from History and Memory Volume 16, Number 2

Excerpt from

A Brief Historical Introduction

LYNN A. STRUVE

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Over the millennia, billions of Chinese have done a lot of remembering. And in a civilization that, since ancient times, has exalted writing and revered knowledge of the past, self-conscious remembrance has perennially occupied the literate elites—both Han Chinese and others who assimilated to their culture—who have shaped and borne forward the textual tradi tions.¹ By no means has even a small portion of all that remembering been traumatic. Recorded memories in the immense extant corpus of Chinese writings run the gamut of qualities that one expects to find in any maturely experienced, sophisticated body of literature, with certain tendencies accentuated, perhaps, by such perduringly dominant values as devotion to family, lineage, and status group. Confucianism naturally promot ed the commemoration of departed elders but was not so rigid a creed as to preclude in the culture such opposite phenomena as memory-searches to answer the spritual enigma of infant death.² In premodern times, in a country so huge as China where partings—especially frequent among men who served as officials—often were permanent, wistful recollections of past friendships were common. Recurrent also, within a strong—one might say obsessive—historiographical tradition, was the transmission of personal memories meant to supplement or correct for posterity the contents of secularly published or imperial-sponsored histories. And in all periods, in a society where children have been indulged and adult roles heavily weighted with responsibility, writers have respond ed soulfully when objects, scenes, smells or circumstances have brought back memories of their naïve, innocent, seemingly carefree childhoods.³ The tremendous variety of Chinese memory-texts, representing many centuries of cultural 6 history, must be stressed at the outset, lest the present journal issue on the theme of traumatic memory in Chinese history suggest to readers that trauma has been particularly salient in China throughout its rich past of continuity and change.

Yet, as students of many peoples and periods have found, trauma when it does happen—in individuals or groups—can be historically very revealing. Literally untold degrees of traumatization are suffered in silence, but when words are found to attempt to tell about extremely stress ful occurrences, those words become vehicles that transport our understand ing to the depths of human experience. And historians who study events without probing how they were fundamentally experienced by people of the day can easily fail to understand broad dimensions of their consequenc es—in the cases presented in this volume, for instance: how the Han Chinese sociopolitical elite gradually became reconciled, or inured, to the imposition of Manchu rule in the seventeenth century; how they rather suddenly became unreconciled to that, with revolutionary results, around the turn of the twentieth century; how the Manchu leadership failed to stanch the disaffection; and how the remarkable silences about mass killings in China since the advent of the republican era (beginning with anti-Manchu pogroms that attended the 1911 Revolution) reflect social psychology and affect social policy. These subjects have been ad dressed to varying degrees in scholarship, but generally the element of human subjectivity has not been probed so effectively as in these studies of traumatic memory.

Our essays, of course, are not clinical studies. In addressing history we do, however, proceed in general accord with observations of psychotherapists that severe psychosomatic shocks can engender a bivalent syndrome of, on one hand, aporetic disability and, on the other, obsessive activity of both mind and body. The capacity of subjects to act appropriate ly on the current situation to pursue rational goals is weakened and distorted; their focus on thoughts and representations of cause or culpability becomes exaggerated and compulsive. The historian’s challenge is to explore, first, how major events, under particular conditions, have widely induced such a syndrome in people of the time; second, what situations or cultural traits have aided or inhibited recovery from trauma in past milieux; and third, what the long-range effects of such traumatizations have been for the societies, cultures, and polities concerned.

NOTES

1. For an elegant study, see Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1986).

2. An especially fascinating case of this is examined by Rania Huntington in a paper, “Memory, Grief, and Marvel: Qian Xiyan and the Ting lan zhi,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, 2004. Further on parents’ remembrances of deceased or lost children, see Pei-yi Wu, “Childhood Remembered: Parents and Children in China, 800–1700,” in Anne Behnke Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu, 1995), esp. 137–52.

3. For an example from the 18th century, see Grace Fong, “In Praise of Female Kin: Hong Liangji’s Remembrances of My Mother’s Family (Waijia jiwen),” presented at the workshop “Memory Links: To Self, Culture, and Country in Chi na,” Indiana University, Bloomington, 2003. For examples from the 20th century, see Catherine E. Pease, “Remembering the Taste of Melons: Modern Chinese Stories of Childhood,” in Kinney, ed., Chinese Views of Childhood, esp. 289–301.