WEBVTT
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Interviewer: Hello! Thank you for accepting my
interview.
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Thank you.
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Interviewer: First, could you tell me if you were born in
the 1980s, or the 1990s?
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I was born in 1980, so traditionally, people would
classify [me as being born in the decade] after 1980.
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Interviewer: 1980s, OK.
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Interviewer: But actually, some [people born in] '81, '82,
and '83 believe we ought to be counted as the "post-1970" [generation].
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Interviewer: Oh, OK. How do you identify/classify
yourself?
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I identify more with being classified as "post-1980."
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Interviewer: OK. Where were you born, and where did you
grow up in China?
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I grew up in a city in northern China, Tianjin.
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Interviewer: Could you please tell me, in your impression,
approximately when was the first time you heard about the historical
incident, the Cultural Revolution?
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For me, this memory is pretty clear. It must've been when
I was nine years old.
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Interviewer: [When you] were nine.
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When [I] was nine years old.
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At that time, it just so happened...what was the greater
background?
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At that time, my parents were university professors.
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At that time, they transferred from a university in
Tianjin to a university in Guangzhou.
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I was born in 1980; when I was nine years old, it was
1989.
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At that time, of course my father said many, many
things—I don't remember [most] of them—but I remember one
statement.
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That time, he was eating and chatting with my mother, and
he said one sentence.
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I'm not censoring it at all; this statement's original
wording was, "The Cultural Revolution was just Old Mao wanting to be
emperor."
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This was my earliest impression of the Cultural
Revolution, one I still remember.
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Interviewer: That was when [you] were nine years old.
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[Right].
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Interviewer: Then, later on? Were there other channels
through which you heard about the Cultural [Revolution]?
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When I was 11 years old, in 1991, my [parents] were
transferred from that university in Guangzhou back to that university in
Tianjin.
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Then, there was no other change; we kept living in
Tianjin.
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In my childhood, I liked reading; as long as a book had
words, I'd pick it up and flip through it.
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Once, I went to a classmate's home and saw his dad's
bookcase. At the time [houses] were all small, just one room.
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On the bookcase was a really thick book with a simple,
shabby jacket. I remember [the text] was deep blue on a red background.
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On the spine was written "Ten-year History of the Cultural
Revolution." I've already forgotten who the author was.
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I felt that book was really intriguing, so I picked it up
and flipped through it.
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I've already forgotten what content I flipped to intrigued
me.
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Anyway, after I'd picked it up, I said to [my classmate's]
father, "Uncle, could you loan me this book?"
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At the time, our two families lived up- and downstairs
from one another; [we] were very familiar.
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I remember my classmate's father looked at me and with a
serious expression said, "I can loan it to you, but after you've read it,
you definitely must return it."
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So, I took it back to read. I remember lying on my little
bed reading it; I must've read it for a week.
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Interviewer: You were 11 years old.
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11 years old, at that time. I was somewhat confused
reading that book, since the author used a lot of obfuscations, I realize
now.
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[Also], that kind of chronological history book is pretty
dry; it was like a day-to-day account.
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When I was young, I most loved reading novels, foreign and
Chinese novels, since [they] had a plot.
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But this kind of [history book] was pretty dull. However,
I still read through it.
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Interviewer: [The process of reading] was simple.
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Right. Actually, [as a] child, [I] had a basic idea.
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Then, this idea was actually the feeling that these 10
years were very chaotic; everything was chaotic--
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--this was chaotic; that was chaotic;
just this and nothing else. At the time, I was 11 years old.
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Later...Should I go on speaking?
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Interviewer: Yes. Go on talking--very good.
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Later on, since from childhood I'd been pretty interested
in history, so I unconsciously looked for relevant things to read.
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Interviewer: May I ask, were your parents in social
sciences, humanities, or natural sciences?
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They were both very typical, very genuine natural sciences
[scholars]; they both [specialized in] chemistry.
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My paternal grandfather did, too. Later, [I'll] probably
talk about my paternal grandfather's story.
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In 1946, or sometime in the '40s, [my paternal
grandfather] passed an entrance exam to study in the United States at
public expense.
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He got his Ph.D. at an American university, then went on
to do a post-doc. In 1953—
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Interviewer: [He] returned to China.
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Right. Also, he took a circuitous route coming back.
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So, he was [among] the first group of [Chinese] scientists
to come back to China from studying in the U.S.
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He studied chemistry, and remained in the university [to
teach].
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Later on, my father mentioned to me that during the
Cultural Revolution, almost all people like my paternal grandfather counted
as people who carried original sin,
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...so at the time there were all
kinds of attacks. When my father talked about this with me, I was already
16 or 17 years old.
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[My father] spoke quite concretely with me, but it was all
his personal feelings,
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...since he was in the second year of
senior high school when the Cultural Revolution occurred and experienced
going “down to the countryside.”
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I have a deep impression of the things he told me about at
the time.
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He said that one evening, he was sitting outside their
family's house, watching all evening as group after group of Red Guards
searched houses to confiscate possessions.
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He said [he] could see a window of the house; after a
while there was a big commotion, and a light came on in the window.
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Then, people's shadows moved back and forth. After a while
it was quiet, and the light went out.
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After a while, again [came] another group [of Red
Guards].
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The same process went on three or four times in one
evening. This was one [incident].
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The second [incident] is, he told me my paternal
grandmother was a homemaker.
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Although she always respected my paternal grandfather, at
that time, she was a bit...
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Because people more or less followed the crowd, my father
said during that period of time, she and my grandfather often had serious
arguments.
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What's more, the words [she] used were mostly those
normally used when struggling against or persecuting intellectuals.
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So, my father said at the time, my paternal grandfather
endured a lot of emotional and psychological stress, was subjected to great
injury.
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This was their family's situation.
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The middle school my father went to was the affiliated
middle school of the university [where my paternal grandfather taught].
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Actually, what my father talked about with me was quite
scattered and disconnected; [when he] thought of it, he just rambled.
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He once said that [when] he was in the sophomore year of
high school, their school's Red Guards...
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First he said to me, these so-called activist elements,
Cultural Revolution activist elements, had some shared characteristics.
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One was that they didn't do well in school; another was
that they seemed to have good family backgrounds.
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He talked about two incidents with me [that demonstrated]
how warped human nature was at the time.
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A group of third-year junior high school students
struggled against a teacher.
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Usually, it was organized so a group of teachers were
taken to a place.
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The so-called "struggle" was actually beating, [my father]
said.
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He noticed that at the time, among the group of teachers
who'd been dragged out was a teacher who was pregnant.
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Just as [she] was about to be taken out, a high school
sophomore with a good family background,
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...who hadn't been classified in the
"five black categories" or "seven black categories" really couldn't stand
to see that,
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...and in the name of revolution, pulled this teacher out
of the ranks.
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If [he] hadn't taken that teacher out, it's hard to
imagine what the consequences might have been.
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Another thing is that in their class, there were two
sisters who were not far apart in age, so they were both in the same
class.
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These two sisters studied extremely well.
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In [my father's] impression, these two girls were also
quite pretty, that kind of perfect beauty.
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However, when the movement came along, these two girls
were the earliest in the class to "make a clean break" with their
family.
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I forget what my father said their mom did, but it seems
like she danced ballet.
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Moreover, she was also someone who'd studied abroad and
returned home, a dancer.
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What made people really sad is that after these two girls
"made a clean break" with their mother,
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...other than to ask for money and rummage through things,
they never went back home.
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What most angered people was that finally, [their] mother
died of persecution, and when her body was lying on the bed at home,
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...they went home and didn't even
look at her, just rummaged through the stuff in the house.
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Finally, some other girls in their class really couldn't
bear this. Usually, they all got along quite well.
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They were all [living] in the university residence
compound.
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They really couldn't stand seeing [how the sisters acted
towards their mother], so they organized and carried [her body] away.
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But the two sisters didn't show their faces during this
entire course of events.
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Later, they were [among] the first group to go "down to
the countryside."
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I believe my father has many examples of feelings like
this, since he was a professor's child.
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In that university, we had a large group of this kind of
person; they were all the children of [intellectuals] who'd studied abroad
and returned home, so-called "birds of a feather flocking together."
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[These kids] played together, and the bitter experiences
they met with were all about the same.
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I believe [my father] had many examples of [experiences]
like this, but he never talked about them, and was unwilling to recall
them.
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He would just bring them up once in a while, for example
[when he and] some classmates would share a meal, or [at] a classmates'
reunion after X number of years.
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[When] he mentioned the story of those two sisters to me,
it was at [his] high school classmates' 50-year reunion.
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They realized that those two sisters' situation was the
worst among [their classmates].
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Because of so-called revolutionary feelings, those two
sisters had enthusiastically taken the lead in going "down to the
countryside" to join a production team.
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Then, very early on, [they] got married to local
peasants.
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[When] joining in the classmates' reunion, the two
sisters' regrets [were obvious].
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There were a lot of things everyone was unwilling to
mention.
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[My father] said the reunion was a bit awkward, since
everyone felt there were always some things they ought not to touch on,
since they were not good for anyone.
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Were those two female students bad? Actually, it's hard to
say.
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But that era created some historical facts; from the
facts, [the two sisters] were bad.
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There's no way of denying this.
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It's hard to imagine [someone's] own daughters seeing
their own mother dead on a bed and not paying any attention, just going to
rummage through stuff.
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So this was something really…
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But personally, first of all, in high school, this [the
Cultural Revolution] was never a "test point."
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Interviewer: What is a "test point"?
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A so-called "test point" is just, for example, a high
school unified examination in history would test—
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Interviewer: Oh, a test's main focus.
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A test's main focus. So, [we] didn't need to memorize
things [regarding the Cultural Revolution].
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Then, in history books, these things [concerning the
Cultural Revolution] were generally all in small print.
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Generally, they'd appear in extracurricular reading;
what's more, they were written about with very little elaboration.
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Also, honestly speaking, now I think they didn't conform
at all to historical fact.
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Maybe this was also an opportunity for a change in my
thinking later on.
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Later, [after I] went to university, my father didn't
[limit] me on money.
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When I was in high school he hadn't really given me much
money, so I was really poor.
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After [I] went to university, he stopped being miserly,
and I started buying all kinds of books.
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I bought a serious history book, Wang Nianyi's
A History of Ten Years of
Turbulence.
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Elaborately packaged, it was also like a chronological
history book.
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Only when I became truly interested in this did I
consciously go back and dig up my father's memories, and then recall things
he’d mentioned before.
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I really became interested because I unexpectedly came
across a selection in
Reader from a book called
My Family written by Yu
Luowen,
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...the little brother of Yu Luoke [a student who was
executed for his writings].
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The book he wrote was really visceral, and also very
real.
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I went to look for that book, and actually found it. But
it had already been censored beyond recognition.
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At the time, our home already had the internet, so I just
found the complete original edition online. I still have that book.
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I remember very clearly it has an orange cover.
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There are a lot of little notes stuffed inside, where I
[wrote out] the things that had been censored out and stuck them in the
book.
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Later, from [reading] this book I went on to seek out
traces of Yu Luoke's life, and then from Yu Luoke's persecution,
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...[I] looked for things about the
background of that historical period, such as people like Zhang Zhixin's
[and] Yu Luoke's individual cases.
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Then, I gradually looked for some upper-level things.
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So-called upper-levels things were things that at the
time...
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Actually, I don't know if A True
Record of the Lushan Conference had [them] or not,
but actually, I read this book.
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Then, [I] felt that [The Lushan Conference Incident],
perhaps in this time period—that is, before all of the historical
incidents that arose from the Cultural Revolution—it amounted to—
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To speak clearly, I really believe the change in Mao
Zedong Thought started from the Yan'an Rectification [Movement].
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The Yan'an Rectification, the Three-anti and Five-anti
campaigns, then the Anti-Rightist Campaign, then it was the Great Leap
Forward, then the Cultural Revolution.
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Researchers of history might believe this was a period of
logical change in a leader's thinking,
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...which brought about the period in China's history from
[19]49 to 1976 [the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution].
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In the beginning, I looked for some domestic information;
later I sought foreign information.
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I read some really interesting...I’m not going to talk
about that.
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Interviewer: This shows you are still very interested.
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I'm extremely interested in much of history, especially
recent modern history, with some [historical incidents].
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Interviewer: Do you feel that there are many young people
born after 1980 [who are interested] like you?
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Not many.
159
00:18:52.080 --> 00:18:53.470 align:center line:-1
Interviewer: I also think there aren’t many.
160
00:18:53.480 --> 00:19:07.240 align:center line:-1
Really not many. I feel that [people] of my age or a year
or two younger lean toward modern cynicism.
161
00:19:07.250 --> 00:19:13.290 align:center line:-1
So-called modern cynicism is that they only care about
their personal lifestyle.
162
00:19:13.300 --> 00:19:23.090 align:center line:-1
To be honest, for living, my minimum can fall quite
low.
163
00:19:23.100 --> 00:19:27.070 align:center line:-1
Interviewer: Is there no one of your own age with whom you
can talk about this subject?
164
00:19:27.080 --> 00:19:27.990 align:center line:-1
Yes.
165
00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:28.580 align:center line:-1
Interviewer: There is still someone.
166
00:19:28.590 --> 00:19:30.600 align:center line:-1
There's just one person.
167
00:19:30.610 --> 00:19:32.730 align:center line:-1
Interviewer: Really very few! So hard to find.
168
00:19:32.740 --> 00:19:34.690 align:center line:-1
Yes, it’s rare.
169
00:19:34.700 --> 00:19:44.690 align:center line:-1
Actually, around us, there's one or two people who can
discuss this with me, but what they pay attention to is not quite the
same.
170
00:19:44.700 --> 00:19:51.390 align:center line:-1
But, we can still talk about a few things regarding this
subject.
171
00:19:51.400 --> 00:19:53.590 align:center line:-1
Interviewer: Good. Thank you.
172
00:19:53.600 --> 00:19:54.290 align:center line:-1
You’re welcome.
173
00:19:54.300 --> 00:19:55.456 align:center line:-1
Interviewer: Thank you for accepting my interview.
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