Wu Wenguang, a documentary maker, interviews an elder in a village in Yunnan Province in 2010. Wu is among the 29 artists and art students who participated in the "Memory Project." Photo: Courtesy of Caochangdi Station
As she delved into buried memories and poured her youth onto paper, Yang Xiadan felt her heart being ripped out. The 65-year-old from Sichuan Province, who only recently started writing, has just completed a 200,000-word memoir about growing up during New China's turbulent, formative years.
She writes about fleeing her hometown in Wusheng county during the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Her inspired prose detail her adventures during the peak of the "red storm" when she taught at a primary school in the countryside. She wrote about the violence, confusion and fear. She cried a lot while she wrote.
Yang started writing in late 2009 when He Sanwei, a commentator also from Wusheng county, called on people to start remembering the past.
"The Chinese have a weird mentality: they value the collective not the individual," He wrote in an article explaining why he wanted people to keep their memories alive for future generations. "China's history is all about emperors and generals, not individuals."
Yang is one of many new writers who have started filling in the blanks with detailed, personal stories that are often missing or neglected by official history textbooks.
Despite limited resources and the mental struggle of reliving a painful past, a growing number of writers, both young and elderly, are rerecording history.
While much of Yang's writings are about ideological struggles and political chaos, she also remembers with a shy smile a childhood and adolescence that were filled with innocence. She writes about her first love letter, taking part in singing competitions and flirting with her high school sweetheart who she remains married to.
Yang also remembers the 1950s and 1960s when people like her were dedicated to ideals that valued honesty, courtesy and other high-minded virtues. She laments their absence in today's materialistic world.
Hunger pains
Yang recalls the hunger pains she suffered during the famine that hit China between 1959 and 1961 when she was in middle school. She writes poignant stories about dipping her finger in a small bottle of salt just to have a taste in her mouth. She and her three brothers cooked and shared a dead sparrow; the only meat they had had in months.
Yang started writing online and later in magazines in 2009. Her visceral descriptions of hunger, public executions and humiliations were an instant hit.
For decades Yang had buried her stories partly out of fear and because she felt they had been widely experienced by so many people her stories seemed insignificant.
"I thought that you should just let go, that it's old-fashioned to talk about the past," said Yang, who also writes songs and is a former employee of her local government.
"I also thought that the young people knew all that had happened," said Yang.
Zou Xueping, 26, a graduate of the China Academy of Art, was surprised how little she knew about her parents' and grandparents' past. "The textbooks only talk briefly about the three-year natural disaster. We don't really know what happened," she said referring to the famine.
Driven by curiosity, Zou returned to her village in Shandong Province in 2010 and began interviewing villagers over the age of 70.
"They were surprisingly stoic when telling their stories, about not having enough to eat and people dying," said Zou.
Zou videotaped the interviews she conducted with 17 elders and turned them into a documentary that now forms part of the "Memory Project" initiated by Caochangdi Station, a Beijing-based art studio where she works.
So far the project has collected stories from 413 elderly people in 14 provinces, who were interviewed by 29 artists and art students.
Hearing the oral histories of her villagers caused Zou to rethink her education. "I never doubted the textbooks before," said Zou. "But after I talked to people in my village I started to wonder which parts are true and which aren't," she said, adding that she feels a sense of urgency as many of her subjects are aged and won't be around much longer.
Interpreting history
Experts agree that since the beginning of time history has been open to interpretation that is often controlled by those at the publishing helm.
They also agree that China's past tight controls over which stories are told and the heavy emphasis on correct thinking has bent some of the truth. Discovering that their history education has been flawed is pushing more citizens to remember.
"The history textbooks may hide the truth sometimes," said Li Yuanjiang, a reporter with Chengdu-based History magazine and a former high school history teacher.
"There have been improvements, but overall history is still taught very mechanically," said Li. "Students don't feel connected to it or that it has anything to do with them."
To encourage young people to become more interested in history and to discover it on their own, Li organized a writing competition for middle and high school students, asking them to dig into their families' or communities' past.
Since the beginning of this year, the contest has received over 10,000 articles. The teenagers talked to their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents.
Interviewing reluctant elders
Lei Zongxing, a 16-year-old student from Shandong, used the Internet, old books and documents to research the life and times of his great great grandfather. Lei discovered he was a famed agricultural scientist.
Lei also found out that his family was labeled capitalists and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. One of his uncles was declared a traitor and died in a labor camp. Family members had avoided talking about the past for decades.
"History should tell us about human life," said Li. "Our education should teach us how history influenced individuals and vise versa."
While many students who submitted essays say they feel more connected to history after talking to their elders, their writing often clings to the clichés they learned at school.
One of the biggest obstacles facing the students who participated in the essay contest was the reluctance of their family members to scratch at long-healed scars.
"Some grandparents or parents don't want to talk about the past," said Li. "Some parents work for the government and feel talking about the Cultural Revolution won't have good consequences."
When Zou showed her documentary to her father, who is a Party member, he became concerned. "He's worried that I might get into trouble with the authorities, and some of the people I interviewed don't want me to show it to foreigners," said Zou, adding that so far she hasn't run into any troubles.
Some longtime amateur historians say they now have a wider berth when it comes to writing about sensitive subjects. Since the 1980s, Ge Shuya has been studying World War II and the battles fought by the Kuomintang (KMT) in his home province of Yunnan and Myanmar.
"It was very different 30 years ago," said Ge, 59, who researches and writes about war in his spare time.
Ge corresponded with veterans or their families in Japan and the US, which raised a red flag with authorities here.
Ge said he was watched by the police and his friends tried to convince him to drop his research. He said he suffered great mental torment after his employers learned he was working on a more objective approach to the past and fired him.
"It was painful," said Ge. "I was a 'nobody' and I was scared. I grew so paranoid I was suspicious of everything and everyone."
Ge said he was taught little about the role of the KMT during the war against Japanese aggression (1937-45).
More room to research
When he first started his independent research Ge said he needed a letter from his "work unit" to look through archives. He also had to transcribe documents by hand as there was no other way to copy them.
"When I started 30 years ago, I thought 'maybe I can't talk about it openly now, but some day it will be okay to discuss this history,'" said Ge, who is now a freelance writer and considered an expert on the China-Burma-India theater during WWII.
"Sometimes I felt hopeless; I had no money, no career, no future," said Ge. "But it was a dream for me and I stuck with it."
"You can't only write about the things you like and skip parts you don't," said He Yunzhong, 67, who has researched archives in dozens of remote counties. "We need to face it. History is about mistakes and pains, which are actually more valuable because we learn from them."
For senior citizen Yang, writing her hefty memoirs were not only about creating a legacy, it was also cathartic.
"The more I write, the more strongly I feel these insignificant things need to be recorded," said Yang. "At least it's about the real life of an ordinary person during a special time."