O.C. Residents Flee Violence-Torn China

A Mission Viejo man flew into Los Angeles on Friday, grateful to a Chinese youth who warned him to leave Beijing’s Tian An Men Square before troops moved in.

“If you don’t leave now, the government will kill you unreasonably,” the stranger told Douglas Hamilton, 28, as darkness fell upon the packed square a week ago today. “He was dead serious,” said Hamilton, who recalled that the words were repeated twice.

Hamilton, a civil engineer who had been teaching at Beijing’s Chinese Ministry of Water Resources, was among the last Americans who heeded official warnings and got out of China as the mass violence in the square shocked the world.

He and others who fled flew into Los Angeles International Airport on Friday and were greeted by anxious relatives. The arrivals included a young Tustin couple who stretched their Hawaiian honeymoon to China and found themselves in the square just before the shooting broke out.

Hamilton said that on the two-mile walk back to his hotel after the stranger’s warning, he passed growing crowds of students trying to physically restrain columns of armed soldiers marching toward the square.

“The students were saying, ‘We are brothers, don’t shoot Chinese,’ ” he said. “But the soldiers were from another province, spoke a different dialect and didn’t seem to understand.”

Awakened by the crackle of gunfire in the distance at 1 a.m., Hamilton went outside to find the city’s eastern horizon bathed in the orange light of fires.

On Sunday morning, it was eerily quiet as he strode through streets covered with broken glass and the charred remains of smoldering vehicles.

“There were people gathered around the body of a dead soldier . . . whose head had been crushed by I don’t know what. The body was picked up two days later,” he said, adding that for the next two days “I heard machine-gun fire every hour.”

Hamilton said he escaped the pandemonium in town by paying a taxi driver “10 times the normal fare to get to the airport.”

The honeymooners were Renee and Bob Lancaster, who were in Hawaii when they decided that adding a trip to China would, in the words of 29-year-old Renee, “open our eyes to what’s going on in the rest of the world.”

They arrived in Beijing and spent Saturday in Tian An Men Square among hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators tensely awaiting the pending arrival of armed soldiers.

“Renee got up on my shoulders to look over the heads of the crowd and look at the soldiers,” said Bob Lancaster, 26, a contracts pricing manager at Camarco Inc. of Anaheim. “The crowd went wild. I guess she was a symbol of liberty to them.”

They awoke in their hotel Sunday morning to find city streets packed with soldiers, trucks and tanks. Sunday night, they boarded a 1950s-vintage Chinese propeller plane and continued their tour.