I am sharing these memories for my friend Hao Jian, who is sitting in a prison cell right now for doing the same. Twenty-five years after the military assault on public protests at Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government still forbids victims' families to remember and properly mourn the loved ones they lost.

Hao Jian lost his closest friend and cousin, Hao Zhijing. We refer to Zhijing fondly as Hao 2. He was a kind and caring man, a policy researcher in the science bureaucracy in Beijing, an optimist, with a good sense of humor, an amateur photographer, a young husband hoping to eventually scrape enough money together to do graduate work overseas, the only child of a Communist Party member.

The night Hao 2 died I remember riding my bicycle downtown around 11 p.m. I had gotten a call from a media colleague saying this was the night the army was moving in. I got to Tiananmen Square with a photographer friend just before midnight and saw an armored personnel carrier burning on Chang'an Boulevard, in front of the Forbidden City at the Gate of Heavenly Peace.