I never cared much for the 1989 Tian’anmen Square Incident (or any of the other ones either). Not knowing what China was like 20 years ago, I can’t speak on how the incident has affected China or how much China has changed. What I can say is, I’m adding my more-or-less ambivalence on the incident to my list of Ways in Which I’m Asian.

The other interns from work and I took a trek to the square after our shift ended. They were hoping to catch something cool, a newsworthy event that would somehow mark the anniversary of a historic day. But of course there wasn’t anything to see. Besides the heightened security (there were guards stationed every 5 meters or so with plain-clothes officers standing near them), the average Chinese person—so far as I can tell—just doesn’t care. It’s in the past, and it doesn’t matter if people know the truth about what happened. What little they know has been passed down through hearsay or is from official government propaganda, and there is an awareness that there is more they don’t know.

I wanted to ask the security guard who stopped us from entering the square, Why all the security? We had visited a week ago with no problem; why did we need our passports this time? He asked to see my passport, and I told him I only had my driver’s license. He admired it and then said it wouldn’t work. He asked me who I was with, and I pointed to my friends. He asked me why we came, and I told him we just wanted to take a look and walk around. He asked me why we wanted to look around, and I said, No reason.

He actually let us through, which I like to attribute to my American-Chinese charm. I didn’t ask my questions because my dad had advised me to stay on the government’s side, which I took to mean as “don’t cause any trouble.” The square had much fewer people than last week when we went: in fact, there were probably more security guards than visitors.

It’s the irony that gets me: Tian’anmen, the Heaven-Peace Door, and its square, with the Long-Peace Avenue running through it bore witness to this bloody incident. In effect, it’s the Massacre at Heaven-Peace Door. There are two sides to this story, and as usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Just because people are protesting for democracy and economic freedoms doesn’t mean the government should bend over and say, Here you go! Then again, just because people pose a threat to stability and the government itself doesn’t mean the government should open fire on them.

China doesn’t have the clear-cut ethics of the West; justice and individual rights are not external entities that need to be maintained. Chinese ethics is much murkier, much more instinctive and subjective. For that reason, the Tian’anmen Square Incident that occurred 20 years ago has simply been suppressed, unaddressed and unanswered.