131: The Kids Are Alright
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When it comes to teenagers we always get it wrong. Even in the most widely scrutinized widely reported stories, we get it wrong. Take Tenement Square. This week is the 10th anniversary of the crackdown and the massacre there, and you think you know the story. Idealistic students trying to democratize their government, but in fact it was more complicated than that. The majority of students were like me. I was a very typical student at that time, and our knowledge of what democracy was really limited. When Wang was part of the student movement, first in Shanghai, where he was a graduate student at the time, then in Beijing at Tenement Square, but it until the crackdown on June 4th, 1989. And he says that for him and most of the students he knew, the movement was not about turning China into more of a democracy. He says students wanted the government to cut down on corruption, do something about inflation, allow them to criticize the government without being thrown in jail or kept from good jobs. It never occurred to us that we wanted to overthrow the communist government. It was like the Communist Party was a God-given thing, and we were born with it, we're going to die with it. And the only way to make it work for us is just to have some modest reforms within the government. But Wang says that for most of the students he knew, most of the students in the movement he believes, there was another motivation besides politics, and equally compelling, if not more compelling motivation. It was really like a big party, you know, I never heard about Wootstock until I came to the US. Woodstock, yeah. Woodstock, and then later on I watched a videotape, and then suddenly just I realized that the students movement in 1989 was just like a big similar to the Woodstock experience. Why, what were you saying that was similar in 1989 in China and Tenement Square and in Shanghai that was similar to what was going on at Woodstock? The kind of the festive atmosphere and the playfulness, and we were singing the pop songs and people playing guitars. It was exciting when, says, midterms were coming up, papers would do, and everybody would skip class together to go to demonstrations. This is not to say that there was not political idealism behind all this, there was. But as one of the best known student leaders, Chai Ling, said in an article in the New Yorker magazine commemorating the 10th anniversary of Tenement Square, the demonstrations, even the hunger strikes, weren't primarily political as far as she was concerned. It was about a kind of sheer pleasure in living, she said. A rock 'n' roll bravado, when Wang agrees. I think that was kind of an accurate statement. I think that was more of an honest assessment of what really motivated us to take part in the students movement, because I noticed when I first came out here, the students leaders who escaped China, the student leaders who escaped China, when it came over here, they exaggerated the motivation, they portrayed themselves as such democracy fighters. I said they knew so much about democracy, and that has a lot to do with how Americans have this romantic vision of fun, the Tenement Square movement. Of course, it goes further than this. We Americans have a romantic vision of what it means just to be a student, what it means to be young, and we ascribe a lot of motivations and meaning to what young people do that simply don't bear much relation to reality. Today on our program, we try to set the record straight with a few typical case examples from W.B. E.C. Chicago and Public Radio International. It's this American life on our glass. Today's program, the kids are all right, stories in which people try to set the record straight about actions that adults seem to widely misinterpret. E.C. One, where the people walk around upside down, a story about what you think
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