I am currently reading The Monkey And The Dragon (2001) by Linda Jaivin.

I am finding it fascinating in itself, but also because I have some kind of connection, albeit minor, as I mentioned in Lost in translation–and also in time! in December 2013.

I renewed contact with an ex-student from SBHS the other day via Facebook/Twitter. Chris Rodley now writes for The Guardian, among other things. Point is, he was part of a cohort that I was teaching when I was working on my book From Yellow Earth to Eucalypt which Nicholas Jose so kindly remembered in his contribution to Telling Stories, which I am still reading. In other words, around twenty years ago! As presumably is the Christmas party – I think it was Christmas – in Riley Street Surry Hills at Nicholas Jose’s place where I would have met Linda Jaivin. That all happened through my then partner M, who had known both Jose and Jaivin in China and subsequently…

Through that same connection I met, briefly mostly, quite a few other people mentioned in The Monkey and the Dragon. See also my posts Nicholas Jose – Fiction and Non-fiction (2005), I too was offered a free trip to China… (2009), Tiananmen and all that – 20 years on (2009), Liu Xiaobo (2009), Free Liu Xiao Bo (2010), 2010 Nobel Peace Prize (2010), Twenty and more years ago (2010), Tiananmen 25 years on (2014), Random Friday memory 16 – among the Chinese (2015)….

Update

Further to my reply to kvd’s comment, here is another account, this time from Nicholas Jose. My memory of what my Shanghainese friend M told me, I might add, is that Nick was actually in Shanghai on the night Tiananmen Square was attacked. Along with quite a few others, M was in the hotel room with him at the time. Soon after Nick returned to Beijing to the Embassy, whose staff was then evacuated for a time. Now to the interview with Nick:

Until now the collective perspectives of Australia’s witnesses to Tiananmen have pretty much stayed under wraps as well. But in this extraordinarily revealing Foreign Correspondent key Embassy staffers have assembled for the first time to give their accounts of what happened.
“The British Ambassador had standing instructions that if anybody sought asylum, he was not to spend the night on the Embassy premises. But we had no rules about this you see, so I just made it up as we went along. Mostly I think we were right.” DAVID SADLEIR Australian Ambassador, Beijing 1989
They tell of dodging bullets, offering sanctuary to key targets including noted dissident and – later – Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo and even their part in spiriting confronting and defining images of the conflict out of China and into the hands of the global media hungry for news and pictures…

MCDONELL: Taiwanese singer Hou Dejian was one of the many now in peril. Earlier he’d been the darling of the Party after defecting to mainland China – but he went on to support the students and this changed everything. He’d become friends with Nick Jose.
NICK JOSE: “He was kind of smuggled in under a blanket or something as I recall, but he got there safely. We were very worried about him actually”.
MCDONELL: “Did you have to convince people above you to allow him to enter the Embassy?”
NICK JOSE: “There was discussion of what was happening with the Ambassador… with other senior diplomats – and it was decided that this was worth doing”.
MCDONELL: “That Australia would get him out”.
NICK JOSE: “Well that Australia would give him refuge. I mean he was a friend of Australia in a sense”.
MCDONELL: The Ambassador held off telling the Chinese Government officially that Hou Dejian was inside the Embassy.
DAVID SADLEIR: “I thought that the longer we delayed, the more that China would…. well, the more the tensions would fall…. the more that China would want to come back into the world community, and the more chance I had of getting him out alive, yeah”.
NICK JOSE: “The Chinese Foreign Ministry was informed that he was there and negotiations began for his eventual… I don’t know if release is the word but…”.
MCDONELL: “Safe passage?
NICK JOSE: “Safe passage out of the Embassy and then not so safe passage back to Taiwan”.
DAVID SADLEIR: “They put him in a truck, drove him down to Tianjin, put him on a fishing boat, put him on the beach at Taiwan. That’s how he did it and from there he made his way to New Zealand”.
MCDONELL: Literary critic turned philosopher Liu Xiaobo was another of Nick Jose’s friends now in grave danger. He’d been advising the students and he in particular would be sought by the authorities. Yet on the threshold of sanctuary, the man who’d become a globally renowned dissident made a fateful decision.
NICK JOSE: “I took him in my car from my flat to the Embassy gates and I said well this is it. We can drive in, the gates will open and we’ll drive in and the gates will close and you will have effectively sought asylum from Australia or you can go and find friends who live nearby, friends I also knew. He thought about it, he looked at me and said thank you but no, he would stay in China, he was Chinese, China was his country, China was his fate, and so he went off to find his friends and it was only later that night, around 11 pm that his girlfriend called you know really upset on the phone to say they’d been riding their bikes through a dark street and an unmarked van had just come up and had grabbed him and he’d gone”.
MCDONELL: “Did you wish you’d convinced him to come into the Embassy?”
NICK JOSE: “Yes. I realised that had been a close possibility and maybe if I’d kind of pushed it a bit harder that might have happened”.
MCDONELL: By not seeking asylum Liu Xiaobo chose the toughest of paths. He was arrested, gaoled for 2 years and tortured. In 2008 he’d be gaoled again. This time for 11 years for “inciting subversion of state power”. He went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize from behind bars. It was awarded symbolically to an empty chair.
The order came to evacuate the embassy of all but a handful of staff.

Did you see My Place (2009-2011)? Very good children’s TV. There is a teacher companion site.

On this website you will find rich educational material to support primary and lower-secondary teachers using the My Place TV series in the classroom. Explore background information, aligned with the My Place stories, on events and people significant to Australia’s history. Download clips and stills from the TV series, as well as teaching activities and student activity sheets that relate to current themes. Go behind the scenes with production information and interviews, or chat with other teachers and share stories in the teacher’s forum.

Imagine my surprise when I found my friend M, the one I mentioned in the Linda Jaivin post a few days ago, is in there!

See Celebrating citizenship, Sydney, 1997. A great William Yang photo – and I was of course at that party.

This asset reflects the enthusiasm with which many migrants embraced Australia, seeing it as their new land of opportunity – Australian citizenship was created on 26 January 1949 by the ‘Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948’ (later renamed the ‘Australian Citizenship Act 1948’); since 1949 more than 3 million migrants have become Australian citizens, with over 70,000 joining them every year; the granting of Australian citizenship to an individual requires certain commitments both from Australia and from the citizen and gives the person rights and responsibilities; not all migrants become citizens, with more than 900,000 opting instead to remain as ‘permanent residents’; ‘Citizenship Ceremonies’ are held across Australia, often hosted by local government councils in a town hall or another building of significance.