pickRed Memory looks at moments during China‘s Cultural Revolution and shows how they continue to reverberate today. Some of the most interesting parts are between the lines, where Branigan discusses the difficulty of researching the topic, from people not wanting to talk to museums suddenly and mysteriously closing right when she tries to go in.
Just cruelty on cruelty. Blaming yourself for not distancing a loved one (because the state punished their loyalty).
For foreigners, looking at the Cultural Revolution is like reading a difficult book. It‘s really hard to understand. Even young people don‘t have an interest.
...he arrived in Inner Mongolia he was arrested and jailed, giving him a close-up view of one of the era‘s worst atrocities. [22,000] people were killed in pursuit of the secret Inner Mongolian People‘s Party, a party which... did not actually exist. Wu promised fellow prisoners that one day he would write ...In time, he founded his own digital magazine, Remembrance. Each issue was emailed to just under two hundred people...
It was only afterwards that the sheer committed bureaucratic effort really struck me. The drudgery. The months spent monitoring traumatised families, mostly too numb and despairing to cause any kind of trouble... The effort which could have driven an investigation to prevent future tragedy had been invested instead in erasing discussion. Remembering, when officials didn‘t want you to, was hard.
Officials and schoolchildren are bussed to places such as Shaoshan, Mao‘s birthplace, and the former revolutionary base at Yan‘an, where red tourism bolsters the local economy and fosters the national tale – business marching in step with the Communist Party. I had become a connoisseur of such attractions... with their mixture of genuine historical drama, sloganeering, Mao souvenirs and features like the Irrigation Canal of Happiness.
The lives of the people I wrote about were utterly distinct from mine, but they often seemed just a few steps away....My mother's family are Thai-Chinese; my grandmother, as a teenager, tried to run away to China to join the Party, frustrated by her lack of schooling...To have a parent from another country is to know how little you can take for granted, to understand how deeply we have been shaped by families and cultures...
Asked the country's most pressing threat, the Chinese opted for 'moral decline' over poverty or crime. You heard the diagnoses every day: a crisis of trust; social decay.
'Our society is ethically hollow,¹ wrote one survivor. 'If we trace these problems to their roots, we are likely to find them in the Cultural Revolution.‘
RED MEMORY: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution | 
