Chapter Ten
Poetic Memory: Recalling the
Cultural Revolution in the Poems
of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo
John A. Crespi
Certainly the most controversial period in recent Chinese historical
memory has been the Cultural Revolution, and the prevailing artistic
modes of remembering those “ten years of turmoil” have been the
written and cinematic narrative. From the literature and film of “the
wounded” in the late 1970s and early 1980s on through to the “seeking
roots” and “avant-garde” writing, the Red Guard memoir, and the
1990s’ films of Cultural Revolution childhood, those who came of age
during that tumultuous era have used one or another mode of story-
telling to comprehend in retrospect the forces that dominated and
often traumatized the lives of themselves, their families, and an entire
society. In these stories’ wake has come an abundance of humanistic
studies analyzing this ever-growing corpus of fiction, memoir, and
film. The most incisive among these perform the following: identify a
hegemonic narrative pattern, then discuss a particular narrative text’s
complicity with or subversion of the hegemonic status quo. In the case
of the more sophisticated narratives, complicity and subversion may,
of course, be difficult to separate. As a general rule, however, the
approach described is grounded in a postmodern mistrust of grand
narratives, among which the most prominent are the cold war narra-
tive of freedom versus oppression (Zarrow 1999; Zhong, Wang, and
Di 2001), narratives shaped by Western-derived postmodern discourse
of “sexuality-as-liberation” (Larson 1999; Larson 2000), the linear
modernization narrative of nationalist and official Chinese communist
historiography (Braester 2003; Wang 2004; Yang 2002), and, corollary
to the modernization narrative, the story of China’s rapid transforma-
tion under the pressures of globalization (Wang 2004; Liu 2004).
Alternatives to such hegemonic formations typically come to light as
stories that disrupt, defamiliarize, or simply diverge from existing