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

Furthermore, Can Xue shares with her fellow Chinese writers a common historical experience and a sheaf of memories accompanying this experience: they have lived through and survived some or all of the Mao years (1949–1976). When survivors like Can Xue and her peers mine their memories for inspiration for their creative work, their work becomes part of the collective memory of the Mao era. But as Can Xue articulates in the earlier passage, it is deep memory—akin to what French philosopher Paul Ricoeur terms “blocked memory”² and Holocaust scholar Amos Funkenstein calls “anamnesis”³—that distinguishes the artist’s interpretative representations from the other mnemonic practices that also constitute collective memory. As Michael Bernard-Donals explains:

Anamnesis, like forgetful memory, functions as a flash of seeing, a moment both glimpsed and lost in the seeing, and thus evokes a pain proceeding from the recognition that the moment cannot be recuperated as cultural memory (as mneme), and that it has in fact—at least for the moment—altogether shattered mneme.…Forgetful memory, the involuntary or unbidden flash of the event that disrupts collective memory and history, functions like the empty kernel at the crux of memory…as an index of displacement and loss that nonetheless compels the creation of another language. The lost memory is the origin of writing as well as of its displacement.⁴

Bernard-Donals’s explanation of anamnesis, or forgetful memory, is quite similar to Can Xue’s description of deep memory. Bernard-Donals also points out that the creative or interpretative work—“the creation of another language”—born of forgetful memory denotes “displacement and loss” and is reflective of “catastrophe and exile.”⁵ The memories of the experiences that Can Xue and her fellow Chinese writers had during the Mao years have produced a sense of displacement, loss, catastrophe, and exile in their writing. Their deep memory of that shared historical experience becomes the foundation of their interpretive works. The testimony of such works to the historical trauma is different from that of official documents because such testimony comes from personal experiences and departs from rational and purposeful inquiry. This