Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China's Cultural Revolution (review)

??6 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 Karen Gernant, professor ofhistory, has recently translatedfiction by the contemporary writers PengJianming, YanLianke, and Guo Xueboforpublication (forthcoming ) by Chinese Literature Press. NOTES1. See, for example, "Watching the Wheat-reapers," "Bitter Cold, Living in the Village," and "The Old Man ofHsin-feng with the Broken Arm," in Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, eds., Sunflower Splendor (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1975), pp. 202-205. Feng Jicai. Ten Years ofMadness: Oral Histories ofChina's Cultural Revolution. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals Inc., 1996. ix, 285 pp. Paperback $16.95, isbn 0-8351-2584-x. As a narrative form, the oral history occupied a truly extraordinary position in Mao's China, especially during the Ten Years ofMadness—the provocative title given this selection from Feng Jicai's classic anthology A Hundred People's Ten Years. A cursory glance at the contents of any Chinese personnel dossier from the Cultural Revolution ülustrates how, over and over again, people from all walks of life had to tell and retell their personal histories, were forced to account for what they had done before "Liberation," tell ofwhom they had known and why, and reveal in detail what their thoughts and actions had been at crucial junctures in time. Old personnel dossiers are full of stories told to and recorded by Party inquisitors —recorders who were, if anything, critical and expert. "But comrade, when you accounted for these actions on earlier occasions you failed to mention the existence of a relative on Taiwan. Why was that so?" Hence we should not be surprised that by the time Feng Jicai set out, in a very different political and social setting, in 1986, to tease out ofhis extraordinary survivors the history of "pain inflicted upon the hearts and shoulders ofa hundred ordinary Chinese during the Cultural Revolution" (p. v), he was able to find coherent stories with preludes, tropes, climaxes, and closures. Far more than mere raw material that needed a professional to mold it into shape, the stories Feng encountered had only to be packaged. Ten Years ofMadness contains sixteen accounts offates suffered not just dur- ' l y ing the Cultural Revolution, but in many cases during the years leading up to that "most chaotic period" as well. One person's story stretches, on a symbolic level, across two thousand years, which really was, its narrator insists, how long "the Cultural Revolution has been going on in our country" (p. 201). Virtually all of ofHawai'i Press Reviews 107 the narrators are interested in unburdening themselves ofpainful memories, as some oftheir tides suggest: "Confessional," by the daughter ofa Rightist; "I've Become a Different Person," by a man who spent a decade in jail not knowing why; "The Dear Price ofWorship," by a classmate of one of Mao's daughters who falls in love with a "counterrevolutionary" and lives to regret it; and "I Refuse to Admit I was a Sacrificial Object," by a proud rebel tortured into confessing a crime about which he knew nothing. On the back cover of the book, Feng Jicai describes himself simply as one who took down what was said by "people who came forward to share their experiences in a cathartic attempt to exorcise memory's demons." However, . . . Ten Years ofMadness prompts the historian to ask whether, in addition to being treated as powerful records ofwhat a selection of survivors chose to tell about themselves and their loved ones in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, these attempts at exorcising "memory's demons" can also be regarded as reliable accounts of "what actually happened." What, for example, are we to make ofthe story tided "Two Women ofNo. 63," about "a Nazi style illegal prison set up at a notorious factory in a big city in North China" (p. 181)? "No. 63" no longer exists—"the facility was demolished" (p. 185)—and unlike the allies who closed the chapter on Nazism, the politicians who oudived Mao did not turn the terror chambers that had served the "cleansing of the class ranks" into museums. IfRonald Reagan was unable to separate real memories from mediated ones ofwar on the silver screen, is...