Minhee Park
·
이런 책을 번역했습니다. 곧 나온다고 합니다.
문화대혁명의 그림자가 과거, 그리고 현재 중국과 중국인들의 삶에 어떤 영향을 미치고 있는지, 문혁이 어떻게 `현재 진행형’인지 인터뷰와 현장 취재를 통해 생생한 목소리로 들려줍니다. 아래 김효진 대표님이 제 옮긴이의 글도 올려주셨습니다.
책 나오면 다시 보고 드리겠습니다. 요즘처럼 출판계가 어려운 시기에, 중국에 대한 이런 책을 낸다는 것이 많은 용기를 필요한 현실입니다. 많은 관심 부탁드립니다.
---------
한 중국인 친구의 이야기가 잊히지 않는다.
상하이 출신인 그의 이모는 문화대혁명(문혁) 시기 열렬한 홍위병이었다. 당이 도시 청년들을 농촌으로 보내 노동을 하도록 한 상산하향(上山下鄕) 운동 물결에 따라 멀고 먼 신장위구르자치구로 가게 되었다. 이모와 동료 홍위병들은 사흘 동안 기차를 타고 가면서 마오쩌둥 어록과 문혁의 구호를 열렬하게 외치며 흥분했다. 신장에 도착해 다시 사흘 동안 트럭을 타야 했다. 황량한 도로를 달리는 동안 아무도 더는 입을 열지 않았다. 그렇게 도착한 시골에서 이들을 다시 사흘간 달구지를 타고 더욱 궁핍한 오지로 가야 했다. 일행은 사흘 내내 울었다. 이렇게 도착한 오지의 열악한 환경에서 이모는 12년을 산 뒤 간신히 상하이로 돌아올 수 있었다. 함께 갔던 일행 중 많은 이들은 결코 돌아오지 못했다고 한다.
이야기를 들은 뒤, 그에게 물었다. 너는 중국 지도자 중에 누구를 제일 존경해? “당연히 마오(쩌둥)이지!”
조금 기묘하지만, 중국인들의 삶 곳곳에 이런 이야기들이 있다. 조금만 깊이 들어가면 어디에나 문혁이 있다. 베이징에서 중국어를 가르치던 선생님은 문혁 얘기를 꺼냈고 삼촌이 할아버지를 고발했던 이야기를 하다가 눈물을 흘렸다. 학자부터 기업인, 거리의 노동자들까지 누구와 이야기를 해도 결국은 문혁과 관련된 가족사가 등장했다. 불평등과 부패에 상처 입고 분노한 사람들은 마오쩌둥과 문화대혁명 시기를 그리워했다.
이 책은 영국 <가디언>의 베이징 특파원이었던 타니아 브래니건이 2023년 런던에서 출판한 <Red Memory-Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution>을 한국어로 옮긴 것이다. 문혁은 1976년 끝났지만, 지금도 문혁을 제대로 살피지 않고는 중국을 제대로 이해할 수 없다. 그동안 문혁의 역사, 그 복잡한 진행 과정과 정치적 여파, 그 시기에 사람들이 겪은 고통, 홍위병들이 지식인들을 학대했던 일들을 고발하는 책들은 한국에도 여럿 소개되었다. 이 책은 `현재형 문혁’ 즉 지금도 문혁이 중국 정치, 사회, 사람들의 마음 속에서 진행 중이고, 그것이 중국의 현재에 깊은 영향을 미치고 있음을 보여준다는 점에서 이전의 책들과 다르다. “문화대혁명이 중국에 어떤 영향을 미쳤는지뿐 아니라, 여전히 어떻게 중국을 만들어내고 있는지도 이해하고 싶었다”고 지은이는 썼다.
지은이는 2008~2016년까지 특파원으로서 중국에서 만난 인물들을 취재해, 문혁의 기억과 상처가 중국과 중국인들에게 얼마나 깊이 남아 있고, 지금 현재를 어떻게 바꾸고 있는지를 생생하게 보여준다. 이 책의 인물들은 여전히 저마다의 `문혁’을 살고 있다.
Roll over image to zoom in
Follow the authors
Tania Branigan
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution Hardcover – 9 May 2023
by Tania Branigan (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars 58
"It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution," Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as an absence; official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia.
Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the madness. Deftly exploring how this era defined a generation and continues to impact China today, Branigan asks: What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited, or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?
Product description
Review
Red Memory... uses China's Cultural Revolution as a timely template for an accessible exploration of what societies choose to remember, how they choose to remember it, what they decide to forget and why it is important. Beautifully written and sensitively reported.--Gary Younge "New Statesman"
Branigan expertly documents both the power and the frailty of memory in the face of an unrelenting campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to bend and twist people's recollections into whatever shapes best suit the CCP in the present.... Literature on the Cultural Revolution is a saturated market, but only rarely does it convey as Branigan does the continuing hold of that decade on a people otherwise transformed by economic development, technological progress, and newfound social and physical mobility.--Mary Gallagher "Foreign Affairs"
Stunning, profound and gorgeously written, "Red Memory" is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding China today.--Patricia L. Hagen "Minneapolis Star Tribune"
[An] absorbing study of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.--Avro Chakraborty "Air Mail"
[T]he past, as Ms. Branigan shows in this evocative book, is not so easy to suppress.--Stephen R. Platt "Wall Street Journal"
Branigan's book offers an equally important cautionary lesson: the perils of ignoring or distorting history. What a country downplays in its historical record continues to reverberate, whether it's the Cultural Revolution in China or the treatment of Native Americans and the legacy of slavery in the United States.--Pamela Paul "New York Times"
Compelling .... Red Memory is also an exercise in attempting the impossible, of trying to reconstruct what it was like to live through and then live with one of the most brutal periods of modern Chinese history. Branigan comes closer to doing so than anyone else has in the English language.--Emily Feng "NPR"
A visceral history of the Cultural Revolution and a probing look at how modern-day Chinese Communist Party has sought to erase this chapter from its past...This is essential reading for China watchers.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
Branigan weaves fascinating, unbelievable, and often terrifying personal narratives into her analysis. Her deep insight into a nation's painted-over trauma explains how mass hysteria, rampant betrayal, and even cannibalism have shattered a society for generations afterwards.-- "Booklist"
Branigan's book is investigative journalism at its best, its hard-won access eliciting deep insight. The result is a survey of China's invisible scars that makes essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the nation today.--Marina Benjamin "Guardian"
[A] penetrating study of the buried stories of the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976.--Isabel Hinton "Prospect"
[Branigan delivers] poignant, engaging stories that reveal the deep scars left by the Cultural Revolution....Across a beautifully rendered text, the author astutely examines the Maoist ideology that drove the tumultuous class struggle and destruction.... Sensitive [and] well-researched.-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"
This book is thoroughly deserving of prominence. It is complex ... because so is China.--Max Hastings "Sunday Times"
This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking book.--Yuan Yi Zhu "The Times"
What makes Branigan's account special is captured in a line at the end of her work: 'This book could not be written if I were to begin it today'.... Amid the growing difficulties of accessing lived experiences in China, Branigan's lyrical style of writing lends itself well to intimate encounters with interviewees.... Her humanising approach to writing about China is particularly valuable amid our current polarising geopolitical narrative, which loves strong lines between enemies and allies. It is also appropriate for capturing a decade in which the line between hunter and hunted shifted with the political winds of the day.--Yuan Yang "Financial Times"
Red Memory shows how the psychic wounds of Mao Zedong's decade of madness endure to this day, replicating themselves through the generations.--Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha
Red Memory will tell you more about Xi Jinping's rule than any tome on economics.--Lindsey Hilsum, author of In Extremis
A breathtaking work.--Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks
A veritable masterwork.--Qian Julie Wang, author of Beautiful Country
Tania Branigan offers nuanced, humane portraits of people whose lives were transformed by those years, and also teaches the reader much about the politics of memory.--Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill
Tania Branigan's prose is masterful and crystalline. It feels as if Joan Didion turned her powers of observation on China. Red Memory is the kind of book capable of altering your understanding of an unforgettable episode that is not a strange artifact of history but, rather, an urgent warning about our deepest, most durable frailties.--Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition and Wildland
Without understanding the Cultural Revolution and its long-term influence, it is impossible to understand today's China. I hope that all China experts, policymakers, think tankers, and the public perceive this and read Red Memory.--Peidong Sun, associate professor of history, Cornell University
[E]xceptional... offers insights at once deep and clear into universal and timeless questions - of memory and forgetting, of horror and what it takes both to survive it and inflict it. It is haunting, evocative, and written with an almost painful beauty. I cannot recommend it too highly.--Jonathan Freedland, author of The Escape Artist
Unfailingly acute, exceptionally humane--a masterpiece.--Julia Lovell, author of Maoism
About the Author
Tania Branigan writes editorials for the Guardian and spent seven years as its China correspondent, reporting on politics, the economy, and social changes. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post. Red Memory is her first book. She lives in London.
Product details
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (9 May 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 1324051957
ISBN-13 : 978-1324051954
Dimensions : 16 x 2.54 x 23.88 cmBest Sellers Rank: 253,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)415 in Censorship (Books)
748 in History of China
809 in Asian PoliticsCustomer Reviews:
4.1 out of 5 stars 58
About the authors
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Follow
Tania Branigan
Red Memory is my first book, born of the seven years I spent in Beijing as The Guardian's China correspondent – writing about the Communist Party's politics, satirical novels, rural development, feminist activism, protests in Hong Kong, natural disasters, ethnic unrest and much more. I interviewed everyone from artists and tycoons to factory workers, farmers and a missile researcher turned volunteer matchmaker. What fascinated me most was the dizzying scale of the country's extraordinary transformation, which was reshaping the world, and its impact on people's lives at the most intimate level. Over time, I also came to realise that it was impossible to understand China without understanding its recent history. Red Memory is the result.
I'm now The Guardian's foreign leader writer, based in London, and was previously a political correspondent and national news correspondent for the paper. I've also written for the Washington Post and The Australian.
Top reviews from other countries
John H. Connelly
5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique Accounting of the Cultural RevolutionReviewed in the United States on 19 August 2023
Verified Purchase
As a long-time teacher and researcher of Modern China, I’ve longed for some meaningful accounts of how victims and persecutors during the Cultural Revolution have come to terms/“negotiated” their actions during this unparalleled campaign/siege. As Branigan pointed out so eloquently, these memories were often constructed, individually, to insinuate oneself into or out of such persecutions. This work (Red Memory), truly opens the door for additional studies of how participants in the Cultural Revolution live with the legacies of these paroxysms of violence, and their roles in them. Red Memory is absolutely required reading for Sinologists and the interested public.
One person found this helpfulReport
Vlad Thelad
5.0 out of 5 stars A decade that still shapes today’s realityReviewed in Canada on 20 July 2023
Verified Purchase
We are all interested in China and its increasingly assertive role on the world stage. This Western interest is not new and has expressed itself at different times through multiple avenues: from Maoist movements to academics specialized in the study of Sino affairs, politics, history and culture. Yet for most of us, China is and will always remain an enigma. It is true that we have had the privileged insights of its elite and rulers’ thoughts as seen by figures like Henry Kissinger, but the fact remains that one seldom comes across a direct account like the one in this book. It contains testimonies of individuals which found themselves in all sides of the decade-long Cultural Revolution, and as is usually the case, their individual stories hit harder than the huge figures of casualties which are so hard to grasp. What sets this book apart is that it goes beyond the individual stories, providing analysis, and deep understanding of a historical period, its broader societal long-term impact, and how it contributes to shape today’s reality.
Report
Reader 1
3.0 out of 5 stars Wish it was better writtenReviewed in the United States on 22 December 2023
Verified Purchase
Great topic. So worthy of an insightful book. And this one has its moments. It’s just not that well written. Author is inclined to vague sprawling paragraphs full of abstraction. She tries to get artistic with her seven setting at times but it rarely comes off. With a story like this, just tell it directly.
3 people found this helpfulReport
Daven60
2.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expectedReviewed in the United States on 4 August 2023
Verified Purchase
Bought this book on the basis of a glowing review in the WSJ. Had I read the review closer I would not have made this purchase. Like another customer said in his review of the book, this is the philosophic meanderings of an editorialist, not a historical recount of this era in Chinese history. If you already know all about the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution you might find this book more interesting. If you want to learn about those topics, look elsewhere.
12 people found this helpfulReport
Lemon Pie
5.0 out of 5 stars AmazingReviewed in the United States on 8 July 2023
Verified Purchase
Great book. I cried, I reflected, I couldn’t put the book down.
One person found this helpfulReport
See more reviews
===
Red Memory — enforced forgetting and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution
Tania Branigan’s intimate stories of survivors capture a traumatic decade for many that still informs modern China
Yuan Yang JANUARY 25 2023
“Another book about the Cultural Revolution? Why do foreigners like to read about it so much?” was my mother’s response when I told her I was reading Red Memory by Tania Branigan.
Indeed, there are numerous English-language texts on the chaos and violence of 1966-76, the decade of internal factional struggles under Chairman Mao that killed around 2mn people — teachers bludgeoned to death by their students, class enemies hounded by their neighbours. Among the books credited by Branigan, The Guardian’s China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, are veteran journalist Yang Jisheng’s recently translated The World Turned Upside Down, Jung Chang’s autobiographical Wild Swans and the post-1970s “scar literature” of writers such as Lu Xinhua.
What makes Branigan’s account special is captured in a line at the end of her work: “This book could not be written if I were to begin it today.” Her posting in Beijing began during the giddy optimism of the Olympic Games, when the foreign ministry relaxed regulations on international correspondents, allowing them to roam everywhere, except Tibet, without permission. It finished just before the July 9 mass arrest of human rights lawyers, in the first few years of an increasingly censorious presidency under Xi Jinping.
Red Memory brings together reported accounts of the Cultural Revolution from survivors of that period still in China — a rarity, given the increasing sensitivity to the Communist party of its own history and its desire to cleanse public memories. Branigan’s central theme is that one cannot understand China without understanding the Cultural Revolution. The book flits between the past and present, exploring how survivors of the era manage its personal legacy, through tightly choreographed confessions or cheerful group reunions.
In one way her argument is clearly true: the era shaped China’s current leadership, particularly President Xi Jinping, who spent seven years labouring as a “sent-down” youth. But it is also elusive, because so few families like to discuss the Cultural Revolution, even with their children. It has left behind intergenerational traumas that families are still struggling to understand.
In one case, Branigan describes a father who taught his son never to trust anyone, not knowing when people would betray him. It may partly explain the broader fears of my grandparents’ generation, their warning to my parents not to study the humanities or arts (often the first scholars to be purged), their desire to have the protection of those in power, and yet their fear of engaging with politics.
The author does not shy away from making analogies to political crises in the west, while avoiding false equivalences. Donald Trump’s “love of disruption and discord, his ability to channel the public’s id” echo Mao’s style of leadership, Branigan remarks. “No country faces its past honestly,” she writes, reflecting on the omission of colonial history in English education, adding: “More Britons believe the empire was a source of pride rather than of shame, a benevolent institution.”
But Beijing’s form of enforced forgetting is unique in its power and scope. Fear of government reprisal caused several of Branigan’s would-be interviewees to self-censor, an occupational hazard for journalists in China that has worsened severely since she left.
Amid the growing difficulties of accessing lived experiences in China, Branigan’s lyrical style of writing lends itself well to intimate encounters with interviewees. She tells the story of a city girl and a married farmer who were brought together when Mao sent 17mn educated youth to toil in the countryside. They had an affair, leading to the man’s imprisonment; decades later, they got back together. “I wondered if love had really lasted all those years apart, or if something stronger had pulled them back, guilt or complicity, their debt to each other, a kind of revenge on the people who had thwarted them,” Branigan writes.
Her humanising approach to writing about China is particularly valuable amid our current polarising geopolitical narrative, which loves strong lines between enemies and allies. It is also appropriate for capturing a decade in which the line between hunter and hunted shifted with the political winds of the day. As Branigan writes, with notable emotional openness from the start: “The Cultural Revolution was a time of impossible moral choices, a time when you could not do the right thing because there was no right thing to do. Worse, I recognise in it the youthful Roundhead thirst for purity.”
My own posting in Beijing began the year after Branigan’s ended. Over the following six years, I saw mistakes from the Cultural Revolution era repeated, in the mass internment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and in the Communist Party’s ever-tighter grip on history.
Perhaps that is why it is so exhausting to remember the Cultural Revolution. When Europeans recall the world wars or the Holocaust, we remind ourselves to be vigilant against the threats of conflict and anti-Semitism, which still afflict us; remembrance serves a collective purpose. In China, collective purpose is a threat to the party.
Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan Faber £20, 304 pages
Yuan Yang is the FT’s Europe-China correspondent
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café
===
Red Memory by Tania Branigan review – the Cultural Revolution up close
This article is more than 1 year old
In gathering histories from one of the country’s darkest, most divisive periods, the former Guardian China correspondent has created a gripping and important document
Rana Mitter
Mon 30 Jan 2023 18.00 AEDT
Share
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were living in a time of Chinese capitalism.
This recasting of the Cultural Revolution as a period deserving of nostalgia began in the 1990s, but it is still in full swing, and it shapes a struggle for ownership of history in today’s China. In Red Memory, Tania Branigan tells a dark, gripping tale of battles between Chinese whose views of the period – violent nightmare or socialist utopia? – still divide family and friends. Branigan was the Guardian’s China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, and during those years interviewed people whose lives were formed, for good or ill, by the Cultural Revolution. This book is not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today.
The most disturbing element is the refusal of perpetrators, even half a century later, to take responsibility for their actions
Branigan speaks to people who suffered from the attacks of the youthful Red Guards in the first years after the storm broke in 1966; their stories of being beaten for “crimes” such as knowing foreign languages or wearing “bourgeois” clothes are no less powerful for being familiar. Less well-known are the memories of many who experienced a kind of liberation during those years; free cross-country train travel for youths (“the Great Link-up”) let them see China in revolution on an epic scale.
But the most disturbing element of her story is the refusal of perpetrators, even half a century later, to take responsibility for their actions. The most chilling case is a man named Zhang Hongbing, whose mother was executed as a counter-revolutionary. Zhang takes Branigan to his mother’s grave, rather jarringly crying for forgiveness while bragging that he has brought the Guardian to come and see her. But the real shock is how she died. She had become disillusioned with Mao and even ripped down the picture of him in their home. Unprompted, Zhang and the other members of his family denounced her to the Communist party, knowing that she would be arrested and shot. Zhang now feels remorse, yet he still seeks to divert blame. His mother, he said, should take some responsibility because she “hadn’t told us that as a person you should have independent thinking”.
Similarly, friends of Song Binbin, a Red Guard who denounced a teacher, Bian Zhongyun, who was beaten to death in Beijing in 1966, try to argue that Song was a victim as much as the dead instructor. The party has acknowledged the Cultural Revolution as a dreadful mistake, but its implication that nobody was individually to blame, and its refusal to allow detailed research in China on the topic, has allowed the generation who lived through it to remain hazy about causes and consequences too.
Tania Branigan: opinions on the Cultural Revolution still divide families and friends
View image in fullscreen
Tania Branigan: opinions on the Cultural Revolution still divide families and friends. Photograph: Dan Chung
Branigan ends with an excellent analysis of how contemporary Chinese politicians seek to mimic the Cultural Revolution while following very different paths. She recalls Bo Xilai, who ran the mega-city of Chongqing until 2012 with an ideology based on “singing red” (encouraging mass performance of Cultural Revolution-era songs such as The East Is Red) and “smashing black” (destroying organised crime gangs). But her main attention is on President Xi Jinping. Xi, she notes, seeks to create a cult of personality that can look like the kind of semi-religious devotion demanded by Mao. Yet unlike Mao, who delighted in the chaos that he had unleashed during the Cultural Revolution, Xi has clamped down on any signs of grassroots activism. Shaped by his own experience of rural exile in those years, Xi clearly has no intention of letting any kind of uncontrolled politics return to China.
In the years that Branigan reported from China, there were still cracks in the authoritarian system that allowed her to collect stories that went against the official grain. By the time she left, the new crime of “historical nihilism” made it much harder to recover those memories. That makes the preservation of oral histories outside China even more crucial.
One of Branigan’s interviewees was Wang Youqin. In 1966, Wang was a schoolgirl who witnessed the hounding of Bian Zhongyun. Her response was to gather oral histories of the period, which are published next month as Victims of the Cultural Revolution in a lucid translation by Stacy Mosher. Her book is less a narrative and more a chronicle of deaths until now untold. Her teacher’s death is described, but so are countless others, mostly far less high-profile, like the 60-year-old Li Jingpo, who worked at the elite Jingshan high school in Beijing and was killed in August 1966. But he was not a teacher or administrator: he was just the doorman. Being a bona fide proletarian didn’t save him from the students who used to call him “Uncle Li”. Wang’s account of what happened during one of China’s darkest moments is a powerful companion to Branigan’s compelling account of why it still haunts the very different country of today.
Rana Mitter is author of China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism. He is professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford University
Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
No comments:
Post a Comment