the corresponding, and widely read, subgenre of the Cultural
Revolution memoir. Such memoirs are frequently structured in
complicity with hegemonic discourses both within and outside China.
Especially in the case of the popular Red Guard memoir, they narrate
the main character’s development along a coming-of-age trajectory
that moves chronologically from childhood innocence, to political
disillusionment, to a postrevolutionary wisdom of self-realization. For
the foreign audience, as Peter Zarrow points out, this narrative
structure falls into the cold war pattern pitting “freedom” against
“totalitarianism” (1999). Concomitantly, such emplotment parallels
and reinforces official and popular narratives that stress a transition
from a naive and error-ridden socialist era to the presumably mature,
accurate self-knowledge of the post-Mao years. By emphasizing the
present at the expense of the past, this brand of narrative imagination
pushes the Cultural Revolution period back in time, to a place where
it can be regarded from afar as a dark, misguided age succeeded by the
bright hope of a more rational and materially abundant present.
The two sets of poems by Yu and Sun offer a poetically constructed
alternative to this conventional narrative-driven patterning. In terms
of what they avoid, the poems offer no beginning, middle, or end for
the Cultural Revolution period, no coming-of-age journey to self-
realization for their subjects, and no dramatic escape from political
and psychological oppression. While both Yu and Sun’s poems at
times take anecdotal form, they do not, either singly or in series, con-
struct a continuous teleology of history or personal growth, much less
a larger narrative trajectory representing the Cultural Revolution as a
span of time willingly left behind upon the emergence of a more hope-
ful “new era.” Instead, in both series of poems the reader encounters
carefully configured texts that, when taken individually, offer detached
yet closely observant perspectives on Cultural Revolution childhood
and, when read as a whole, represent a sustained effort to retrieve,
reconstruct and unfold complex, discontinuous moments of memory
and self in China’s revolutionary past. The Cultural Revolution, both
poets implicitly insist, was a deeply formative historical episode that
irrevocably occurred, an event forgotten, repressed, and even trivialized
during the intervening years, but that has not lost its presence or
relevance even decades later at the turn of the twenty-first century.
The key to comprehending how the poems express these ideas lies
in attending to certain structural features that help distinguish them
generically as poems. Understanding how they reconfigure time and
memory thus requires close attention to patternment in the poetic
texts themselves, and the search for pattern calls for close reading of
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 169