him,
afraid of losing my chance at a teaching position.

Regardless, I failed to pass my political investigation. The university
Party committee rejected my application on the grounds that I “did not
fervently love my country and socialism.”

To this day, I still feel guilty for the cowardice I showed when
confronted by the stability maintenance
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/stability-maintenance/> system. June
Fourth is not just a matter for the generation that came to age in 1989.
It’s a matter that relates to every person on Chinese soil. It is blood
spilled by tyranny. It is an open wound on the body of this nation that
will never close. Whatever you think of June Fourth, you cannot have a
muddled opinion on it, you cannot make haphazard excuses for it. You must
say no to atrocity, you must say no to the truth written in blood and the
lies written in ink. One’s opinion of June Fourth is the most basic
measure of the morality of every Chinese person, the touchstone that
torments every Chinese person’s conscience and humanity. Any action or
expression that crosses that bottom line is an injustice that violates
one’s very conscience.

After my expulsion from the university in 2009, I made my way to Beijing.
Since then, I have met many teachers and friends, and I heard even more
stories of Tiananmen.

When I first arrived in Beijing, I became a reporter for a
Party-affiliated magazine. One day, an older female colleague recounted a
story from her university years. It was the early 90s and a soldier had an
eye for her, was courting her, but she had no feelings for him. One day,
as they were walking together, the soldier asked her, “Do you college
students still hate us soldiers?” She didn’t respond. The soldier
continued, “I didn’t fire my gun.”

Another female colleague of mine, born in the 80s, held an advanced degree
from Wuhan University. Her boyfriend was an army officer. One day she
heard some of us chatting about June Fourth and was shocked. When she got
home that night she asked her boyfriend about it. He told her that the
guns were not loaded that day. She called me late that night and yelled,
“Did people really die or not? Who should I believe?” I answered her
question with a question of my own. “If there were no bullets in their
guns, how did all those students and ordinary citizens die?” After arguing
for half an hour she still didn’t know if she should trust her boyfriend
or me.

She broke up with her boyfriend. I don’t know the reason why.

In a restaurant in Beijing’s Haidian District, professor Yu Shuo, who had
arrived in Beijing from Hong Kong, shared with me her own June Fourth
story. At that time she was a young lecturer in Renmin University’s
sociology department. She and Liu Xiaobo
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/liu-xiaobo/> came from the same
hometown and were friends. That whole summer, she carried a camera and
tape recorder around Tiananmen Square, interviewing students,
intellectuals and city residents. She wanted a record of everything. On
the night of June 3, she was preparing to evacuate the square with the
last wave of students. Liu Xiaobo
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/liu-xiaobo/> had told her his bag was
left at a corner of the Monument to the People’s Heros, with his money and
his passport that he would need to travel to the U.S. still inside. While
the students were retreating, Yu Shuo ran over to the monument to retrieve
the bag, but a student patrol grabbed her and threw her to the ground,
yelling, “Do you want to die?” After she returned back to campus, she
showed her photos to a leader from her department. One of the photos
showed the body of a student who had been beaten to death near the gate of
China University of Political Science, his brains spilling onto the
ground. The department leader began to wail. He grabbed a pile of blank
letterhead and stamped them all with his official seal. He gave them to Yu
Shuo, saying, “Child, run away, quickly. This is all I can do to help
you.” Yu told me she’d always remember that department leader, who risked
a great deal to help her. It’s ordinary people like him whose souls shine.

With these letters in hand, she scrambled her way to Guangdong and then
Shekou 
<http://maryannodonnell.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/the-shekou-tempest-transla
tion/>, preparing to look for Yuan Geng. She hid on and island for half a
month, then went to Hong Kong as the first person rescued through
Operation Yellowbird <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird>.
She later moved to France, where she married a French citizen. She earned
a Ph.D. in anthropology and became a professor. Today, she works to
facilitate academic exchange between China and Europe.

While visiting his home in the Beijing suburb of Songzhuang, Yu Jianrong
shared his own story with me. During June Fourth, Yu was in his hometown
of Hengyang in Hunan Province, where he worked as a secretary for the
municipal government. Yu had a classmate, the child of high-ranking
cadres, who was a flag bearer on Tiananmen Square. After June Fourth his
classmate fled home and Yu found him a place to stay. Finally, security
officials found Yu. His classmate was left unscathed, but they
investigated Yu. The investigation scared Yu enough for him to quit his
job and become a businessman. He went on to earn over two million yuan,
after which he moved to Taiwan and became an academic, earning his
doctorate. He eventually became a well-known scholar. June Fourth changed
his entire life.

Late one night in a Beijing bar, the artist Gao Huijun shared his June
Fourth story with me. He was a college student at the time. On the night
of June 3, Gao and his classmates were on Changan Avenue, bullets
screeching past their ears. Suddenly, a stray bullet bounced off the
ground and struck one of his classmates in the chest. He died at the
scene. He collapsed to the ground, then crawled for a few hundred meters
before falling still. Old Gao spoke breathlessly, as if it were
transpiring before him. A crystal teardrop flickered from behind his thick
eyeglasses.

Once during a banquet at a restaurant near West Fourth Ring Road in
Beijing, my good friend Wen Kejian introduced me to a middle-aged man
sitting at the table. “That’s Ma Shaofang,” Wen said. Stunned, I asked,
“You’re Ma Shaofang from the June Fourth wanted list?” Ma, nodding his
head, replied, “I never thought, after twenty years, there would still be
young people like you who remember me.” I immediately took up my glass and
toasted him, saying, “There are certain people and certain things that are
unforgettable.”

Ma Shaofang was the first student leader I had ever met. After his release
from prison, Ma became a businessman. He is staunchly determined never to
leave China.

In Tianjin’s TEDA Arts Center, I once conversed with the renowned
collector Ma Huidong <http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/ma-huidong/> over
drinks. As the wine warmed us up, Mr. Ma told me that after he graduated
from China University of Political Science in the late 80s, he entered a
re-education center. After he’d been washed clean, he escaped from the
center and began doing business. Twenty years after June Fourth, he’s
still never been back to Tiananmen Square. Whenever he’s about to pass it
in his car, he takes a detour. “After the gunfire of June Fourth, reform
died,” Mr. Ma said.

The famous philosopher Li Ming
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/li-ming/> is my good friend, despite
our age difference. In the 80s, before his hair had turned gray, he was
already known for his work on the editorial board of the Walking Towards
the Future series. He told me he was the research director of Youth
Political College during June Fourth. After the crackdown, he was fired
from his job, then arrested. In all these years, he never received a
single penny from the Communist Party. His pay suspended, Li Ming scraped
by with translation and writing.

At the artists village in Songzhuang, I once shared drinks and
conversation with the renowned poet Mang Ke. He told me how he returned to
Beijing from abroad in early 1989 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of
Today magazine. Along with Bei Dao and others like him, he added his name
to an open letter calling for the release of Wei Jingsheng. After June
Fourth, Mang Ke was detained at his home. A black bag was placed over his
head and he was taken to a place he didn’t know. After two days, he was
released. The people who took him said he was detained for his own safety.
Afterwards, Mang Ke relied on painting to make a living.

Once at a teahouse, I spoke with a middle-aged businessman who had served
twenty years in the army. When the topic of June Fourth came up, he
couldn’t stop talking. At that time, he worked in the basement of the
Tiananmen Square command center. He was in charge of intelligence
collection. Hundreds of informants were sent out from the center every
day. Every avenue and alley of Beijing was closely monitored. He said
during that time, Mayor Chen Xitong
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/chen-xitong/>would visit the command
center almost daily.

Mr. Yu, a publisher in Beijing, is a friend from my hometown. He also told
his June Fourth story to me.  That Year, he was teaching middle school in
a remote village in Hubei Province. He was extremely depressed. During his
time there, he wrote an essay titled “Where China Is Going?” He made ten
mimeographed copies and gave them to his classmates and friends. As a
result, he was reported to the authorities and arrested. He spent a year
in a detention center before being released without ever having stood
trial. “China’s detention centers are the cruelest places on earth,” he
told me. “I crawled out of there.” After he left, he learned his
grandmother, whom he loved dearly, passed away the very day he was
detained. Some time later, his wife divorced him. He began to wander
aimlessly.

The author Li Jianmang lives in Europe. I once met him during one of his
trips back to Beijing. During June Fourth, a classmate of his, He Zhijing,
who also happened to be the cousin of Beijing Film Academy professor He
Jian, went missing. Later at the hospital, Li was saw He Zhijing’s body.
He had been beaten to death. Li Jianmang said before all this his father
wrote him a letter. “Don’t be a hero. When you hear the guns, hit the
ground,” his father wrote. “My son, you do not know their ruthlessness.”

After the advent of Weibo I made many new friends online, some famous and
some not. One of them is a Beijing girl named Keke who maintains a
government website. She told me that during June Fourth she was in second
grade. Keke’s birthday happens to fall on June 3. That Year on June 3, her
family celebrated her birthday at her grandmother’s house. Afterward she
walked from Hujialou to Gongzhufen. On the road, she saw buses on fire,
roadblocks, twisted bicycle frames and pedestrians navigating their way
through the carnage. It was a terrifying, unforgettable scene. Memories of
June Fourth have lingered in her mind ever since. After getting on Weibo,
she frequently posted images and documents from June Fourth. Her account
was quickly shut down. She is reincarnated
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Reincarnate> all the time.

My friend Hai Tao is a writer from the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou. He
recalled to me that after June Fourth, the older men and women of town
were sent to downtown Beijing everyday to dance and sing patriotic songs.
When they became tired they wanted to buy popsicles, but the streets
peddlers wouldn’t let them buy any. “You have no conscience,” the peddlers
would say.

*                    *                    *

There are still many stories of Tiananmen to tell.

That year, the author Ye Fu worked as a police officer in Hainan. Facing
the massacre, he cast away his uniform, submitted his resignation letter
and bid farewell to the system forever. Then he was reported to the
authorities in Wuhan and imprisoned. Then his mother drowned herself in
the Yangtze River. Then he wrote his famous work, My Mother on the Yangtze…
That year, my friend Du Daobin left his hometown for the provincial
capital of Wuhan to participate in the protests. Then he published some
critical political commentary online. Then he was arrested. Then he became
a famous dissident…

That year, many parents couldn’t find their children, many families lost
their loved ones. That year, many talented people left the country, many
people died away from home, never to return. That year, China became a
broken world, a world of life and death, a watershed. That year, China’s
twentieth century came to an end.

One afternoon in Spring 2010, I passed through the heart of Beijing on the
subway, traveling from the eastern suburbs to the western neighborhood of
Muxidi. Sitting on the side of the road in Muxidi, I thought about all the
blood and tears shed some twenty years ago right there. I thought about
the Tiananmen Mothers. I thought about the countrymen we lost forever. For
a very, very long time, with a heavy heart, choking back tears, silently,
I sat there until dusk. That afternoon, I quietly wrote this poem:

 
At Muxidi, Thinking of Someone
—for the Mother Ding Zilin

Today, I am at Muxidi
Thinking of someone
I don’t know him
But I will remember him forever
At this moment, I miss him
Like I would miss a long lost brother
That was twenty-one years ago
Right here, at Muxidi
An unforgettable place

That merciless summer
A single bullet
Passed through his body
His sixteen-year-old body
He let out his final scream
And then bid farewell to this world
This evil, gory and lie-filled world

He left
This sixteen-year-old youth
This eternal youth
He’ll never grow up
But we, in this world without him
Grow older by the day
Until the present

All these years
Seem like a century
No, many centuries
We watch ourselves grow old
But are powerless
We tell ourselves, we are alive
We need to live
And we tell ourselves we need to make peace with this world
But we know
We are not fated to make peace with this world

For no other reason
Only because of this young man
He will never grow up
So we must grow old
To grow old, is really to die

Today, at Muxidi
I am thinking of someone

I miss him
Like I would miss a long lost brother
A brother lost twenty-one years ago
I miss him
This eternal youth
I want to cry, but I cannot
I know we have no more tears

Even worse than having no tears
We don’t even have any blood
Our souls were hollowed long ago
In the gunfire, among the bullets
In twisted, hidden history
All we can still do
Is come here

Thinking of this youth
Like missing a long lost brother
A brother lost for 21 years
He never left
But we’ll never have him back

 
Time is like a murderer. Twenty-three years have flashed by. Countless
countrymen have forgotten, countless others have remembered. I am from the
post-June Fourth generation. On this twenty-third anniversary, I earnestly
write this record, like putting my heart on an altar of blood. I do this
for nothing more than the justice we are yet to receive. I believe blood
was not spilt in vain. Judgment will surely come.

June 4, 2012, on the banks of the Xiang River, Hunan