Garden Grove Couple Returned Before China’s Eruption : Travelers Saw the Upheaval Simmering

From airplanes, tour buses and trains that took them on an 18-day tour, Joyce and Edward Johnson of Garden Grove had front-row seats on the early scenes of what has become a drama of democracy and repression in China.

The Johnsons returned from their China trip May 26, but they saw more than just a glimpse of the tension between demonstrators and the government--which was to turn into a massacre a few days after they left.

The couple--he is retired and she is a trustee in the Garden Grove Unified School District--were touring the country, a nation they had not yet visited.

What they remember most are the countless people demonstrating, and their quiet way of doing it. A few days after they left, the quiet turned into an uproar.

The Johnsons were in Bejing’s Tian An Men Square when Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited, when the throngs of students demonstrating in the giant plaza were newly arrived.

“If you looked in that square, there were over 1 million people there,” Edward Johnson said. “If you have ever seen a million people at one time, it is something that’s fantastic. . . . I saw nothing but heads everywhere. It sure is overwhelming.”

Joyce Johnson said knots of students--10 or 12--would gather at utility poles to read the signs that were posted often with news from other demonstration points.

The couple first flew to Hong Kong, then made their way by train and boat to several cities in China.

“We saw a lot of protesters in Shanghai,” she said. “The students were all over. They were protesting at different places--downtown, in the city squares, where there would be shops and different places, wherever you had universities, and there were universities everywhere.

“They were quiet, but the numbers--they were just really protesting en masse, with their actual bodies, being there.

“When we reached Shanghai, there were rumors that students that had been fasting, that some of them had died, or so it was said,” she said.

“The students we saw protesting had made floral wreaths out of paper, and they were wearing black armbands and marching in the street.

“And yet, they were quiet and still didn’t do anything but block the streets and be there in their numbers,” she said.