'I force myself to remember their faces, their voices, their crying,' Tiananmen survivor says

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Liane Lee will never forget the boy she couldn't save.

It was June 4, 1989, and the 26-year-old womanwas out in the streets of Beijing with her fellow university students demanding democratic reform, when hundreds of armed soldiers descended on Tiananmen Square to quell the urprising with deadly force.

The soldiers opened fire on the protesters and everything was blood and chaos. Then she spotted him a young boy, maybe middle school aged.

"He was holding a rock and crying hysterically, 'They killed my brother!They killed my brother! I'm going to fight until I die,'" Lee,vice-chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China,told As It Happens host Carol Off.

Rock in hand, the boy was about to confront the machine-gun toting soldiers and seek his revenge, she said.

"I grabbed him with all my strength and then told him, 'No, you can't go. It'sdangerous,'" she said. "Then he laid his head on my shoulder and [was] crying like an old man."

In that moment, an ambulance drove by and the boy wriggled free from her grasp.

"He chased after theambulance, crying, 'Brother, brother, my brother!'" she said. "I thought he just disappeared. But about 30 minutes later, his bloody body was being carried back."

'Tell the world what happenedtonight'

It's not clear how many people were killed that night 30 years ago, when the Chinese government sent troops to crack downon protesters in Tiananmen Square.

No official death tollhasever been released, but witnesses andadvocatesestimate that thousands of people were killed gunned down by assault rifles, assassinated by snipers and mowed overby tanks.

And Lee says she could easily have been one of them.

Shewas a university student in Hong Kong who travelled to Beijing to join the pro-democracy movement in solidarity.

After she saw the child's body, she says she became so sick that her fellow protesters brought her to one of the makeshift first aid stations set up in the streets. That's when another ambulance pulled up.

"They [were] calling for Hong Kong students to get in the ambulance and then leave. We strongly refused," Lee said.

"There is a female doctor.She held my hand, looked into my eyes and talked to me:'Listen, my child. Please get in the ambulance. You have to leave the square safely. We need you to go back to Hong Kong to tell the world what happened tonight, what our government did to us.'"

'No such thing'

She listened to the doctor, went to theemergency room, and from there, was able to escape Beijing on a flight chartered by the Hong Kong government.

She later moved to Toronto, and then West Virginia. Now she spends most of her time being an "ordinary" stay-at-home mom, she said.

Butshe's never forgotten the reason she survived so she couldtell the world what happened in Tiananmen Square, even if it means reliving her trauma again and again.

"I've been thinking of giving up many times." she said. "I just think I have no choice. I have to come out."

Hear from a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre

5 years ago

Duration 3:38

Thirty years later, Liane Lee is still telling the world about what she experienced in Tiananmen Square as a student protester because she feels it's her duty.

As she watches Chinese and Hong Kong authorities denounce and punish the next generation of young activists, she worries that history will repeat itself.

She especially fears for the young people in China who are unaware of their own history, she said.

She remembers protesting against former Chinese president Jiang Zemin, when several young Chinese peoplebranded her a "liar" andinsisted there is "no such thing" as the Tiananmen Square massacre.

"They yelled at me and they even wanted to punch me," Lee said.

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The Chinese government has worked vigilantly to scrub the massacre from its history books. It's not taught in school or memorialized in the square. Mentions of it are thoroughly censored from online searches and social media.

Only in Hong Kong which retains a measure of independence from the Chinese government is the anniversary marked with a candlelight vigil.

But for Lee's part, she says she will never forget.

"I remember everything," she said. "I force myself to remember their faces, their voices, their crying, their tears, you know, even the last breath of their life."

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview with Liane Lee produced by Allie Jaynes.