By the way, nice “extra” work in the movie. You all look pretty real to me.

I just read this in Factory Girls [p.126], where the Chinese American author talks about trying to discover her family history from her relatives in China:

A few were trying to make sense of the past, but most were not… it hurt less to let it go.

My relatives did not like telling their own stories. They often began by insisting they had nothing to say… Not one of them, it seemed to me, had faith that their memories mattered… Perhaps in a world where so many peple had suffered, one person’s story did not matter. Suffering only made you more like everyone else.

By the way, thanks for including the Chinese vocab in your comments!

Secondly, the fear factor. The party has made it clear that it doesn’t welcome such reflection, and has been routinely censoring publications about the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution. So people are afraid and don’t feel free to talk about their past at all for fearing consequences. Keep in mind that a lot of the rightists, for example, suffered 20 years, the best part of their lives, for speaking something very trivial, and you can imagine how fearful they are now to speak their mind. I can readily recall a few of these figures I know, how withdrawn they were when they were finally “free.” It is heartbreaking, Joel.

Third, the shame factor. Primo Levy wrote about this too, and I also find traces of it in people I came across. Somehow, and somewhere in the back of their consciousness, they feel they brought this on themselves, and it was their own fault. I once heard one man cursing himself, “我是一个孽种！” (I was condemned!)

An entire generation of people has chosen to keep silent, a bigger part of it has already gone and the rest is dying out.

I have in my possession a stack of letters written by a man who was a victim of 肃反 （a purge in 1955) in the last years of his life. He said he had no particular desire to write about his past, the reason being, “What’s the use?” In all of these letters, he went great length to do to justify to himself why he should not feel bitter over this bitter past of his. He reckoned that, even 刘少奇 (Liu Shaoqi) and so many big people suffered and suffered worse fate, let alone me; and it is the law that “revolution eats its own children.” Then his thoughts took flight to history, to the universe, to semi-philosophical musing (party-style) on how inconsequential an individual life is, etc. All I can say is that he didn’t succeed very well to convince himself, becase he kept coming back to it over and over again.

He was a retired journalist of Xinhua News Agency. If this was his situation, imagine others’. And he died last year.

Another thing I wonder about this generation is how they’ve handled their memories from the Mao era. If they’ve spent the last several decades pushing those memories away rather than thinking over them and sorting them out, articulating them at least to themselves in their own mind, they maybe just don’t have much to say about it all at this point.