Twenty years have passed but the pain remains the same for Ding Zilin , whose 17-year-old son Jiang Jielian was shot dead near Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3.
But this year is especially painful for the retired professor as she has realised it is time to face reality - the vindication she and other families have demanded is unlikely to be realised any time soon.
'The government has not changed its attitude one bit ... and now society has changed, we can't expect that it still cares,' the 73-year-old said.
The hardest part, Ms Ding said, was telling other members of the Tiananmen Mothers, a group she founded for families of the victims, of the new reality. Facing reality does not, however, constitute a surrender. Ms Ding said they would continue to record what they learned about the movement.
Ms Ding joined the Communist Party when she was 24. Her belief wasn't shaken even after she was sent to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution in 1972 when she was pregnant. Jielian was a gifted child and was picked to take part in the International Physics Olympiad in 1979. 'I was so proud of my boy's talent and his sense of social responsibility,' Ms Ding said. But the crackdown destroyed his mother's happiness. She began a project to collect the names of all June 4 victims and published a partial list in 1994. Tiananmen Mothers was born out of this effort.
'I cannot forgive a party which dares to shoot its people. I also cannot forgive a government that lies.'