What does ‘trauma’ mean? A chat about the Cultural Revolution with author Tania Branigan

I first met Tania Branigan in China’s capital in 2007 when she was a correspondent for the London-based Guardian newspaper, and we soon launched the Azure-Winged Magpie Appreciation Society in honor of one of Beijing’s prettiest birds, and of which we’re the only two members.

It was a pleasure to talk to her about her new book, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution. This is an edited, abridged transcript of our recent conversation.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

Tania, you were in China from around 2007 until 2015, a fascinating period of time. There were so many books you could have written about your time in China, and you chose the Cultural Revolution. Why?

I never set out to write a book, but I felt like the topic chose me. As I say in the book, it all really started with a conversation with Bill Bishop. He was talking about going to try to find the body of his father-in-law in the village where he’d been held captive by Red Guards.

The people there were quite sympathetic, but just said “how are we supposed to know which one of those is his?”

There was something about that that was so immediate, that was terrible…Certainly not the worst thing that I’d heard about the Cultural Revolution, but it was the fact that it was so imaginable that it just stuck with me.

What was imaginable, the fact that the villagers didn’t know whose bones were there because so many people had killed themselves or died?

There was something so commonplace about it, [it was] something that could come up over coffee.

It made me realize quite how recent it was and how many people were still living with the repercussions and the trauma to this day.

And there was something about the fact that when you hear about the mass killings in the Cultural Revolution, for example, it feels sometimes so extreme and so horrific that it’s almost hard to relate to it or imagine this. But this was the story of somebody’s dad and it was very close. And the fact that Bill’s wife, when I spoke to her, was talking about having a lifetime of growing up with this absence and this sense that you wouldn’t even know what it meant to have that space be filled, even once she’d become a parent herself.

Right.

And so it felt very raw, very close. And then I went to see a painter who’d done an extraordinary series of paintings, about a hundred portraits of people who were caught up in the Cultural Revolution, whether famous or not, including Bill’s father-in-law.

I was fascinated.

I talked to some of the subjects or their families, but I still thought it was something I was going to leave there because I was a news reporter and I had a pretty busy day job. But this was just under the surface of all these other stories that I was working on.

I’d go and talk to somebody about business and it would turn out that they felt that the thing that had really given them their drive as a tycoon was the fact that they’d been through this experience that had hardened them, made them more ambitious, made them feel they had to grasp the moment in some way. Or I’d talk to somebody about family relationships and it would turn out that the dysfunction within a family, or — dysfunction is quite a loaded word — but certainly the breaches that had occurred within family relationships were often very directly tied to things that had happened in that era. If you looked at politics, I felt it was very hard to make sense of Chinese politics without understanding what had happened.

It just seemed as if in all these spheres, the Cultural Revolution was still playing out under the surface without people really acknowledging it. But once you started talking to people about it, it was right there.

And then the other thing, of course, was that we did see in that period a whole host of people starting to come forward, particularly, I think, with social media and news media at that stage having more freedom than it does now. Seeing some of these stories like Red Guards apologizing to teachers or to others for what they’d done in that era.

As to why now? I can only say it took me a very long time to make it work and to bring it together as a book alongside my day job.

Oddly and quite depressingly, I did feel the parallels became almost more topical or more pronounced as I was writing. Obviously within China, but also looking at what was happening in the West.

You hinted at that in the book and in the podcast you did with Bill. Do you want to expand on that? Trump, and Boris Johnson? Have they somehow reincarnated an aspect of the Cultural Revolution?

I’m not the first person to observe that Trump feels like a very Maoist figure, in terms of his love of and exploitation of upheaval, turmoil, chaos…his ability to kind of tap into the public’s id, to get straight to the masses, to direct the crowd in the service of his political ambitions and his political project.

The reliance on division, the quote that really resonated in my head was Mao’s words, “who are our enemies, who are our friends?” The drawing of lines, the attempt to find an enemy, and then to turn the masses upon that enemy.

Obviously in Trump’s case, the attempt to overthrow political institutions using mass public sentiment, those are all things that seem to me to be disturbing echoes.

That makes sense. On the other hand, I think toward the end of your book, you talk about going back to the U.K. after being in China, and everything seems quaint and small compared with big China, which is booming and growing fast and everything.

I completely relate to that. I left China in 2015 as well and came to America, which is much bigger than the U.K. in every way, but also, some of the time, it feels like everything is slow and much less ambitious than China was for much of the time we were both there.

I also sometimes feel like when it comes to discussions of trauma, your book is full of stories of people who have suffered these incredible things, stories like Bill’s father-in-law. And the story of the guy who denounced his own mother, who was then executed, and he has been trying to atone for this ever since then.

Those are graphic examples, but everybody who knows people in China who were alive during that period knows of many truly horrible stories.

I found myself arriving in the United States in 2015 in a political and media culture where even the tiniest transgressions are called “traumas.” And people use the word “traumatized” to mean basically “somebody said a mean thing about them.”

Do you sometimes feel like there’s this very weird gap between what you experienced researching this book?

We know that some people are more vulnerable to things than others, and you don’t want to deny people’s experience. But I do feel the word trauma can be overused, or very loosely used. Not everything bad or painful or distressing is traumatic. And yes, it seems to me that the things that people of that generation in China have been through – not just the Cultural Revolution, but the Cultural Revolution as this culmination of a series of horrific traumas, which is partly why it was so destructive, because people were already so battered and scarred by everything that’s gone before — it’s just very hard to imagine how anybody got through that.

And I suppose it’s remarkable and in some ways encouraging to know that people have gone on to live good and fulfilling lives, but carrying an immense burden in many cases that is almost unimaginable to us, yes.

One of the interesting things about the burden that you talk about a little bit in the book is the fact that many of the people who either were traumatized and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, or were the persecutors and the tormentors, still have to kind of live cheek by jowl.

In the podcast you did with Bill, he describes working at the Chinese literary translation press and having colleagues who had done horrible things to each other in the Cultural Revolution. Some of the stories in your book reflect that as well. I have some buddies who lived on Yandai Xiejie near Houhai. We used to have long Beijing lunches…They lived in a courtyard where everybody had been living since the 1960s. There were families who had [actually] persecuted each other in the Cultural Revolution. And since then, all the way to the late 2000s, they were living in the same yard and seeing each other every day. And I would go to these lunches, and see these people greet each other, and then make snide remarks to me…

Can you talk about that a little bit? How people cope with seeing other people who have…played a major role in their own traumatization and dealing with that on a day-to-day basis?

It’s interesting because the psychotherapist [I interviewed for the book] said to me that they thought that was one of the hardest things about that experience, particularly compared to previous traumas, for example, after the Japanese occupation, the Japanese were forced out.

But after the Cultural Revolution, this was a situation where, as you say, people were living side by side. People spoke to me about going back to work with the people who were responsible for their husband’s death, for example, and obviously that was incredibly painful.

Wáng Xīlín 王西麟, the composer I interviewed, said that he saw goodness as being the people who turned away when you were going through a struggle session or a denunciation. Because you couldn’t expect anybody to oppose it or stand up for you. He felt that the people who kind of tried to withdraw and not be active participants were doing something right.

Almost a reverse of that biblical thing, “It’s enough for evil to triumph that good men do nothing,” more like “If you do nothing, at least you are not helping evil to triumph”?

On the other hand, you also have people who actually had quite a good time in the Cultural Revolution because they were young and could rebel.

That was something I was very keen that people understood, that for all the horror of the cultural revolution, there is actually a lot of affection for the period within China, which is born of a few things.

Number one, obviously, nostalgia is very much about how we view the present. A lot of that, I think, is fuelled by the things that people have seen as being wrong with Chinese society more recently: It’s too money-minded, lacking in meaning, glaringly unequal and so forth. So people have looked back to the Maoist era generally as being a time of more egalitarianism, less corrupt, purer, with more kind of meaning and belief, in something other than…cash and doing well for yourself.

Beyond that, specifically with the Cultural Revolution, I start the book with somebody who talks about the freedom and the sense of fun, being a very young teenage girl and riding around the country and in her case having grave doubts about some aspects of it like the violence, but still kind of thinking “We’re doing the right thing,” and in fact at times thinking to herself “I don’t believe in this violence, but is that my failure, is that me not being revolutionary enough?”

I wanted to get across that sense of excitement and freedom that really did exist for many young people, the sense that there was very briefly a sort of a flowering of possibilities. And for some, as you say, the freedom was the freedom to hang around on the street corners and not go to school.