Last month, in a small room at the back of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union headquarters in Mong Kok, eight students gathered to discuss their feelings towards the 1989 democracy movement.
Sitting around a small rectangular table in a cramped room, the eight students hesitatingly introduced themselves and revealed which universities they attended before expressing their feelings on a historical event they have rarely had the opportunity to discuss.
They drank tea and ate biscuits. All eight of them were only 20 years old.
Twenty years earlier, students from universities all over Beijing had descended upon Tiananmen Square to commemorate the death of Hu Yaobang and call for widespread reforms in a protest movement that ended with the crackdown on June 4.
Wang Dan, a history student at Peking University, who later topped a most wanted list for his involvement in the protest, had just turned 20.
Wuerkaixi , a student at Beijing Normal University, second on the wanted list, was 21.
Last month's tea gathering was organised by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which hopes to stoke interest in the 1989 pro-democracy movement among students too young to remember it. The Y89 movement hopes to gather students born in 1989 to take part in commemorative events and take to the stage during the June 4 candle-light vigil to symbolise how the next generation will not forget.
