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

I selected primary materials from widely available, published forms of memory work such as fiction, memoirs, autobiographies, and documentary films that have surfaced since Mao’s death. These memory works reflect the many aspects of the forces underlying remembering and forgetting. They also embody the politics of writing and publishing traumatic historical memories in contemporary China and beyond. The subsequent chapters proceed chronologically, beginning with a scar literature classic and ending with popular Cultural Revolution memoirs that appeared early in the twenty-first century. Together the five chapters assemble an intimate picture of how loss, regret, and guilt directly affected individuals, and of how individuals struggled to find meaning and redemption.

In chapter 1, I lay the groundwork for treating literature as testimony and argue that the post-Mao literature needs to be treated as testimonies to the atrocities of the Mao regime. Focusing on the generational memory of victims, I offer a new reading of some of the most representative literary works produced since the end of the Mao era by studying the memories of adult survivors (the first generation) and the “postmemories” of child survivors (the 1.5 generation). These texts are found first in the scar literature of the immediate post-Mao years and later in the “root-seeking” (尋根 xungen), self-reflection (反思 fansi), and other literary trends that followed in later decades.

In chapter 2, we turn to the question of perpetrator and perpetration in the Cultural Revolution, examining how both first-generation and 1.5-generation writers approach this question and, in particular, how guilt and confession work alongside or against each other. One text analyzed in this chapter is Ren Ah, Ren! (Humanity, O humanity!) by Dai Houying 戴厚英, a first-generation survivor who, after some years, confessed her crimes by proxy. I also analyze two short stories: “1986” and “The Past and the Punishments,” by Yu Hua 余華, who, from a 1.5-generation child-witness’s perspective, imagines and contemplates the