by YassWaddah
I was nine, and my family lived in Beijing at the time. We were foreigners housed in a distant (and comparatively comfortable) expat compound to the northeast.
When the public assembly began, we started watching the news closely every morning to see if it was safe for my father to go to work each day. As the Chinese media didn't provide reliable coverage, my parents tuned in to the AFRTS (Armed Forces Radio and Television Service) to watch CNN and other U.S. news services.
It was a weird feeling to be so reliant on news broadcasts from half a world away just to figure out what was going on in the city center, a dozen km away.
One of my classmates lived in a US compound not far from the (old) US embassy location - a stray bullet went through their window and he told us how the Ayi (local maid) pushed him and his brother to the floor and covered them with her body to prevent any harm to them.
When my family finally evacuated, it was after the directive came from my father's foreign firm, saying that all non-PRC staff were to leave and if they remained then the corporate leadership could no longer underwrite their safety. We piled into the compound's shuttle bus and headed for the airport, which was fortunately along the direction as us, away from the city. We were stopped by a wujing military police squad and they examined our passports and let us go.
We left in first week of June, and the (then-tiny) capital airport was overflowing with expats seeking to get out. I had the longest summer vacation of my life, back in the US, although my father returned around July to continue his work. I grimly joked whether he had life insurance.
The repercussions among the expat community were lasting, too. My foreigner's school in Beijing had already listed China as a hardship post, so it was hard to attract good teachers. For the years following, teacher morale plummetted and despite the high cost of the private tuition, academic levels suffered and the school was basically a glorified daycare for rich diplobrats for some time afterward. I got out of China in 1990.
As an interesting coda, I went back to work in southern China myself as an adult in 2015 for three years. The economy has improved beyond all recognition, although they're rapidly creating their own microcosm of the internet and e-commerce. They rely on a handful of apps on the phone for almost everything in life: the first apartment I rented, I could not actually open the door because the keycode had been texted to my (non existent) social media account associated with that phone number.
I encountered a Chinese language version of Twilight Struggle in a game store at a bazaar, but they would only accept payment via e-commerce Alipay, which I didn't have set up. That was a shame - I would have loved to have brought back a TS copy all in Chinese to puzzle and exasperate my US gaming buddies.