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What happens when you go to your favorite bath house and accidentally break a cup worth at most 10 yuan? What about if the staff of the bath house then tried to shake you down for a 500 yuan ‘replacement cost?’ Well, if you’re the son of an army general in China, you go and get 200 of your Dad’s best troops to do a little ‘redecorating’ at the baths. I can’t help but think that this sort of thing is far more the rule than the exception. Interesting article this morning on the Cultural Revolution and historical memory in the New Republic Online. (Joshua Kurlantzick, “Silent Revolution,” 9/18/06, registration required). I’ve said this before in other places, but the question of historical memory is tricky because it involves not only abstract concepts such as ‘states’ or ‘nations,’ but because–as in the case of the Cultural Revolution–the past for many people is quite personal. We show a documentary on the GPCR each year to our lower-division Chinese history survey. In one interview, a prim woman in her 40s sits in her stylish Beijing apartment and talks calmly about how, when she was a girl in the late 1960s, a group of her friends were going to go that night to the home of their school principal to ‘struggle with him.’ According to the woman, she arrived late–to find that her friends had already beaten the old man to death. She asks the camera: What would I have done if I had been there, too? Would I have beaten the man also? Events such as slavery become History for many reasons, separation by time can play a part. So can the way the story is told. Germans can criticize |
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