In the fall of 2012, I signed on to teach U.S. history to high schoolers in Shanghai. Our program sought to prepare Chinese high school students for acceptance to American colleges, to meet the concerns of anxious Chinese parents wanting to prepare their children for bright futures. My colleagues and I soon realized their tuition money did not provide adequate resources for the children, but we began hopefully.

In reviewing my textbook before going to China, in a section covering 20th-century world issues, I discovered a paragraph about the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of spring, 1989. It included a picture of “Tank-man:” a young man, in dark pants and white shirt, holding two white plastic bags (perhaps food or water) standing in front of a row of tanks. The videos on TV showed that when the tanks changed direction to go around him, he moved back in front.

This image electrified the world. Chinese authorities have persistently purged access to information about those protests, as well as the numbers killed and injured in using the military to crush the movement. I reported the problem to our administrators, and was assured the publisher would review, and if necessary, “cleanse” textbooks of anything objectionable to the Communist Party. The books arrived late, but I had my teacher’s copy to start with, and the textbook worked well.

We only got up to the mid-19th century by May, but I was generally pleased with the students’ progress. We lacked ESL and other student supports, often reduced to begging the host school for uncontracted technical services. Evidently corners were also cut in the textbook screening: on May 2, we were abruptly informed that a student had found the paragraph and picture and showed it to someone in the host school. And then chaos. Our program was temporarily shut down. All our students (including those sick at home) were interviewed and their textbooks confiscated. I spent the rest of the semester teaching from some hastily photocopied sections of the book, along with material from the Chinese-censored internet.

Xi Jinping had become president of China that semester. My students celebrated by writing a letter to Xi to share in class, offering good wishes and suggestions. One wanted help for the children of “migrants” from the country who filled the factories and workshops of Shanghai: considered illegal residents, they were not allowed to attend school in the city. From colleagues, I heard that things were changing in the universities of China: “Constitutionalist,” a term used to describe Chinese academics who advocated for following more closely the written Chinese constitution, began to be seen as a negative. So did the term “civil society.” Eventually, under Xi, many foreign programs like ours were shut down.

Over time, I’ve remembered that year as an amazing opportunity to work with engaging students in a fascinating city and country, and to appreciate the freedoms that we in this country often forgot that we had. I still believe the first part of that sentence. The second part has been crushed by what we see now in Washington.

In a 1990 interview, Donald Trump described the horrific actions of the Chinese government in 1989 as “very strong,” complaining that the U.S. was “weak” by comparison in managing public disturbances. In his first term, he was held back by military advisors from violently suppressing protestors. Now he is deporting them, using dubious legal theories, and in ways reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings and reprisals of the 1940s and 1950s, calls ideas he doesn’t like “Anti- American,” and protestors “terrorists.”

Our government is scrubbing its records of the experiences of women, people of color, gender identity and sexual preferences, and placing tremendous pressure on public schools and higher education to do the same. How ironic, that although Trump seems to see China as an adversary to be confronted and resisted, he is, in his theory of government, copying the Chinese Communist Party.

When Roe vs Wade was overturned three years ago, I was looking forward to the birth of a granddaughter. I had lived my entire reproductive life under the protection of the right to an abortion. With the loss of Roe, I was struck by the horrid sense that my granddaughter would be less free than me. I realize that all our freedoms are subject to context and conditions of all kinds, and so many other Americans face far greater challenges than I have in realizing freedom.

But the loss of reproductive rights feels like the opening blow, culminating in what we now may be in danger of losing. Please, everyone, let’s remember what we know of freedom, and imagine more. Let’s remember that freedom belongs to us all, or it doesn’t exist.

Dawn Saunders

East Middlebury