Five things I appreciated about "Red Memory"

Most club members have received their copies of Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, our book of the month for November, but a few are still winging their way across the country. So I wanted to give you some context when you pick it up.

Why did I appreciate this book? Why did I pick it? Here are a few things that stood out.

Acceptance
To me, and maybe to Western readers in general, there’s not a lot that makes sense about the Cultural Revolution. How can this stuff happen? It seems mind-boggling. People who have direct experience of totalitarian societies might have a better grasp of the way in which people can turn to their darkest selves, but there is a disconnected, extraordinary strangeness about Mao’s 25-year rule that I don’t think will ever quite compute for those outside China. But Branigan’s book doesn’t try to present a grand theory of everything to get around that weirdness. It knows that this history is bewildering, and deals with what it has.

Specificity
One way that Branigan sidesteps the baffling complexity of Maoist China is by focusing relentlessly on the stories of specific individuals. We are guided through the fog by the experiences of real people and what happened to them during this period. This not only challenges stereotypes about China—which many still see as a vast land full of endless drones in service to the party—but also allows Branigan to show that people find it hard to come to terms with what the Cultural Revolution actually involved.

Character
The book is structured as a series of individual portraits, interviews and profiles, interspersed with a few chapters of exposition—and it really worked for me. Each person came alive on the page through vivid, personal descriptions. There is a mixture of subjects (artists and propagandists, militants and rebels, betrayers and protesters) but the fact that they are allowed to speak for themselves proved powerful and affecting. There are similarities between them—the sense of regret, the difficulty in coming to terms with how history played out—but there are differences, too. Some of these people are funny, others quiet, some resigned, some adamant. And they are all very much alive.

Honesty
That is not to say that everyone in the book is truthful or direct: far from it. Branigan has to deal with people who aren’t honest with her, and aren’t honest with themselves. This, I suppose, is the central theme of Red Memory: how do people live with their actions, or with the traumas that have happened? How do you carry on in the aftermath? By slowly accumulating these examples of people’s different ways of dealing with their part in this terror, we are able to juxtapose different perspectives in a way that felt very real to me.

Fearlessness
And at the heart of it all, there is Branigan’s unflinching eye. She asks the questions, draws out the memories, and plays it back for us in ways that are often brutal. There are sections in the book, descriptions both from the author and her interviewees, that are deeply distressing. Betrayals, murders, denunciations… all of the large-scale programming that society underwent seems represented. But it’s always careful and straight, and uncompromising: three qualities I really welcome.

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Next week I plan on doing a closer read of a particular section to explore what all this means in practice, but as you read Red Memory, I wonder: Did you enjoy these same things? Do you understand the Cultural Revolution? Can you imagine what it was like?

Onwards

Bobbie