Ai Ling Zhou was 25 when Hawke allowed her and thousands of other Chinese students to stay in Australia after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. On the day after Hawke’s death, her son Naaman Zhou asked her to look back

A lot of people wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Bob Hawke. They would be, like my mother was in 1989 as she watched the TV, somewhere unknown. Somewhere between unmoored and trapped, feeling sick to the stomach.

Like many Chinese-Australians, Ai Ling Zhou was here on a student visa when the soldiers went into Tiananmen Square. She had friends in the crowd, and assumed they had died. She had been here for two years, and had been feeling a kind of hope. Not any more. On her visa, time was running out.

With the former prime minister’s passing, the night Bob Hawke let thousands of Chinese students stay is a moment parents around the country will be telling their children and their families. They are sharing stories and tributes and sadness.

I asked my mother about it. She was 25. It was six days of darkness.

We're not just mourning Bob Hawke – we're mourning purposeful leadership and big ideas | Lenore Taylor Read more

“Before Tiananmen we found it very exciting,” she said. “The students were occupying the square for a lengthy period, and the government didn’t do anything. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the USSR had dissolved, Gorbachev visited China. We thought China was happening. We thought China was going to move into democracy.

“Out of the blue that morning the news came that tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, and there were shootings and there was bloodshed and all of a sudden we just felt, when we saw the news, our hearts just shrank all of a sudden. It was just so sad.

“We left China for political reasons. And when the students were occupying Tiananmen Square, we thought China had hope, and we might go back. I remember all of a sudden, it felt as if I was in a war. As if the war had come to us. That sort of feeling, you’re so scared, you try and hold on to your family members. We felt trapped.”

Hawke made the announcement six days later. He had seen what happened. He read the cables. And he told the country what they said, how the tanks “reduced them to pulp”.

He gave my parents four years. He cried and he didn’t consult the cabinet. “When I walked off the dais,” Hawke said later, “I was told: ‘You cannot do that, prime minister.’ I said to them, ‘I just did. It is done.’”

My mother found out on the TV.

“At the time, immigration law was very strict, we saw no way we could stay in Australia and we didn’t know where to go. We felt very sad. Lost. He made the announcement very quickly. He cried on TV.

“And that was very touching, we saw the human side of him. We saw humanity. The prime minister of Australia weeping. They let us stay for four years, unconditionally. Which allowed us to work, and Medicare access.”

I asked her if she saw it live. She can’t remember, and tells me to stop asking. “Maybe not. We had a very busy life! We were working two jobs.

“I felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel, for our lives. We were really in a dark tunnel for those six days, until he made the announcement.”

Migrants understand how precarious life can be at times like this. The importance of tiny slips of paper with years of life on them. She was the same age then as I am now. It is the bittersweet blessing of the second-generation migrant that I didn’t realise that until now, and took it for granted my entire life.

At the time, degrees from Chinese universities were not recognised. She had a bachelor’s in material engineering, but it did not matter.

“Because our degrees weren’t recognised, we felt devalued,” she says. “At the time, a lot of people really, really felt we had no hope in our life. Like ants in society. When your degree is not recognised, you don’t know where to go. But that changed everything for us.”

Greg Combet: Bob Hawke transformed Australia irrevocably and for the better Read more

After 1993, Paul Keating transferred the visas to permanent residency. I was born in 1994, and she went back to uni as a new mother. She had waited for years with the uncertainty. “I was almost 30 years old and wanted to do everything in one go.”

She became a professor of economics at the University of Sydney. This explains why she keeps mentioning Keating. (“I still preferred Keating, he was more serious and had more vision,” she says. “Now is not the time,” I say).

But Hawke of course, is still the original, and a giant.

“I immediately liked him so much,” she says. “Even later on, when I was working in a cafe as a waitress, I heard the radio, he was saying ‘no Australian children should be living in poverty by 1990’ – I truly believed. And all the other people just laughed at me, and said ‘How could you believe such a statement. It will never be true.’ I think perhaps I was believing because of the those earlier events, the June 4th announcement.”

As the tributes to Hawke keep flowing, his staunch opposition to racism recurs, because it feels like it has been missing. It is something my mother feels only in retrospect.

“His time was before John Howard’s time, and before Pauline Hanson’s time. Howard at the time, as opposition leader, that was the first wave of anti-Asian sentiment.

“And Bob Hawke stood on his feet. That was really good. He didn’t play the game with Howard, he didn’t race to the bottom. He didn’t participate in that.”

They are sharing memories of him now, her to me, and her friends to each other.

“A lot of my Chinese friends are so sad. And they were saying, a politician may have done a lot of things, but the only things that people remember most is when humanity shines.”