![]() ![]() These conundrums - the slipperiness of memory and the intractability of talking about trauma - are at the heart of what makes Tania Branigan's book Red Memory: Living, Remembering, and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution so compelling. The problem was they themselves had yet to sort through and make sense of China's turbulent past, and they struggled to articulate it in full to an outsider. The state often intimidates sources for speaking to journalists as well, and a nervous interviewee will not divulge enough detail to create an intimate rendering of a person's life.īut I found people with weighty stories were still willing to talk in China. There are obvious obstacles to reporting that humanizes, such as the constant surveillance and the threat of state retaliation taken against foreign and Chinese reporters. Rarely do journalists based there get enough material to write up convincingly full-bodied portraits. And yet China-reporting these days resists the profile. China should be a reporter's dream: more than one billion people, a rich history, and extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. ![]()
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