The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

questions of perpetration and guilt and the possibility of retribution after the collective traumatic past has receded into history.

In chapter 3, the focus is on surviving victims’ accounts and methods of collecting testimonies about the Great Famine. I discuss three modes of memory representation: oral testimonies collected and turned into documents, memory documents written into reportage or investigative documentaries, and testimonies written into fictional representations of historical events. For the first mode, I examine the archived testimonies produced by the independent documentary filmmaker Zou Xueping 鄒雪平, namely, The Starving Village and its sequel The Satiated Village, to understand how survivors of the Great Famine recall their memories and how Zou Xueping herself and her young niece’s generation were affected by the interviewing and filming experience. For the second mode, in which archival documents and interviews are written into reportage, I use the investigative reportage of the Great Famine in Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng 楊繼繩, as my primary text. Both Yang and Zou provide factual information and eyewitness testimonies derived from survivors’ memories, although Yang also weaves in evidence that he uncovered in archives. For the third mode of memory representation in fiction, I analyze Chronicles of Jiabiangou, by Yang Xianhui 楊顯惠, a collection of short stories based on Yang’s archival research and interviews of about a hundred survivors of this notorious labor-reform camp born of the Anti-Rightist Movement. In cases of literary writing with the clearly stated purpose of bearing historical witness, such as Yang’s Jiabiangou stories, memory functions on two levels: on the meta level of the narrative that belongs to the survivors, and within the narrative as a narrating device designed by the author.

In chapter 4, we turn to the ethics of bearing historical witness through figurative writing. For this, we look at Yan Lianke 閻連科, one of the writers most censored by the PRC government, and his recent novel The Four Books as the primary basis of my analysis. The Four Books tackles memory through the prism of allegory. Memory is elusive when it is staged