Chasing Hope

On recent weekday afternoons I've been reading — during my “unstructured time,” as my youngest son Kevin puts it — a memoir by New York Times Editorialist and Reporter Nicholas Kristof titled Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life (Random House, 2024). Kristof quotes Desmond Tutu on his opening page: “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” And in this fascinating memoir, darkness is plentiful and vividly described.

Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, chased important stories in places all over the world: China, Japan, and the Congo to name but a few. In his introduction he points out that journalism is an act of hope: “That if we get the story and shine a light in the darkness, the public will respond and change will come.” He writes “that’s why reporters rush toward gunfire, talk their way into drug dens, scramble toward riots. ...”

One story he covered was the student massacre at Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. Among the images indelibly imprinted in my mind that day was the lone student standing down a Chinese tank, daring its driver to run over him in the riot that was taking place.

Kristof was also right in the middle of that riot and resulting massacre. He had received news from Chinese friends that soldiers in trucks and armored vehicles were moving down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, “mowing people down with automatic weapons — headed for the pro-democracy encampment of students in the Square. ... When the first young man fell, I thought perhaps he had fainted, until I saw that half his head was blown away.”

Let me share a bit from that chapter that is particularly memorable to me:

The bravest people that day were the rickshaw drivers, pedaling small carts. ... That night, as the rest of us cowered, it was the rickshaw drivers who pedaled out toward the soldiers during each lull in the shooting and picked up the bodies of young people who had been shot. They placed the dead or injured on the backs of their rickshaws and then turned and rushed back toward us and beyond to the hospitals.

I remember watching one husky rickshaw driver in a white tank top; he was in his late thirties with a round, stubble-covered face, wearing flip-flops. As he drove out toward the soldiers, I held my breath, wondering if he would be shot. Then he picked up the motionless body of a young man and pedaled back frantically toward us, his legs pounding up and down like pistons, blood seeping out of the body onto his cart. ... That driver evidently recognized me as a foreign journalist ... for he swerved to pass by me and slowed so that I could document the scene.

“Tell the world!” he shouted at me. “Tell the world!” Tears were steaming down his cheeks. ... This rickshaw driver might not have been able to define democracy — but he was risking his life for it.

Hundreds were shot dead that night and thousands more were injured, yet so many ordinary Chinese like that driver stood fast. Kristof ends that episode asserting that we have so much to learn from their commitment and valor.

Kristof returns to that scene later in his memoir. He writes that witnessing an army firing on its own people changed him utterly. The Chinese government at the time — those in power — may have tried to whitewash what happened in the square that day, but as Kristof quotes the words of the Chinese writer Lu Xun, “Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.” In his mind's eye, he writes, “daydreaming about some day in the future, I envision a new statue at Tiananmen Square: It is of a rickshaw driver carrying a wounded student.”

What a powerful image to end on — and to keep in mind as we head toward our own future and the risks we face as a people in a very divided country, with threats to our own democracy looming.

Sorry to end on a threatening note, but we too live in perilous times, where riotous crowds break into our congressional chambers and where assassins with guns break into homes and threaten our citizens. So remember the image of the rickshaw driver and stand strong against evil in all its forms. And remember that “hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”