June 4 in Tian'anmen Square

This is a post I wrote a month ago. I wanted to wait until I had left China to post it, because I was really enjoying my time there. Chinese minders - if you're reading this please don't deny me a visa next time I want to visit you country.

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I accidentally ended up in Tian’anmen Square today. We had planned to shoot in interview at Zhongshan park. However neither my partner or I realized that Zhongshan park was, in fact, the park surrounding the west side of the Forbidden City. When I asked her what subway stop we were to get off at, and she obliviously replied ‘Tian’anmen’ I knew we just should have turned around and went back to class, but we were almost there at that point so I didn’t say anything. The mood at the station was somber and there were noticeably more guards than usual. When we got up to the street, the usually bustling crowd was subdued and traffic was snail-paced. Soldiers in green uniforms marched in pairs in seemingly random patterns through the square, I guess to break up any crowds. Since we were working on a project about marriage and relationships, I noticed that the looked a lot like the couples strolling through the park that we had shot the night before. There were a few foreign tourists, many more Chinese tourists, but not many people taking pictures. I felt really self-conscious carrying our camera bag and tripod. The students at CUC where we’re taking classes had been warned not to talk to foreign journalists this week. I tried not to think about it and walk confidently past the guards, after all we were working on a fluffy love story and didn’t have anything to worry about. Walking through the park, row upon row of soldiers, both uniformed and plain-clothed, waited in various staging areas. Their expressions seemed to reflect the same attitude of my 23 year-old partner. The day was ancient history, before their time, not a China they knew or recognized. They were bored, and if they had any feeling about the day, they didn’t show it. We found our subjects and started the preliminary interview, I tried to keep the camera bag and tripod out of sight, as we were within 10 meters of a long row of guards. Our conversation was going well, and I almost thought we could conduct the interview as long as I made it obvious we were talking to our friend and not at all interested in the soldiers, but as we were walking a volunteer security guard stopped us and told us that if we shot anything they would break our camera. So much for that. My partner and our subject calmed the man down and assured him we weren’t shooting anything. As we left, our subject said that it was because I was a foreigner that they were suspicious of us. We wrapped up the interview, didn’t shoot anything, and headed back to class.