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

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

Mostly in Beijing.

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

[I was born in the] '90s.

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

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

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

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

Interviewer: How did your teacher talk about it?

Do you still remember?

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewer: Classic exam-based education.

Right.

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

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.

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

Actually, I really want to learn more about it.

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

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

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

Interviewer: Thank you for accepting my interview.