"Our teacher said the school entrance exam would not cover the Cultural Revolution, so we just skipped it."

WEBVTT


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Interviewer: Thank you for accepting my interview. Could
you please tell me where you have mostly lived in
China?

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Mostly in Beijing.

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Interviewer: Could you tell me when you were born? You
don't need to say the exact year; just the decade will
do.

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[I was born in the] '90s.

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Interviewer: So young! Could you tell me, when did you
first hear of the Cultural Revolution,

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...and through what channel did you hear about
it?

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It must've been my first or second year of junior high
school, in the early 2000s.

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During history class, when the teacher touched on
contemporary Chinese history, he mentioned that China had had ten years of
Cultural Revolution.

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Interviewer: How did your teacher talk about it?
Do you still remember?

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It must've just been one class period; [the teacher] spent
no more than ten minutes on it.

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This topic was listed in our book's table of contents,
with the dates of the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976].

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Our teacher said to us that the high school entrance exam
would not cover this topic, so we just skipped over it.

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The book actually didn't have a lot of content; it didn't
concretely mention what had happened.

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It just said this event had happened during those ten
years.

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Interviewer: Classic exam-based education.

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Right.

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Interviewer: Was your family a way of receiving bits and
pieces of knowledge about the Cultural Revolution?

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My grandparents must have experienced it, but generally
speaking, they didn't talk about it at home. My feeling is that they
avoided talking about it.

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Interviewer: Do you yourself have much interest in knowing
more about this topic?

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Actually, I really want to learn more about it.

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I heard it mentioned once in junior high, and once in high
school -- both times in history class.

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Both times, [the teachers] said, "This won't be on the
test, so we're skipping over it."

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So, I was still really curious, what actually
happened, that no one talks about it?

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Interviewer: Thank you for accepting my interview.