Rose Tang was stunned when she saw videos last week of crowds in China chanting in Mandarin, “Give me liberty or give me death.” It was a phrase the Brooklyn resident had last heard more than three decades ago, when she was one of the student leaders at the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
It took her back to the afternoon of 3 June 1989, when she spotted military convoys rumbling toward the protest camp. She threw on a black outfit and rode her bike into the square, determined to defend it. But nothing could have prepared her for the massacre that followed in the early hours of 4 June as the soldiers started shooting and killing the young protesters, including one of her friends. She remembers climbing over a tank to survive.
