Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Batavia - Richmond Memorial Library | 34020004102115 | 951.056 BRAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Medina - Lee-Whedon Memorial Library | 34103001987090 | 951.05 BRAN (HISTORY 8) | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... North Tonawanda Public Library | 34120007096965 | 951.056 BRAN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia.
Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
Author Notes
Tania Branigan writes editorials for the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent, reporting on politics, the economy, and social changes. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post. Red Memory is her first book. She lives in London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Branigan debuts with a visceral history of the Cultural Revolution and a probing look at how the modern-day Chinese Communist Party has sought to erase this chapter from its past. Lasting from 1966 to 1976, the upheaval saw children condemning their parents for "thoughtcrimes," and students, some as young as 13 or 14, attacking and murdering their teachers. As many as two million people were killed. Young reactionaries, who called themselves Red Guards, perpetrated these atrocities to glorify the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong, who used the tidal wave of violence to strengthen his leadership position and silence domestic critics. The chaos touched almost every Chinese family, including that of current president Xi Jinping, who "was exiled to a long stretch of bleak rural poverty" after his father was persecuted by Chairman Mao. Though the Cultural Revolution was declared a historical catastrophe in 1981, no one was held responsible and there was no closure for the victims. Drawing on fascinating and often wrenching interviews with victims and perpetrators, Branigan reveals the speed with which "beatings and deaths became commonplace" and makes a persuasive case that the period is an unresolved national trauma lying just beneath the surface of modern China. This is essential reading for China watchers. (May)
Guardian Review
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing's burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were living in a time of Chinese capitalism. This recasting of the Cultural Revolution as a period deserving of nostalgia began in the 1990s, but it is still in full swing, and it shapes a struggle for ownership of history in today's China. In Red Memory, Tania Branigan tells a dark, gripping tale of battles between Chinese whose views of the period - violent nightmare or socialist utopia? - still divide family and friends. Branigan was the Guardian's China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, and during those years interviewed people whose lives were formed, for good or ill, by the Cultural Revolution. This book is not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today. Branigan speaks to people who suffered from the attacks of the youthful Red Guards in the first years after the storm broke in 1966; their stories of being beaten for "crimes" such as knowing foreign languages or wearing "bourgeois" clothes are no less powerful for being familiar. Less well-known are the memories of many who experienced a kind of liberation during those years; free cross-country train travel for youths ("the Great Link-up") let them see China in revolution on an epic scale. But the most disturbing element of her story is the refusal of perpetrators, even half a century later, to take responsibility for their actions. The most chilling case is a man named Zhang Hongbing, whose mother was executed as a counter-revolutionary. Zhang takes Branigan to his mother's grave, rather jarringly crying for forgiveness while bragging that he has brought the Guardian to come and see her. But the real shock is how she died. She had become disillusioned with Mao and even ripped down the picture of him in their home. Unprompted, Zhang and the other members of his family denounced her to the Communist party, knowing that she would be arrested and shot. Zhang now feels remorse, yet he still seeks to divert blame. His mother, he said, should take some responsibility because she "hadn't told us that as a person you should have independent thinking". Similarly, friends of Song Binbin, a Red Guard who denounced a teacher, Bian Zhongyun, who was beaten to death in Beijing in 1966, try to argue that Song was a victim as much as the dead instructor. The party has acknowledged the Cultural Revolution as a dreadful mistake, but its implication that nobody was individually to blame, and its refusal to allow detailed research in China on the topic, has allowed the generation who lived through it to remain hazy about causes and consequences too. Branigan ends with an excellent analysis of how contemporary Chinese politicians seek to mimic the Cultural Revolution while following very different paths. She recalls Bo Xilai, who ran the mega-city of Chongqing until 2012 with an ideology based on "singing red" (encouraging mass performance of Cultural Revolution-era songs such as The East Is Red) and "smashing black" (destroying organised crime gangs). But her main attention is on President Xi Jinping. Xi, she notes, seeks to create a cult of personality that can look like the kind of semi-religious devotion demanded by Mao. Yet unlike Mao, who delighted in the chaos that he had unleashed during the Cultural Revolution, Xi has clamped down on any signs of grassroots activism. Shaped by his own experience of rural exile in those years, Xi clearly has no intention of letting any kind of uncontrolled politics return to China. In the years that Branigan reported from China, there were still cracks in the authoritarian system that allowed her to collect stories that went against the official grain. By the time she left, the new crime of "historical nihilism" made it much harder to recover fighter. In the opening pages, the protagonist of Fran Littlewood's debut novel is stuck in traffic gridlock in north London. It is a scorching summer's day and Grace, in the grip of a hot flush, feels "on fire from the inside out". She's atrociously late and she's pouring with sweat. Drivers are blaring their horns and the man in the next car is staring at her, and suddenly she can't take it any longer. She gets out of her car and simply walks away. If this feels reminiscent of another classic first scene, that's because it is. In her acknowledgments, Littlewood cites as her inspiration Falling Down, the 1993 film starring Michael Douglas as a nameless man who, having lost his job, his wife and his children, bewildered and enraged by his plunge from proud respectability into impotent obsolescence, finally snaps, abandoning his car on a traffic-snarled LA freeway to go on a rampage through the city. Like Falling Down, Amazing Grace Adams takes place over the course of a single, spectacularly bad day. And like Douglas's character, 45-year-old Grace feels baffled and obsolete. Her husband has left her. Her adored daughter, Lotte, has opted to live with her father, refusing to see or speak to Grace. After months of sick days and missed deadlines, Grace has lost both of her jobs, as part-time French teacher and translator of schlocky romances. Physically, too, she has become unrecognisable to herself. Trapped in perimenopause, she is a fug of hot flushes, full-body itchiness, brain fog and incontinent paroxysms of rage. On the day she ditches her car, Grace is trying to get to Lotte's 16th birthday party, from which she has been explicitly excluded. She has ordered a Love Island cake to take with her, hoping that the shared joke will heal the rift between them. But she is not quite in her right mind. As she makes her increasingly unhinged way across north London, she encounters the usual roll call of misogynist microaggressions: patronising shop assistants, aggressive drivers, lairy builders instructing her to smile because it might never happen. Except this time Grace means to make sure it does. The bestseller lists have recently played host to some fabulously flawed and self-sabotaging midlife heroines: think of the acerbic Martha in Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss or indomitable Elizabeth Zott in Bonnie Garmus's megahit Lessons in Chemistry. Littlewood's publishers are doubtless hoping that Grace Adams will take her place alongside them. Certainly, Amazing Grace Adams has some lovely moments. The novel is studded with flashbacks that gradually reveal Grace's story, and the early days of her relationship with her husband, Ben, are evoked with a beguiling mix of tenderness and humour. Their first encounter, at the geeky Polyglot of the Year 2002 competition, is a particular delight. Littlewood is strong on the mother-daughter dynamic, too, skilfully capturing the fierce push-pull between Grace and the recalcitrant Lotte. Where the novel falters is in its narrative spine: Grace's increasingly frenzied march across London, which unfolds at a hectic pitch somewhere between a fever dream and a Twitter pile-on. In Falling Down, the protagonist's violent spree is presented as not only unlawful but misguided; acts of revenge unjustly wreaked on innocent bystanders. In the end, his rage is also impotent: it changes nothing. By contrast, Grace's rampage is presented as a liberation, two fingers up to anyone who thinks menopausal women have no purpose or agency, and more fundamentally as the foundation for a fresh beginning. There is little humour in these sections, and less kindness. Grace smashes up a shop display. She breaks one man's headlights with a golf club and head-butts another in the face. It slowly becomes clear that Grace's unravelling owes as much to the trauma of the past as it does to her perimenopausal present. But for most of the novel Littlewood appears to assume something more troubling: that justification is superfluous and, because Grace is a woman, whatever she does, however irrational or disproportionate, other women will instinctively cheer her on. I agree that we need more stories of smart, funny, powerful menopausal women fighting back. If only Grace Adams were one of them.
Kirkus Review
The former China correspondent for the Guardian explores the "cumulative forgetting" of the devastations of the Cultural Revolution. London-based journalist Branigan, who lived in China from 2008 until recently, delivers a series of poignant, engaging stories that reveal the deep scars left by the Cultural Revolution, which radiated violently across the country from "Red August" 1966 to 1976. Across a beautifully rendered text, the author astutely examines the Maoist ideology that drove the tumultuous class struggle and destruction, leading to the deaths "of as many as 2 million for their supposed political sins and another 36 million hounded." Prompted to explore the history more deeply after viewing artist Xu Weixin's exhibit of huge portraits in Beijing of those who "had played a part in this madness, as victim or perpetrator; often both," Branigan digs into numerous vivid personal tales. Many were teenagers at the time, and some were children of the political elite; they responded to Mao's direct appeal to "be martial" by becoming zealous devotees of the Red Guard. They inflicted violence on their teachers and denounced their parents, all in the name of destroying the "Four Olds"--old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. Many of the perpetrators, including current leader Xi Jinping, would later be disgraced themselves, sent to reeducation camps in rural communities for years afterward. Only Mao's death and the ousting of the Gang of Four would end the mayhem. Throughout this sensitive, well-researched narrative, Branigan delicately delves into these shattered lives. Many of her subjects are still searching for justice or recognition, while others remain nostalgic for their patriotic youth. The author notes that while the hysteria and fanaticism of the time "forged modern China," the events are rarely discussed today--even as the trauma continues to resonate deeply. A heartbreaking, revelatory evocation of "the decade that cleaved modern China in two." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In her compelling history, former Guardian China correspondent Branigan writes, "It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution." The atrocities of Chairman Mao's societal upheaval killed at least two million and hounded another 36 million between 1967 and 1976, and the memory of this red terror is the crucial vector by which to understand the paradoxical state of China today. Branigan weaves fascinating, unbelievable, and often terrifying personal narratives into her analysis. Her deep insight into a nation's painted-over trauma explains how mass hysteria, rampant betrayal, and even cannibalism have shattered a society for generations afterwards. This communal trauma is where the simultaneous aggression and insecurity that shape Chinese policy come from; it's the malaise driving this powerful nation. Particularly valuable is the author's perception of the absence of clearly demarcated good and evil. This priceless work of oral history preserving the experiences of aging victims and perpetrators (often both at once) will enhance understanding of China during this time of elevated conflict. Nuance is exactly what's necessary in approaching a society so profoundly wounded.
Library Journal Review
Branigan, former China correspondent for The Guardian, debuts with an exploration of the human toll of the Cultural Revolution in China (1966--76), during which two million people were killed and 36 million were imprisoned or otherwise persecuted. Narrator Rebecca Lam provides a careful, sensitive presentation, conveying these painful stories and accounts with an even tone that acknowledges emotion without drama or ornament. As the book details the trauma inflicted upon so many--with people reporting their family members for betraying the state, and others killed on the basis of flimsy rumors--Lam's performance allows the hurts of Branigan's interviewees to be viscerally understood. This approach creates emotional space for listeners to deeply consider individual events and their connection to the larger political context of Mao's China. Branigan includes some amusing anecdotes, but these are few and far between and serve as a foil for the book's heavier passages. There is hope that speaking of the pain may keep it from reoccurring, but the author soberingly hints that a new cycle is beginning. VERDICT A valuable addition to library collections that explores the connections between politics and belief and their consequences.--Matthew Galloway