The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years

Abstract

How to come to terms with the past? How to navigate between history, memory, and literature when it comes to political violence and traumatic experiences, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? These are questions at the center of modern and contemporary Chinese literary studies. There have been a number of works focusing on the issues of history, memory, trauma, and representation of the Mao era, such as Xiaobin Yang's The Chinese Postmodern: Trauma and Irony in Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction (2002), Yomi Braester's Witness against History (2003), Rong Cai's The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature (2004), Ban Wang's Illuminations from the Past (2004), David Der-wei Wang's The Monster That Is History (2004), Michael Berry's A History of Pain (2008), Kirk A. Denton's Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (2014), and Jie Li's Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (2020).Lingchei Letty Chen's book, The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years, stands out in its endeavor to account for the traumatic Mao time from the conceptual and methodological framework of the transnational memory discourses, particularly, the Holocaust study. It provides an important inquiry into the work of memory and postmemory produced from the immediate post–Cultural Revolution years to the twenty-first century, ranging from scar literature to “lite” Cultural Revolution memory writings, from documentary films to Anglophone popular fiction and memoirs, from reportage to documentary fiction. Chen sees her project as an “archaeological work” to unearth hidden remembrances and testimonies of the historical calamity of the Mao years, to fathom “the psychological, the behavioral, and the sociocultural ramifications of such deep historical trauma” (20). The purpose of the book is twofold: it discusses major works on the Cultural Revolution and other political events of the Mao era in order to explore “the dialogic relationship between memory, bearing historical witness, and literary representation” (140); and it also seeks to add new angles of reflections on human tragedies and historical violence to the interpretive work of trauma studies.The book is composed of a theoretical introduction followed by five chapters examining varied forms of memory works including fiction, memoirs, autobiographies, and documentary films from the late 1970s to the present. Chapter 1, “Literary Memory and Postmemory of a Traumatic Past,” reads works of the Scar, the Root-seeking, and the Reflection literatures, and proposes to treat them as testimonies to political atrocities. It approaches post-Mao writings from the perspective of the Holocaust generational distinction and distinguishes writers like Han Shaogong as the first generation who created an era of lived memory and writers like Mo Yan, Can Xue, Su Tong, and Yu Hua as the 1.5 generation whose works are considered postmemory. Chapter 2, “Confronting Specters of the Past: Remembering Perpetrators,” focuses on issues of perpetration, guilt, and confession manifested in Dai Houying's novel Humanity, O Humanity! and Yu Hua's short stories “1986” and “The Past and the Punishments.” Chapter 3, “Where Documentary Proof and Memory Intersect: Remembrance of the Great Famine,” discusses three modes of representation of the Great Famine: Zou Xueping's documentary films, The Starving Village and The Satiated Village; Yang Jisheng's investigative reportage, Tombstone; and Yang Xianhui's book Chronicles of Jiabiangou. Chapter 4, “History's Doppelgänger: Allegorized Memory and Its Moral Imperative,” explores the ethical dimension of Yan Lianke's novel, The Four Books, as an allegorized remembrance of the Great Famine. Chapter 5, “Palimpsests of Identity: Memory-Lite Writings of the Cultural Revolution,” turns to Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoirs and popular memory work in contemporary mainland China to consider the use and/or abuse of memory.Memory studies, particularly those concerning the Holocaust, have contributed greatly to the understanding of human suffering and guilt, trauma and catastrophes, remembrance, forgetting, and amnesia. On the other hand, as Andreas Huyssen warns in his study of the Holocaust memory as a global trope, “while comparisons with the Holocaust may rhetorically energise some discourses of traumatic past, it may also serve as a screen memory or simply block insight into specific local histories.”1 The question arises as to how we can retain historical and cultural specificities of traumatic memories of the Mao era as a dark phase of China's pursuit of modernization and avoid the leveling and homogenizing tendency of a global memory discourse.The most thought-provoking moments of the book are those when it explores the mnemonic discourse without losing insight into the literary intricacies of the memory work within the historical and cultural context of China. Chen's reading of Yan Lianke's The Four Books demonstrates her fine eye and sharp critical skills. She offers a forceful analysis of Yan's narrative strategy of allegory and its ethical consequences. Whereas it appreciates Yan's incisive investigation of intellectuals' responsibility in political victimizations such as the Great Leap Forward epitomized in the District 99 labor-reform camp, chapter 4, at certain moments, reads anxiously in questioning the author's omission of graphic pain, suffering, and the death of peasants during the Great Famine. On the one hand, Chen maintains that Yan's allegorizing of memory illuminates the elusive and Sisyphean task of preserving memories and reveals the inevitable futility of personal repentance and redemption confronting pervasive political stifling and surveillance; on the other hand, she criticizes Yan for failing to bear witness to the perished: “If indeed Yan's novel is a remembrance of the famine, where are the victims? Why are their voices unheard?” (160). I would suggest that such a controversy points not so much to the novelist's ethical stance but, rather, to the very value and capacity of literature. As Chen's main argument in this chapter articulates, literature serves not merely as yet another account of bearing witness and testimony to political atrocities or as a direct reflection of the objective reality. More so than history, statistics, or public documentations, literature is able to probe the complex relationship between memory and oblivion, fiction and history, humanity and reality, just as Yan Lianke's own conception of literature of “mythorealism” elucidates: Mythorealism's connection with reality stems not from finding direct causes and effects inherent in life, but rather from reaching within the soul, the spirit (that is, the relationship between people and the inner working of things and reality), and the artist's unique imagination born of reality. To reflect on things as they appear is not how we reach the real and reality. Rooted in the soil of everyday life and society—imagination, allegory, mythology, legend, dream, fantasy, magic, and transference are the means through which mythorealism arrives at the real and reality. (162)In sum, this book provides a valuable contribution to the study of cultural memory and of the post-Mao culture. It is an essential text for students and scholars who are interested in both memory studies and contemporary China. It expands the national focus of the traumatic experiences of the Mao era and opens up room for debates about new ways of approaching the localized trauma and memory and relating them to other histories and international contexts.