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245 8 Tales of Two Empires The Conquerors, the Colonized, and the Heroes Looking at Changbai Mountain high above, Watching the Black Dragon River flowing afar, I wonder: Who will take over [the land]? Who will build another empire? —Rugai, 19371 As it wasn’t long ago that the Qing dynasty collapsed, people still have fresh memories of its misdeeds....The Manzu suffered from their expulsion [by the Chinese Nationalist Government]. The illegitimate Manchoukuo [regime] of thirteen years...is a constant reminder of shame (chiru zhu ⪬㎯ᰕ) for the Manzu. —Lu and He 1999, preface During the 1911 Revolution, the Anti-Japanese War, and the Liberation War, the Manzu again joined other brotherly ethnic groups in fighting the enemies and sacrificing their lives....The Manzu are members of the Chinese nation and are as outstanding as other ethnic groups. —Lu and Sun 1993, preface The Qing Empire came to an end in 1912, and Manchoukuo disappeared with Japan’s imperial empire in 1945. Yet collective and individual memories of the two empires persist in the Manzu’s narrations of their pasts. “The remembering and the telling are themselves events, not only description of events” (Portelli 1981b, 175). Manzu accounts of the two empires reveal a triadic process of the ethnicization of the Manzu community: the Manzu’s reconception of Manchuria, redefinition of their historical roles, and decolonization in post-Qing China. With a role to play in revising the history of a community for the present redefinition of identity, the interconnected individual, communal, and state-sponsored narratives are concretized in the changing Manzu tales of the two empires. Volumes of existing literature have offered insights into the disparity between individual and state narratives about the past. Nevertheless, two questions about such narratives remain open: Who are the individu- 246 | Experiencing Borderlands, Re-understanding Homeland als and the state? Would the individual/state or individual/collective dichotomy be too simplistic to facilitate the study of interactions among histories, the people who record and present the histories, and the people who utilize constructed history as resources? Local communities, individuals, and the state all participate in revising historical narratives for re-identification or re-self-identification. Ethnic peoples present their histories and practice their identities in accordance with historical variables that define the position of the ethnic group in the broader community. A multifaceted analysis of the Manzu’s narrations of their pasts will help us understand the complicated historical reasons behind the changes in their accounts of the two empires. Narrations of the past help to create the present. “Historical memories ” are expressed and presented through narratives in varied formats by historical agents, such as history textbooks and personal memoirs, visual materials at museums and monuments, and oral accounts transmitted across generations, among others. This chapter addresses the specification of the remembered and the forgotten during the highly complex socialization processes of creating “collective memories.”2 During the past decade, scholars have questioned and challenged the definition of collective memory, as well as the methodology of historical studies of memories. Studies on how communities are imagined or constructed by the intelligentsia and/or the state frequently use “collective memories” to refer to presentations of the past. They adopt the theoretical framework founded in the analyses of social relations by Durkheim and Mauss, or Maurice Halbwach’s theory on the constructability of collective memories. Jeffrey Olick has noted that “collective memory becomes synonymous with pattern-maintenance per se” (1998, 336).3 Elizabeth Tonkin, in her analysis of African oral literacy, points out that the experiential aspects have often been overlooked in most theoretical analyses of Durkheimian collective memories. In East Asian studies, attention to experiential aspects in general, and to subnational participants in particular, is similarly lacking. Scholars tend to focus on the winning power that authenticated or authenticates the existing state in the historical present and on that power’s revision of history. The following analysis of the Manzu’s narrations of their pasts reveals that, although often overlooked, the accounts of those who have lost territorial sovereignty and authority over the rhetoric of nation building provide a valuable primary source for scholars studying other dimensions of the revision of history and reformation of community. This chapter addresses two ways in which historical tales are usually told: narration and writing. Despite a certain imbalance in the amount of available and accessible primary sources from each genre, my inclusion of different categories of Manzu narrations about the two empires [18.117.186.92] Project...

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