On Friday night I went down to Victoria Park in Hong Kong and found 150,000 people holding candles in the dark. It was June 4th, the anniversary of the state-sponsored killings of  hundreds of democracy protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen square.

I could not understand the speeches over the loud-speakers during the two hour presentation. I have few close Chinese friends, and I have never managed to have a candid conversation about what happened in 1989. Many of the people in Victoria park were not even born when the Chinese military opened fire on its own people. I know the history, from documentaries and books, but I don’t know why it should matter so much on a balmy Friday night, 21 years later.

But a hundred thousand people weeping over candles says it still means something.

I began to ask people why they were there.

“We came to learn about the history,”  three young girls told me in halting English. They were secondary school students, and their teacher had encouraged them to come.

That history is not taught in mainland schools, and all mention of what happened in June 1989 is elaborately censored online — including web pages, online forums, IM conversations, and personal emails. Last year a former Chinese solider was arrested and taken from his home in the middle of the night for publishing an open letter calling for a review of the incident.

Hong Kong operates under a different constitution, and you can talk about Tiananmen here — most of the time. Last week a group of activists tried to display a statue called the “Goddess of Democracy” in front of the Times Square mall, a sort of faux Statue of Liberty that mimics a famous paper-mache figure erected by the original protesters in Tiananman square in 1989. Thirteen people were arrested and the statue was confiscated.

“It wasn’t hurting anyone,” said a man in his late  20s, who would only identify himself as “a worker.” “It’s not right for them to take it away.”

He said this was his first June 4th vigil, as it was for many others I spoke to. In fact it’s estimated that this was the biggest turnout ever, exceeding even the very first vigil in 1990, when Hong Kong citizens openly feared what the 1997 handover to China might mean for their freedoms.

This demonstration would be impossible in Beijing. Officially, the students who were calling for “democracy” remain dishonored; the Communist Party of China insists to this day that the military violence was necessary to maintain stability of the country. That’s what they say when they can be forced to talk about it at all — for the “June fourth incident,” as it’s been blandly retitled, is taboo. The June fourth incident does not exist.

There was no coverage of the Hong Kong demonstration in the Chinese media; nothing on Xinhua, nothing in China Daily.

And I think that’s why people keep coming. Occasionally someone I talked to used  words like “freedom” and “democracy,” but when I pressed them it always came down to specifics. The statue was taken away. The Chinese government won’t talk about what happened. There was no grand ideology uniting the people in Victoria Park, no deep ideals other than this: we want to talk about it, and you will not let us.

When it comes down to it, the 1989 protestors didn’t know what they were doing. They wanted change, and they boldly called out the crimes and repression of their government during the horrors of the cultural revolution and after. But they also wanted to force students to attend demonstrations, according to later interviews. The protest movement was hardly democratic or even organized; it had no coherent philosophy and was riddled with internal power struggles. It’s easy to make the students and workers of 1989 into heroes or martyrs, but the truth is messier.

“I’m willing to keep an open mind,” one Hong Kong medical student told me. “Maybe there was no way to finish the affair without blood. But many mainland students don’t fully understand what happened that day. They need to know so they can make a careful judgement.”

Maybe that’s the sort of diplomatic language that will be necessary for reconciliation. But the history isn’t so bloodless. People died. Lots of them. People lost limbs and family and friends, and then lost friends again when everyone connected to the protests was quietly rounded up, silenced, or exiled. A series of laminated yellow posters recalled the victims, with the name, photograph and whatever is known of the story of each one. We know that some people were shot or crushed by tanks; others simply disappeared that night.

Does it help to imagine a woman sitting alone in her Beijing apartment, grieving silently for a long-lost lover? She can’t even write an email to a friend to say how she feels (try; it will bounce.) There will be no commiseration. It is not yet allowed.

And here, at last, I began to see what was denied to me as an outsider. I am not Chinese. I do not have family on the mainland — family who disappeared 21 years ago, and family who live still with the threat of a government that cannot talk about what it did. For me Tiananmen is abstract; I can make it about ideals like “freedom of speech” or “human rights” but I have no faces to attach to the violence. It was not my statue they took away.

“For me it’s a memorial,” said a middle aged man there with his wife. He wore glasses and a white polo shirt, with a camera slung around his neck. He had a slight pot belly. He said he had two children.  ”I have to keep coming every year until the Chinese government admits what they did, and that it was wrong,” he said.

“I may not live to see that day.”

The “Pillar of Shame” is faces: faces in agony, anonymous faces, dead faces. It stands in the plaza of the Student Union of the University of Hong Kong as a monument to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in which hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by the Chinese government. It was installed by students on the tenth anniversary of this sorry event, and the police did not stop them.

This would never fly on the mainland. In China, web searches, blog posts, foreign news broadcasts, and even instant messages about the Tiananamen Square massacre are very closely censored. To erect a monument to something that officially did not happen is unthinkable, not to mention severely punishable.

But Hong Kong is different.

The island was a British colony by treaty with the Chinese for 100 years. The 1997 handover to the Chinese government was peaceful, and Hong Kong became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” This means that it is under different law. In effect, the Hong Kong Basic Law — drafted jointly by the British and Chinese in the late 1980s — is a completely different constitution for the region. Hong Kong and China even require different entry visas and have different immigration procedures. In particular, mainland Chinese residents are not allowed to live here permanently.

And they might want to! Hong Kong residents enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and guarantees against unwarranted search or detention. The chief executive is not democratically elected, but the legislative council is. The internet is not censored and the economy is officially capitalist.

This arrangement provides a strange vantage point for China observers; it’s China, but also not-China. It’s free, and you can do things here you could never get away with on the mainland. For example, Rebecca MacKinnon of the University of Hong Kong has published some wonderful research on the Chinese internet censorship regime.

The Basic Law is guaranteed by the PRC for 50 years, until 2047. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

A man was angry and a woman was crying, by the bus stop at 12:15AM near Causeway Bay MTR. I walked right past them (almost didn’t see them, don’t stop don’t get involved) then turned around when I heard blows and realized that no one else was paying attention.

What I saw was this: an angry Chinese man in a suit restraining a slight Chinese woman in a dress by the arm. He was yelling, and then he was banging his head against the ad on the side of the bus shelter. She was crying and she was trying to pull away from him.

I did it, I turned around, walked back, got within a few meters, and said quietly and clearly, “you need to leave her alone.” And that was all I had. Then I just stood there.

He pulled her closer. Her back was to me. He wasn’t looking at me. He put his arms around her waist like he was keeping her from leaving. She pushed him away weakly with her hands on his chest. She pulled him in halfheartedly with an arm around his shoulders. He restrained her. He held her close and soothed her hair. She was crying. She was apologizing. She was actually in the wrong, or she wasn’t.

His eyes flicked up to see me still standing there, just watching, heart pounding, wondering if I was about to get punched. I had nothing. Calling 999 wouldn’t help. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was angry. He was shamed. She had cheated on him, or he had cheated and then he had made it about her. She was staying or she wanted to go. She stood as conflicted as I was confused. I stood very still and alert and watched with I do not know what expression on my face.

How long was I going to stand there, and why?

I wanted to say, “come with me.” I imagined calling the only stable Westerners I knew in Hong Kong, Jessica and her husband, a coffee-shop encounter and traded cards, I barely knew them. I imagined how I would lead her gently into a taxi and say to the driver, “Shuen Wan station, please,” and call to get the exact address, then the conversation as I explained the emergency to a mere acquaintance in front of a crying woman. I wanted to say: you don’t have to put up with this. I wanted to say, there is help. I don’t know where but Jessica is going to look up women’s shelters while you drink this tea. Or milk. Or whatever the hell comforts a weeping Chinese woman gone too far from the village.

“Are you alright?” I finally said.

She turned her teary face to me and said, “yes.” Weak smile. “Thank you.”

“Do you want to come with me?”

She did and she didn’t. Her body language said everything. “It’s okay. He’s my husband. Thank you.” Brave face.

But it wasn’t ok, and I didn’t and still don’t know how not OK, and I didn’t know what to say to her that would allow her to break free, if breaking free is what she needs, if breaking free can even exist for her. Unless of course everything actually really was OK. Unless of course I had just made it worse by shaming her husband in public.

I walked away, but it took some minutes for my heart to subside..