I have no idea what TAM was really all about. And I haven’t met anyone yet who has been able to adequately tell me. My friends Mark and Annie, who were living in Dongbei at the time, have given me the best sense of how things felt: a sense of dawning hope is about the best I can put it. I have a great friend here in Tianjin whose father handed out small money to students at Tianjin Station as they boarded trains to Beijing. He was a poor working man in 1989, but he was overwhelmed by the possibilities of something happening that needed to happen, and so he traveled from the countryside to the nearest big city, Tianjin, and gave students who were off to the Square a few kuai here, a few kuai there to help them buy food along the way. It was the frog knowing that there was more than just the well. It was imagining a sky that was more than a just a tight, little circle at the up end of a long, dark shaft. Was it democracy? I’ve no idea. But I do know there was Tank Man.

Yesterday a new photo of Tank Man, taken at street level moments before the iconic photo and film footage were shot, was published by the NYT here. It is a harrowing photo since we know what happened next. He is standing in the background a good 75 meters in front of the lead tank, two young men in the foreground fleeing, a man on a bicycle looking over his shoulder, a front-end loader, it’s shovel resting on the street. Without the other dramatic photo and film of the incident, what we have here is a man on the street with tanks. It is a photo. There is no movement, other than the implied motion of the two men in the foreground who are running away.  We view Tank Man from his starboard quarter, patiently standing at attention, waiting for whatever was about to happen next. The distance between him and the lead tank allows us to understand infinitely more his composure and intent. He seems calm, self-contained in the middle of fear and wreckage.

We all know what happened in the next few moments, but we have no idea what happened after that.  As often as I have heard the term “hero’ overused and misused by politicians and people who don’t know any better (George Bush I declared all those who served in his war, Gulf War I, as heroes, thus cheapening the word even more than Ronald Reagan had), I can honestly say that there are few in this world who I would pin with that title. Tank Man for me is Number One.

And so I want him to be alive, though I’m sure I’ll never know. I think about him often as I walk the streets of Tianjin and Beijing, especially in the early mornings and late evenings when I often nod to men with their dogs, smoking cigarettes, hunkering down next to a canal, looking off into the distance. I want him to be one of them: a guy who’d be hard to remember if you had to pick him out of a crowd, but one who is, unavoidably, there. His unforgettableness is immeasurably tied to his anonymity, his heroness is his calm humanity in the face of overwhelming machine. This is the best that I can do with Tian’anmen and June 5th.