When dawn breaks on this June 4 day, a diminutive, middle-aged teacher named Professor Chen will quietly leave his new home in Beijing for a routine day at work.
In Toronto, a scruffy, slightly younger man named Leon Tuo will rise to an equally unremarkable day, at the Chinese-language daily where he works, hoping to go unnoticed.
The two men live half a world apart and will not speak, but each will hold the other close to his heart, their lives forever linked by the quiet but crucial roles they played in the dramatic events that unfolded in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago Thursday.
It's a bond that extended into self-imposed exile, spent largely in Canada, where they struggled to move on with their lives while coming to terms with their past.
From a distance, China marched on, but for them – and a handful of other witnesses who came to Canada – the clock stopped on June 4, 1989.
Back then, Mr. Chen was a professor of political science at Beijing University, locally known as Beida.
Mr. Tuo was his third-year student, a “typical teenager,” who spent his spare time listening to Hong Kong pop and dreamed of one day graduating into a government job to serve his country.
Leon Tuo poses for photos in Toronto, May 30, 2009. Twenty years ago he was a student at Beijing University and had a man die in his arms. Tom agreed to have his photo taken, on the condition that his identity is somewhat obscured. He is worried about a backlash from the pro-China community here, as well as consequences for his parents, who still live in Beijing.
On campus, the mood was already roiling. Students frequently took to the streets to vent frustration with the slow pace of China's political reform.
Escalating protests in 1987 triggered the fall of Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party chief, accused by other Politburo members of empathizing with the students calling for change.
At the time, Prof. Chen and Mr. Tuo kept their distance rather than risk their careers.
That changed when Mr. Hu died of a heart attack two years later and students poured into the streets to mourn.
Mr. Tuo, then 20, was one of the first to lay a white paper wreath at the foot of the Monument to the People's Heroes. Prof. Chen, then 35, visited the square between classes to advise his students as tensions grew.
At one point, he intervened to pull three of his students off their knees after they went to deliver a petition to Premier Li Peng and were rebuffed.
“That was the moment for me that it became something bigger,” recalled Mr. Tuo, dressed in jeans and a khaki jacket and blinking back tears in an east end Toronto coffee shop last week.
“We had been taught that students are the key to the country. Why were we being ignored?” he asked.
The Beida faculty's decision to remain uninvolved changed on April 26, when the state-run People's Daily newspaper ran an editorial that denounced the protesters as part of “a planned conspiracy” to sow disorder.
Angered, Prof. Chen and many of his colleagues joined the students in the square the next day for what would be one of the most triumphant moments of that spectacular spring – hundreds of thousands of protesters jamming the city's main boulevards in a peaceful show of defiance.
“Maybe there has been no demonstration of this kind in the history of the world,” Prof. Chen said, speaking Wednesday at a café near Renmin University in Beijing.
He and his fellow professors marched at the front, linking arms as if to protect the students behind them, including Mr. Tuo.
The students never returned to class. Prof. Chen joined the Tiananmen protests full-time, sleeping on the concrete ground for days on end.
