Instapundit posts a remembrance of when - 37 years ago - the tanks rolled into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to crush a student movement for freedom and democracy. Also linked are several other photographs of those events.
The DrsC feel a particular connection to that day for, by coincidence, we were in Taipei as tourists seeing Taiwan and planning to go on into the mainland via Hong Kong for further sightseeing. As you can imagine, folks in Taipei were agog at what was being reported.
The mainland had gone into a lockdown, and would be nervous about foreigners (us). So we changed our plans and stayed in Hong Kong. I had some nice dress shirts tailored in Taipei, with my initials on the cuff. Good times.
I believe it was on this trip we had a couple of "small world" experiences that stick in memory. In the elevator in the Taipei Sheraton we said hello to an ethnically Chinese colleague from our uni in CA who was there on business or scholarship.
Maybe a week or so later we encountered a former B-school colleague in the lobby of Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport who, like us, was in transit. A conspiracy theorist would have felt stalked or tailed.
I then and now believe it was coincidence of a sort. University faculty travel more than most folks which increases the likelihood of unplanned meetings. On a later trip, we bumped into a colleague of the other DrC at Narita airport near Tokyo. And yes, we have traveled a lot.
