Unlike other Beijing kids, Steven Chen rarely went to Tiananmen Square with his parents when he was little.
He found out why at a family gathering, at eight years old, when he first heard about the "Tiananmen crackdown".
On the night of June 3, 1989, the People's Liberation Army turned its guns on students and ordinary people who had been calling for a democratic future for their country.
For weeks before, the students, who were among the hundreds of civilians massacred that night, had been camped out in Tiananmen Square as part of their protest.
When the stories of that night were told to eight-year-old Mr Chen, he was "totally shocked" to hear relatives talking about "tanks running over the bodies of students," he told the ABC.
"Tiananmen has always struck me as a very solemn and stately place. You can hardly associate the two scenes together," he said.
Today, 33 years after the Tiananmen massacre, he shared how he learnt about the crackdown, and how it has influenced his life.
"I asked my dad why he didn't take me to Tiananmen Square as other parents did. He then showed me a video of what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989," Mr Chen said.
"That's the first time I saw the famous tankman picture."
But when he asked questions about what had happened, his parents refused to reveal more.
Out of curiosity, he searched "Tiananmen Square incident" and "8964 incident" online, but the only thing that popped up was an empty webpage.
Although he did not fully understand what a blank search page meant as a primary school student, it sparked his desire to see the world outside the Great Firewall.
At the age of 15, he moved to Australia to study.
Here, he was able to access information not readily available to most people in mainland China.
'It's my duty'
With the assistance of his older siblings, Mr Chen was first exposed to the world outside the Great Firewall through a VPN when he was in grade six.
Among the vast amount of Tiananmen crackdown footage on YouTube, what struck him most was a short conversation between a young man on a bicycle and a Western journalist.
The young man told the journalist he was heading to Tiananmen Square because "it's my duty".
He told the ABC that if he had lived in China in 1989, he would have joined the movement as well.
"I admire these students who could have lived a stable life, but they chose to take such a risk to fight a goal that wouldn't necessarily pay off in the short term," Mr Chen explained.
Before coming to Australia, Mr Chen mentioned the Tiananmen movement to his classmates once, but they all looked at him questioningly.
"We live in the same society and the same space, but we have a disconnected perception," he said.
'It's my greatest sorrow'
Not all of China's younger generation share Mr Chen's desire to know about the erased history in Chinese textbooks, even including the descendants of the participants in the Tiananmen movement.
Xu Xiao, a senior college student in Nanjing in 1989 and one of the organisers of the students' protest at his college, told the ABC that his son was "completely indifferent" about what happened in 1989.
He said his son's indifference has been an indelible pain.
Mr Xiao moved to the United States in 2019, but his son still lives in China.
He compared his situation to that of Sitong Tan, a famous revolutionary who dedicated his life to moving Chinese society forward.
"Before Mr Tan was killed, his wife told him: 'You're about to be killed, and we don't have any children yet.' Tan said: 'One more child means one more slave in the world'."
But Mr Chen believes there's a reason why the younger generation knows little and cares less about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Besides the strict censorship in China, he said another reason was that the movement had no relevance to the real interests of modern youth.
"If they focus on aspects such as the GRE (Graduate Record Examinations), master's degree, or internships, it may allow them to get a higher salary for their future jobs.
'Why do we need to review this history?'
Commemorating the Tiananmen Crackdown has become a part of Mr Xiao's daily life, but he said that merely relying on the "89 first generation" alone was "not enough".
Louisa Lim, a journalist who has reported from China over a decade, has been working to uncover the hidden truth about the Tiananmen movement.
In June 2018, when Lim was speaking to Chinese students at an Australian university about the Tiananmen crackdown, a Chinese student asked: "Why do we need to review this history? Why do you think knowing this history is helpful to the young Chinese generation like me?"
Lim told the ABC that Chinese youth deserve the right to know the truth, although many might be terrified about hearing something inconsistent with what the government had been telling them.
"They are convinced that all of the government's decisions are correct and unmistakable, and any deviation from that benchmark is reckless, even dangerous," she wrote in her book The People's Republic of Amnesia.
The political sensitivity of June 4 has increased in China over the years, with more than 3,200 terms referencing the Tiananmen massacre having been censored on the Chinese internet.
Lim said when such knowledge was hidden from people, it was a sign of weakness rather than strength.
Even as one of the small number of young people in the know, Mr Chen said he would not encourage China's younger generation to learn about Tiananmen movement because "most young people can't change anything even if they know about it".
They even have to use Pinyin — the Romanisation of Chinese characters based on their pronunciation — or abbreviations to avoid detection by AI algorithms when typing anything regarding 1989 on social media platforms including WeChat.
"They can't do justice to those who died, they can't go to any memorial ceremonies," he said.
