Yanjie Wang
Wang Xiaoshuai has often been recognized for his gritty, deeply affecting dramas about the life of rural migrants living on the periphery of society. Three of his critically acclaimed films, So Close to Paradise (Biandan guniang, 1998), Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche, 2001), and Drifters (Erdi, 2003), focus on the harsh reality facing the rural-to-urban or rural-to-overseas migrants in contemporary China. As Michael Berry summarizes, “Through his recent work, Wang has pinpointed the complex phenomenon of population movement . . . as one of the most important and defining characteristics of contemporary Chinese society” (2005: 164). Unlike the mainstream media, which tend to ignore migrants or normalize their suffering, Wang Xiaoshuai’s representation refuses to take their displacement and subordination for granted, engaging in what Jian Xu (2005: 434) calls “a critical intervention into the symbolic order of ‘market socialism.’” Wang’s layered depiction of the ambitions and plights of rural laborers not only sheds light on the complex process of their subject formation, but also reveals the economic and institutional violence that a market economy and a socialist state jointly impose on this disadvantaged social group.
Scholars of Wang Xiaoshuai’s films tend to focus on how he portrays characters migrating from the countryside to the city.1 Few have commented on the characters who migrate in the opposite direction, despite the frequency with which they appear in his later films. Wang has repeatedly set his stories in the shadow of the Third Front Movement (sanxian jianshe), a centrally directed, large-scale urban-to-rural relocation project carried out in the 1960s as the Vietnam War escalated and the rift between China and the Soviet Union widened. Motivated by national defense considerations, the Chinese government moved thousands of factories and their workers from coastal regions (which, in the event of war, would likely become battlefronts) to the remote mountain areas of southwestern and western China, a region that became known as the Third Front.2 The objective was to build an industrial system in China’s interior that would allow the nation to keep functioning in the event of an attack (Naughton 1988: 354). Wang’s family joined this massive migration, relocating from Shanghai to Guiyang when his mother’s factory was moved there.
† I am grateful to producer Liu Xuan for allowing me to preview the film and for providing several film photographs for this essay. I also would like to thank Kirk Denton, editor of MCLC, and the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions and insights on an earlier draft.
Regarded as a state secret for many years, this movement has long been excluded from public accounts of Chinese history in China and has rarely been explored in cultural productions.3 Wang Xiaoshuai is among the few filmmakers to depict this often-ignored episode of the Cultural Revolution and the lesser-known struggles of the families most affected by it. Retaining their initial concern for displaced people, Wang’s films on the Third Front nonetheless depart from the exclusively contemporary, urban milieus seen in his earlier works. Instead, they dig deep into a forgotten past, tackling questions about memory and trauma associated with this sociohistorical upheaval. In examining the history and legacy of this program, Wang Xiaoshuai says he ultimately aims to enrich our understanding of the profound impact of the Cultural Revolution.4
1 For further research on Wang Xiaoshuai’s representation of migrant workers in contemporary China, see, for example, G. Xu (2007), Lu (2008), and Gladwin (2012). Xu examines the symbolic and institutionalized violence migrants suffer in Wang’s films. Lu shows how Wang’s rural migrants illuminate a new urban space through the act of navigating it. Gladwin pays attention to yet another aspect: the absence of traditional rites of passage
to adulthood in an itinerant existence of migrant workers.
2 The eastern coastal areas were seen as the strategic First Front, the central areas were the Second Front, and the regions far to the west were the Third Front.
3 Although there have been some introductions of this history on the Internet and an increasing number of journal articles on it since the 1980s, the Third Front Movement has not been widely discussed or represented in of official and cultural discourses.
4 Wang Xiaoshuai (2014a) says: “When conceiving this film, I was not bound
by any specific ideas. Nor did I think
the Third Front was the most important aspect of the film. I just wanted to show that the Cultural Revolution, as a long, significant historical period, had deep and lasting impact on Chinese people. . . . So I proceeded to further investigate the traumatic consequences of the Cultural Revolution.”
Wang Xiaoshuai’s first attempt to retrieve the experience of the Third Front families was his 2005 feature, Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong). Set in an outlying town in Guizhou province in the early 1980s, a couple of years after China’s reform and opening up, this film centers on a father-daughter conflict: the father imposes his dream of returning to his hometown of Shanghai on the whole family, but the daughter is reluctant to leave the town, where she has come to feel like she belongs. The daughter’s eventual psychological breakdown betrays, Richard Letteri (2010: 5) suggests, “the sense of homelessness that engulfs her as well as those people caught up in the dramatic changes taking place in the Chinese economy and society.” Indeed, the father and daughter, in the final analysis, are both victims of politically motivated economic migration that displaces and wrecks the youth of two generations.
Wang’s next film on this subject, 11 Flowers (Wo shiyi, 2011), pushes the time frame further back, to 1975, in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution; it serves as a prequel of sorts to Shanghai Dreams. A semiautobiographical tale derived from Wang Xiaoshuai’s own boyhood memories, the film captures fragments of the life he left behind, a life in which innocence and curiosity unexpectedly intertwine with gruesome historical events. The eyes of a maturing teenage boy subtly reveal a confused, disturbing adult world intruded on by menacing political changes.
Wang Xiaoshuai’s most recent film, Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe, 2014), is the last installment of his Third Front trilogy, expanding on the themes and events of Shanghai Dreams and 11 Flowers. Red Amnesia continues to excavate and meditate on the experience of those families exiled during the Third Front Movement in the all-pervading shadow of the Cultural Revolution. Yet, unlike the earlier two films, both of which are set decades from the present day, Red Amnesia crosses temporal and spatial boundaries, bringing the past into the here and now. Following a retired widow named Deng Meijuan (referred to as Lao Deng throughout the film), a former Third Front factory worker, the film sensitively captures an aging lady’s inescapable bondage to the past. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Lao Deng is one of the few Third Front workers who has managed to escape a life of toil and displacement in a rural factory and transfer her family back to Beijing. All is well until a series of silent phone calls disrupt the calm of her reclaimed urban life. The appearance of a mysterious teenage boy stalker further disturbs that life. Thanks to the continuous, provocative phone calls and the boy’s haunting presence, traces and memories of the past begin to loom large, eventually propelling her back to the remote factory town in Guizhou province where she once worked. The film thus mingles past with present, and here (Beijing) with there (an unnamed former Third Front town in Guizhou). To effect this mingling, this film transcends the realism of Wang’s earlier films, borrowing from the dramatic toolkits of mystery and horror films. Beginning with the mystery of the telephone harassment of Lao Deng, the film carefully withholds information, letting the viewer’s excitement, anticipation, and anxiety mount. It intensifies this thrilling ambience by including images of ghosts—or at least what Lao Deng perceives as such—that add a new dimension of fantasy to the film.
Why does Wang use these new narrative approaches? What kind of understanding of history, memory, and reality do they help illuminate? Focusing on the metaphor of ghostly haunting that permeates this film, I elucidate how Wang uses this trope to emphasize the unbreakable tie— rather than the division—between past memory and today’s reality. Red Amnesia challenges both the official practice of burying memories of the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and common people’s comfortable consignment of history to oblivion. Both of these practices serve the forward-looking, unreflective post-Mao discourse and its obsession with economic development. Red Amnesia draws our attention to the enduring toll that historical violence takes on people, families, and society as a whole. In exploring the origins of the ghostly haunting, the film aims at more than the usual historical targets: the vast harm that befell the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution was not a mere consequence of Mao’s ruthlessness or the wickedness of certain highly-placed political villains, nor did it result from some inexplicable bout of mass hysteria. Rather, it was enabled by common people.
The Politics of Inheritance
The official state discourse after the Cultural Revolution sought to bring closure to this historical period and to press for much-needed economic development. A landmark speech delivered by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978 made this ideological shift explicit. Although Deng affirmed the necessity to correct all the wrongs resulting from the Cultural Revolution, he nevertheless urged prompt and general settlements, discouraging a thorough, in-depth investigation of past problems. He advised: “We should have the major aspect of each problem in mind and solve it in broad outline; to go into every detail is neither possible nor necessary” (Deng 1999: 449). Driven by a progressive view of history, Deng instructed the Party and the nation to “emancipate” themselves from historical burdens and shift their focus to socialist modernization in the new era. “We must look forward. Only if we consider new situations and resolve new issues can we move forward smoothly” (451), stressed Deng. A forward-looking mentality has henceforth come to mark the developmentalist ideology and the post-Mao identity of the Chinese. As a result, the history of the Cultural Revolution era became cut off from the present and was rendered irrelevant.
Critical of the progressive conception of history, Jacques Derrida brings up the notion of “hauntology,” calling our attention to the lingering presence and innate relevance of the past in the present. The prompt for Derrida’s interrogation was an essay by Francis Fukuyama (1989) in which he heralded “the end of history” and declared the full and final triumph of global capitalism over communism. Whereas Fukuyama’s encomium to capitalism presupposes a clear border between the past and the present, Derrida’s hauntology denies the possibility of such a boundary. Instead, it seeks to break the restrictive enclosure of historical periods and expose the illusion of the ontological existence of the present. Derrida (1994: 54) warns us that we inevitably bear the marks of the past. In his words, “the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.” He therefore proposes to transcend chronological barriers and pursue “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xix).
Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia echoes Derrida’s hauntology in its manner of probing the remnants of the Cultural Revolution, a period the official narrative blocks off neatly into a decade (1966–1976). Contesting this mainstream view, Wang Xiaoshuai attempts to show that the past is not just past but persists into the present. Rather than just revisiting past experiences, as he does in Shanghai Dreams and 11 Flowers, the director explores how the past has become, as Avery Gordon (2008: 8) puts it for another context, “a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.”
The past seethes into Lao Deng’s life with the aforementioned silent phone calls, which not only disturb her peace of mind but also fuel various speculations of people around her. Recently widowed, Lao Deng lives alone in Beijing, spending her retirement in a humble apartment. She provides support, although often unwanted, for her two grown sons and cares for her elderly mother, who lives in a nursing home. However, Lao Deng’s usual rhythm of life is disrupted by the harassing phone calls; every time Lao Deng answers the phone, she hears only silence ( g. 1). Relentless and mysterious, the calls make Lao Deng utterly distraught and paranoid. When she tries to report the calls to the police, her anxiety robs her of a clear mind, keeping her from coherently expressing what has happened. Everyone Lao Deng appeals to offers his or her own theories about the true nature of the calls. The officers in her neighborhood dismiss them as hallucinations born of a widow’s loneliness; to them, Lao Deng’s complaints are nothing more than a case of empty-nest syndrome (the stress, loneliness, and mental instability that afflict people whose children have left home). This explanation is a convenient one, and indeed the plight of the Chinese empty-nest elderly (kongchao laoren) has grown increasingly pronounced in recent years. Lao Deng’s elder son, Jun, however, blames his contract
Figure 1: Lao Deng receives a silent call.
workers, whom he suspects of retaliating against him for his failure to pay their wages. Jun’s conjecture directs our attention to another contemporary social issue—the struggle of migrant workers, a familiar theme in Wang’s films. Jun’s wife fails to see any cause for alarm, suggesting that the silent callers are just pulling pranks or misdialing. In her account, the extremity of Lao Deng’s response shows just how badly the widow’s mind is fraying.
On the narrative level, these divergent opinions on the mystery of the phone calls build suspense and engender curiosity in spectators. When viewed more closely, however, they also disclose a culture of amnesia in present-day China. Although these characters reach different conclusions, they all share a predilection for a mode of perception that takes the here and now as its default coordinates. They largely neglect inquiries into history and historical inheritance. Whether they blame parental loneliness, the desperate state of migrant laborers, or mental decline, these characters turn a blind eye to the family’s past and its rami cations on the present. The kind of amnesia and denial they practice has gone on in China for decades. Since the market economy began to take root in the 1990s, an ecstatic mood has gripped many Chinese, who are enticed by the promise of a new life. Indeed, postsocialist China fosters the habit of forgetting, quietly depriving its people of memories and the sense of historical depth they provide. As Yiju Huang aptly notes, the immediate historical past “is diverted in a form of transference—the celebrated miracle of economic development, the newfound faith in development, and the fervent gaze oriented toward the future.”5
Bucking this historical trend, Wang Xiaoshuai draws attention to the family’s history, which continues to shape Lao Deng’s character, especially how she interacts with her sons. A stubborn and cantankerous mother, Lao Deng keeps interfering in her sons’ private lives. This irritates Jun’s wife, who resents her mother-in-law’s meddling in her housework and childcare. Lao Deng’s bond with her gay son, Bing, is strained by her open disapproval of the way he lives his life. On the surface, her relations with both her children seem to reflect the growing generational gap resulting from rapid social changes. Lao Deng seems to go against the grain of such new concepts as the nuclear family, privacy, and homosexuality. However, this modern versus traditional dichotomy cannot fully explain why Lao Deng feels so entitled to direct her sons’ lives. This sense of entitlement is most dramatically captured in the scene in which she has a quarrel with Bing. Annoyed by his mother’s frequent barging into his place to cook for him, Bing asks her to respect the privacy of his home. Instantly provoked, Lao Deng yells, “Your home is my home, and what’s yours is mine. You are nothing without me! Don’t think to keep me away.” Here, Lao Deng articulates the enormous debt Bing owes to her—one that goes beyond the average mother’s due. Why does Lao Deng feel so fiercely entitled to direct her sons’ lives?
5 Yiju Huang 2014: 76. Nurturing a for- ward-looking culture does not preclude revisiting the past. In fact, contemporary China has witnessed a surge of popular reminiscence. Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang (2007: 1) note that there is a burgeoning of a “memory industry” characterized by the sentiment of nostalgia. Although nostalgia discloses a sense of discontent with the rising issues of inequality and social injustice, especially for the victims of economic reform, it nevertheless tends to romanticize the past rather than examine it critically.
A fuller explanation can be drawn from her struggles for the family on the Third Front. As Bing eventually learns, the then pregnant Lao Deng struggled exhaustively to obtain a rare transfer allocation, thereby ensuring that he would be born in the city. Through her efforts, he and his brother have been spared the isolation and hopelessness of life in the mountains. Jun and Bing, who enjoy all the comforts and privileges of city living, are oblivious to how much Lao Deng has struggled to secure this life for them. What frustrates her is less the modernity of her sons’ attitudes than their failure to appreciate her sacrifices. Viewed in this light, Lao Deng’s struggle to form meaningful bonds with her children becomes more comprehensible. The long take that follows Lao Deng’s trek to Bing’s place neatly symbolizes this difficulty: the camera shows her pulling a heavy shopping cart into a hair salon, staggering past the front desk, stumbling up narrow stairs, squeezing through a massage room, and finally arriving at Bing’s apartment. Lao Deng seems to have passed through the tunnel of time, only to find herself in a place beyond memory; it is as though her past personal experience is no longer relevant.
Lao Deng’s recalcitrant refusal to give up her role as the caregiver of the family functions as a coping mechanism in the face of the social and familial nullification of her past experience. In February 1965, the Chinese government issued “the Decision on the Third-Front Construction System in Southwestern China,” making heavy use of the slogan “be prepared against war, be prepared against natural disasters, good citizens and horses heading for the Third Front” to promote the system. Responding to the call of the state, Lao Deng threw herself into the cause of building China’s Third Front. Like millions of others, she subjugated her individual interest to that of the nation (Yang 2006: 102). The value of her efforts, however, has essentially come to naught as the leftist policies that dominated the Third Front Movement were repudiated following the Cultural Revolution. Frustrated by the sense of absurdity of her past sacrifices for society, Lao Deng then puts all her energy into aiding her family, whether they welcome her help or not. What we see is an independent, strong-willed, and, at the same time, vulnerable and pathetically isolated Lao Deng struggling to prove her self-worth in the modern, bustling city of Beijing.
If Lao Deng’s situation dramatizes one struggle—that of returnees to the cities after the Cultural Revolution—then the teenage boy who
stalks Lao Deng dramatizes another—that of people still stranded on the Third Front. Unlike educated youths, most of whom returned to the city following the Rustication Movement, the bulk of Third Front families were not allowed to come back. Bound to their factory and constrained by the strict household registration system, the boy’s family, including his grandfather Lao Zhao, must remain in their underdeveloped Third Front factory town in Guizhou. As China shifted into the reform era and refocused on the east coast in the 1980s, the regions once held to be strategically crucial were sidelined. With the decline of government subsidies, coupled with the constraints of geography and transportation, many Third Front plants went bankrupt. Their livelihoods gone, Third Front workers were gradually relegated to the margins of the society. In the film, the boy and his grandparents still occupy their originally-assigned factory dorm, which is now dilapidated and largely deserted. The isolation and decay of the family home serves as the physical embodiment of its being forgotten and forsaken. Had his grandfather won the chance to move back, the boy could have enjoyed all the privileges that Lao Deng’s grandson does. Instead, stranded in a gloomy Third Front town, he grows up in desolate poverty.
The boy’s roaming in Beijing and his strange behavior arise from the trauma of being forever displaced and marginalized. The opening sequence of the film shows the boy after he has broken into a random apartment in Beijing. He takes a shower, gets a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, and sinks into a chair as he takes a drink. His curious, wandering eyes and the conspicuously ill-fitting lady’s slippers on his feet suggest his alienation from this stranger’s home. We learn later that the boy habitually breaks into people’s houses, where he gives himself a taste of daily urban life and indulges his more malicious appetites. He deliberately waters houseplants with boiling water and leaves rooms in cluttered disarray. In sating these dual thirsts for leisure and destruction, he commits acts that are clearly not mere burglary, but are motivated by complex psychic impulses. Growing up in the Third Front region, the boy harbors feelings of envy tinged with hatred: he wants to both live the urban life and spite the system that denied it to him. These mixed emotions are inseparable from the formative environment he grew up in.
The boy’s schizophrenic conduct later gets him into serious trouble. As he continues breaking into homes, he develops a false sense of belonging. In one scene, he sits comfortably on a sofa, eating an apple while watching TV. Wang’s use of slow panning gives the episode a dreamlike quality, which is enhanced when the camera moves from the boy to a fish tank, whose brownish water saturates the entire screen. Through this lens, the boy looks like he actually lives in this apartment and is just passing time on any ordinary day ( g. 2). However, a jump cut disrupts this surreal scenario, and the boy is no longer on the sofa behind the fish tank. As the camera pans left back to its original position, the room is in a shocking mess. On the floor, beside a bloodied knife, lies the corpse of an old man surrounded by his own owing blood. The view implies that the boy was caught off-guard by the homeowner and kills him in a panic. The homeowner’s unexpected return would have reminded him how little he belongs in the city, and the brutal homicide is his desperate response to being woken from a dream. As Cheng Qingsong (Cheng/Wang 2014) laments, his crime is “the harmful toll of history,” whose repercussions are no less striking for the younger generation than for the one that directly experienced it.
Figure 2: The boy spends time in another home he breaks into in Beijing.
Both Lao Deng’s and the boy’s existence affirms the enduring impact of history on personal, familial, and societal levels. However, both of them are seen as unwelcome “intruders”—the literal translation of the Chinese title of the film. Lao Deng’s sons detest her intrusion into their lives; and the mere fact of the boy coming to Beijing, to say nothing of his housebreaking, defies societal expectations. On a symbolic level, the real intrusion derives from the traces of the past that Lao Deng and the boy bear into the present. That they are rejected, in this sense, signifies contemporary China’s rejection of its past memories in the name of an unencumbered march to the future. Lao Deng and the boy seem to run out of sync with China’s historical course and its modernization. The film’s attention to their experience and the heavy historical and psychological baggage they carry thus serves as a counternarrative to the dominant culture of amnesia and a reminder of our inherited existence. Through each character’s journey, we see the close connection between past and present.
Wang Xiaoshuai continually underscores this connection by juxtaposing shots of old, broken-down buildings with modern ones. The very first image he presents in the film is of a run-down two-story building made of gray and red bricks ( g. 3). As it unfolds into view, two features loom large: its broken windows and a withering tree with sparse leaves that stands in front of it, both connoting a strong sense of history and desolation.6 The film soon follows this with an image of a more modern, urban residential building bathed in bright light. Crosscuts of this kind recur in the film, and the contrast between the two types of images is great enough to make it seem as though the shots of the Third Front residential building are flashbacks. But as the film’s conclusion reveals, the musty, derelict building stands as it is in the present day. Although this space holds a wealth of memories for Lao Deng, it is not merely a memory; rather, it is a physical relic that has survived into the present. The past and the present coexist.
Figure 3: The opening image of the film featuring a deserted building.
6 This location is actually where Shanghai Dreams was shot ten years ago (Xiaoshuai Wang 2015: 166–168).
Figures 4 and 5: The ghost of Lao Deng’s husband suddenly appears as she talks.
7 According to Wang Xiaoshuai (2014b), the boy’s silence is also a sign of his marginal position in society. Silent male protagonists have become a signature feature of Wang Xiaoshuai’s films.
One is reminded of Dongzi (So Close
to Paradise), Erdi (Drifters), and Gui (Beijing Bicycle), whose silence goes hand in hand with their alienation from the urban surroundings.
As Wang Xiaoshuai (2015: 168) points out, “Red Amnesia is a film suffused with the past, but it is also entirely in the present. Such representation makes us more aware of the lasting impact of the past on the present.”
Ghostly Haunting
Unlike his previous films, which approach their subject matter realistically, Red Amnesia features ghostly images, thoroughly partaking in the tropes of fantasy and horror. Frustrated by the unbridgeable rift between her and her sons, Lao Deng pours out her bitterness in front of the portrait of her deceased husband—her only source of consolation. As Lao Deng mutters, her husband suddenly appears, sitting face to face with her to listen to her grievances. Similar scenes, in which the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband is brought uncannily into an otherwise realistic setting, appear several times in the film ( g. 4, 5). Notably, these ghostly images are typically presented from an objective perspective rather than from Lao Deng’s point of view. In so doing, the film seems to insist that the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband is not an illusion, but a real presence that demands our due attention. For this reason, the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband is represented not as a translucent shadow or a floating apparition, but as a fully embodied human.
Although the boy is not dead in the same sense as Lao Deng’s husband, he is also like a ghost: his silence, solitude, and status as an exile in the city make him a ghostly figure, wandering about in a place he does not belong.7 Interestingly, he is the only person, other than Lao Deng, who appears in the same frame with the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband. Originally thinking the boy to be a young migrant who has come to Beijing seeking work, Lao Deng is kind to him and even invites him home for dinner. During the meal, Lao Deng quite casually speaks to her deceased husband and introduces the boy to him. Her husband shows up at the table looking at the boy, who curiously turns his eyes toward him. Although it is unclear whether the boy actually sees Lao Deng’s husband, their gazes into each other’s direction creates a communicative space between them, suggesting the boy’s special affinity to the realm of ghosts and symbolically incorporating him into it. By contrast, throughout the film, Lao Deng never makes eye contact with her husband, and her husband never materializes at Jun’s home to reunite with his own sons at a family dinner.
How do we make sense of Wang Xiaoshuai’s invocation of the ghostly? When elaborating on the idea of hauntology, Derrida notes that remnants of the past are often embodied in ghosts and specters in response to the repression of the hegemonic order. He writes, “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (1994: 37). Whereas the power structure wishes to keep unwanted memories at bay, Derrida draws our attention to the spectrality of history—the fact that the ghosts of the past always return. “After the end of history,” he asserts, “the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.”8 The return of the repressed by way of haunting not only opens the gates of memory but also produces a different discourse that questions ideological hegemony. As Avery Gordon (2008: xvi) suggests, the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way to “interfer[e] precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us.”
Red Amnesia’s invocation of the ghostly functions in a similar way, both revealing and contesting the hegemonic political regime that wishes to repress the unwanted past. As mentioned earlier, the state has been restricting in-depth investigation of the Cultural Revolution era and pressing the Chinese people to be fully invested in a new phase of the nation’s development.9 However, the wholesale negation of the Cultural Revolution is not driven simply by a faith in linear progress and economic development; it is also driven by an attempt to disown the Party’s infamous legacy. These efforts to seal the Cultural Revolution in the past forestall any further discussion that could potentially undermine the Party’s legitimacy. In this sense, repressing memories that do not fit the official narrative springs from an effort to maintain hegemonic political control.10 The existence of the ghostly is a symptom of this repressive structure, but it is also a powerful medium through which to bring back repressed memories. Both Lao Deng’s husband and the boy bear a forgotten history, and the film, in opposition to the of cial discourse’s efforts to exorcize the haunting ghosts of the past, carves out a space for them to be physically present and demand recognition.
8 Derrida 1994: 10. The spirit that ani- mates Derrida’s discussion is the specter of Marx, whose theory and practice many would think is no longer relevant. Derrida, however, reminds us that Marx’s spirit never stops coming back. This con- tinual return ends up, as Jean-Philippe Mathy (2011: 38) puts it, “preventing the closure of economic liberalism as the end of history, which would make any sur- prise, any revolt, any event, impossible.”
9 Even in 2016, the ftieth anniversary of the launching of the movement was largely ignored and met with virtual silence from both state-run and popular media.
10 The recent revamp and eventual shut- down of the history magazine China An- nals (Yanhuang chunqiu) speaks volumes about the new crackdown on dissenting political opinions on Communist Party history. Sebastian Veg (2016) suggests the government was threatened by the opportunity the magazine offered to “engage more substantively with the most dif cult and contentious issues still raised by the Cultural Revolution.”
Figures 6 and 7: The boy follows Lao Deng like a ghostly shadow.
Whereas the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband mainly serves as a spiritual companion with whom to share memories, the boy, a ghost of a different order, appears to hold more complex significance for Lao Deng and for the film as a whole. Rather than consoling the widow, he confounds and haunts her, forcing her to confront a dark and painful secret. Although the film never gives a definite answer, it hints on multiple occasions that the boy is the mysterious phone-caller, reaching out to her in the mute, disturbing manner of a ghost knocking at a door. He also trails the old woman like a ghostly shadow, approaching her at the bus station, on the sidewalk, and in her apartment building ( g. 6, 7). Besieged by these calls and the boy’s stalking, Lao Deng is driven to distraction and vexation.
The convoluted relationship between Lao Deng and the boy is most dramatically conveyed through a masterfully designed crosscut sequence, in which dream and reality, conscious and unconscious, interweave and become almost indistinguishable. The sequence takes place after a long day, during which the boy accompanies Lao Deng to the outskirts of Beijing as she brings her electronic footbath to the manufacturer for repairs. After the pair return to her house, he sticks around. In this sequence, Wang repeatedly cuts to and from a dream of Lao Deng’s, but does so without fading in or out, depriving the viewer of traditional cinematic cues. In her dream, Lao Deng finds herself tottering along in a deserted suburban area, weak and vaguely conscious. She is followed by the boy, who carries a footbath in his arms. The dream, thus far, largely reenacts what has happened during the daytime. The camera then cuts back to Lao Deng’s bedroom in real life. Here, the boy is seen climbing up onto Lao Deng’s bed and tenderly laying his hand on her arm. Still asleep, Lao Deng warmly holds his hand in response, a faint smile flickering across her lips ( g. 8). Understandably, their shared status as outcasts brings these two lonely souls together and creates a sense of sympathetic intimacy. The boy feels that someone in the city finally cares for him; Lao Deng is delighted to have company.11 The scene then reverts back to the dream world, in which the boy stands behind Lao Deng, poised to strike her over the head with the footbath: the previous sense of warmth is suddenly replaced by chilling horror. In the next scene, which may be occurring in dream or in reality, Lao Deng encounters two incarnations of the boy: one lies beside her, gently holding her arm; and the other stands beside her bed, with a cleaver held above her ready to hack her to death. This long dream sequence ends with Lao Deng waking in a state of fear and confusion. Struggling out of bed to check the other room, she finds that the boy is already gone, although he has left old photos of her family torn in pieces on her desk ( g. 9). The boy’s act of shredding old photos hints at something pertaining to past memory hidden beneath the ambivalent relationship between him and Lao Deng. The way Lao Deng derives both comfort and unease from the boy’s presence calls to mind Freud’s notion of the uncanny, the German original of which, unheimlich, contains a meaning identical to its opposite, heimlich (homely, familiar). For Freud (2001: 930), “the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of and long familiar.” If the sense of the uncanny is actually triggered by the familiar, then the puzzle is why the familiar becomes uncanny and threatening. Freud refers to repression as that which causes the feeling of fright. The uncanny is, in his words, “something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only though the process of repression” (944). In other words, repression estranges what used to be familiar and customary. The dreadful effect of the uncanny thus comes from the fact that what ought to have remained hidden and concealed has come to light. The emergence of the suppressed “stranger” threatens the well-maintained psychological and symbolic order, constituting an unsettling confrontation with ourselves and our time.
11 In a sense, Lao Deng displaces her love toward her grandson, which her son and daughter-in-law have largely rejected, onto the boy. When she invites the boy for dinner, she xes meatballs, saying that they are her grandson’s favorite, but, unfortunately, her son and daughter- in-law do not like her making such meat dishes for him.
Figure 8: The boy lies beside Lao Deng, who warmly holds his hand.
Figure 9: The old photos of Lao Deng’s family are torn up and scattered.
The boy’s presence is so uncanny for Lao Deng precisely because he reminds her of a familiar past—one that both she and the nation as a whole have consigned to a deep recess of the mind. The details of that past eventually come out: she and the boy’s grandfather, Lao Zhao, used to work in the same Third Front factory in Guizhou and competed for the sole spot to Beijing following the Cultural Revolution. Thanks to her vigorous participation in all kinds of political activities, Lao Deng gained enough knowledge of Lao Zhao’s past to attack and defame him, thereby ensuring that she would get the privilege of an urban transfer. The loss of this singular opportunity so shocks Lao Zhao that he has a stroke, leaving him bedridden for the rest of his life and devastating his family. Not long after Lao Zhao’s death, the boy embarks on the journey to Beijing, beginning his stalking and, presumably, stealthy harassment of Lao Deng by telephone. By then, Lao Deng has learned about Lao Zhao’s death from
50 • Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia
Lao Huang, a former coworker of hers. The boy’s haunting presence at this juncture forces Lao Deng to confront this shameful personal secret and her own heart of darkness. With undefined apprehension, Lao Deng con des in her deceased husband, “Since Lao Huang called the other day, telling me that Lao Zhao passed way, things have become weird. I feel like there is always a shadow following me around.” The real shadow of the boy later becomes an internal one, causing Lao Deng to “see” him constantly looming in front of her, even though surveillance video reveals no one other than her. For Lao Deng, the harm she did to Lao Zhao and his family is a haunting shadow of memory both familiar and horrifying—the repressed in Freud’s sense—and the boy ensures that she can no longer repress it.
When evoking the past, the ghostly presence of the boy follows a different pattern than that of some notable characters in earlier films of the ghost genre. Fleur (Ruhua) in Rouge (Yanzhi kou, 1987), for example, attempts to rekindle her past romance, and thereby evokes Hong Kong’s nostalgic fantasization of and fascination with its past (Chow 2001). In another instance, the ghostlike figures in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu san, 2004) seek consolation from the communal experience of watching an old film in a seedy theater (Stuckey 2014). Both cases project an ideal image of the past, which has the power to redeem them. Red Amnesia, by contrast, displays a complex memory that is at once endearing and disturbing, challenging the nostalgic tendency to romanticize the past. Indeed, Lao Deng’s memory of the Third Front experience is an ambivalent one: her youth at that time was filled with romantic idealism, but also tainted by ruthlessness and betrayal. The recurring scenes that show her wandering hesitantly in front of the community recreation center dramatize her conflicted feelings about the past: she is drawn to the familiar revolutionary songs the community choir sings inside, but each time she approaches the doorway, she is instantly overcome by an urge to flee the resounding chorus, whose voices reverberate with too much revolutionary tumult. While she attempts to repress dark memories, the boy’s presence pushes
12 Revenge has been a central theme of the Chinese ghost genre. As Stephen Teo (1997) notes, most Chinese ghost movies depict the revenant seeking revenge and destruction of its victims.
13 The boy’s initial urge to seek vengeance reminds one of the famous horror film The Lonely Ghost in the
Dark Mansion (Heilou guhun, 1989), which also deals with ghostly haunting related to the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. In this film, the ghost is a teenage girl who returns to avenge
her own murder and the death, by persecution, of her parents. Similar to the effect of the boy’s haunting in Red Amnesia, the girl’s uncompromising pursuit of historical justice defies the official narration of the end of trauma. However, whereas the story of The Lonely Ghost culminates with the girl’s vengeance, Red Amnesia goes further to propel confession of sins. For a detailed analysis of The Lonely Ghost, see Li Zeng (2013). Zeng suggests that this film engages in a valuable feminist approach to the historical trauma of
the Cultural Revolution in that it rejects the familiar idea of a male hero as the narrator of history and the savior of the female victim and instead asserts full female agency in the course of revealing unhealed wounds and executing historical justice.
her to break the psychological barrier and confront what she has so far evaded. The ghostly haunting halts her psychic evasion of the past; she becomes aware that she can no longer repress memory of the family she damned through her own actions.
The provocative power of the boy also impels her to eventually confess her sins. Attempting to wring meaning from her recent bizarre experiences, especially after learning of Lao Zhao’s death, Lao Deng concludes that the boy must be the reincarnation of Lao Zhao’s ghost and must have visited her to exact his revenge.12 Bearing his grandfather’s unresolved grievance, the boy initially demonstrates an intention to hurt Lao Deng—it is most likely he who throws a brick through Lao Deng’s window one night. If what appears on-screen toward the end of Lao Deng’s dream sequence partially reflects “reality,” then he also most likely contemplates killing Lao Deng.13 However, what he seems to value more than revenge is an acknowledgment of guilt. In the film, Lao Deng eventually lets her suspicions slip as she answers yet another harassing call: “Lao Zhao, is that you? Have you come for my debt?… I know it is my fault. I feel so sorry for what I did to you and your family . . . I am sorry. It’s all my fault.” Notably, her apology ends the incessant telephone ringing that has haunted her house and her mind. As Judith Zeitlin (2007: 87) explains in a different context, “only when the grievances fueling the phantom’s manifestation are properly redressed can the emotional stasis of ghosthood be ended and the dead soul finally enter a cycle of rebirth or dissolve into silence and nothingness.” Lao Deng’s admission of her guilt assuages the grudge-bearing boy, ceases his ghostly haunting, and allows him to eventually leave Beijing with peace of mind.
In a broader sense, the ghostly haunting embodied by the boy bears witness to the unresolved history of the Third Front Movement, which caused the geographical and social dislocation of countless families. Displaced from their urban homes, these families find themselves adrift, generally unable either to go home or to identify with their new environment. Erya, the earliest Chinese dictionary, defines “ghost” as gui ye, or “that which returns.” With regard to the exact meaning of gui or “return home,” David Der-wei Wang notes that “contrary to common wisdom, ‘home’ refers not to an abode in the human world but to the site of eternal rest” (2004: 266). Referencing Zuozhuan, Wang further explains that “if ghosts have an abode to return to, they will not cause terror” (267). In other words, if a ghost has a home, it will not become a haunting spirit. In light of this understanding, the ghostly haunting in this film points not only to unsettled personal scores, but also to the Third Front generation’s ongoing dilemma of having no home to return to. In this spirit, Lao Huang complains about the rootlessness that state policies engender: “After I die, I do not want to be buried in my hometown Shanghai, nor Guizhou where I am exiled. I belong to neither. I will ask my son to simply throw my ashes into the sky.” Lao Huang spells out the quandary of many left-behind Third-Front workers, including the boy’s deceased grandfather. The return of Lao Zhao’s dead soul, if we accept Lao Deng’s understanding, signals the need to address old grievances. In the same way that his restless spirit haunts her, the memory of countless workers haunts a government that has been evading the responsibility to redress unresolved issues caused by the Third Front Movement.
Moral Interrogation
The question remains as to why Lao Deng’s apology comes so late, especially because she knows precisely what she did to harm Lao Zhao and his family. What allows her to deny her own guilt? I argue that the prevailing story of collective victimization—told in both official and cultural contexts—allows many to shirk deserved blame. A state resolution issued in 1981 marked the official appraisal of the Cultural Revolution; it repudiated the movement for having brought severe turmoil and catastrophe to the nation.14 When tracing the principal causes of the decade of calamity, it charged Mao Zedong with chief responsibility for initiating the revolution,15 and then directed the most vehement denouncement to the counterrevolutionary cliques of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, who enabled the movement’s worst excesses. Although the Resolution gestured toward a more in-depth investigation of social and historical causes underlying the catastrophic revolution, it only scratched the surface of the matter, aiming primarily to uphold the legitimacy of the Party. First, it emphasized the short history of the world socialist movement and used that to excuse the mistakes of the Party, which was not yet fully prepared for “the swift advent of the new-born socialist society and the socialist construction on a national scale.” Second, it blamed the pernicious legacy of China’s feudal autocracy, which contributed to the rise of the cult of Mao and the fall of inter-Party democracy. Valid as they are, these reflections were overly rhetorical and prematurely conclusive, leaving many important questions, including the confused moral landscape during and after the Cultural Revolution, largely unaddressed.
14 See “Guanyu jianguo yilai dang de ruogan lishi wenti de jueyi” 关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议 (Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China). URL: < http://cpc. people.com.cn/GB/64162/64168/64563/65 374/4526448.html>
15 The Resolution decried Mao’s personal mistakes without questioning the rectitude of the theory he created. That theory remains foundational to the ideology of the Party.
In the official appraisal, broad masses of the Chinese people were casually consigned to victimhood. Pitting the people against the forces of the radical left, the Resolution fashioned a simplistic dichotomy between the vulnerable masses and their misguided leaders, with the latter visiting grievous harm on the former. By lumping them into a conceptual category, the Party acquitted ordinary Chinese of any responsibility for the nationwide mass movement, even though its initiatives were not always directed from above. In fact, the official discourse’s lack of attention to individual responsibility accords with an inclination of its participants to deny their oftentimes inseparable victimhood and guilt. In his discussion of the role of the masses within the Cultural Revolution, Roderick MacFarquhar (2016) reminds us:
The essence of the Cultural Revolution is not just that Mao un- leashed it and caused the chaos. The essence is that the Chinese, without direct orders, were so cruel to each other. They killed each other, fought each other and tortured each other. Mao did not go down the streets and say: “You are licensed to torture. Go torture.” It just happened.
Indeed, many Chinese were not just victims, but also victimizers. However, the official narrative of the people’s victimization leaves the question of their responsibility in acts of violence barely addressed. By this logic, Lao Deng is as much a victim of the Third Front Movement as her comrades, even though she has ruthlessly victimized some of them. The sense of her shared victimhood assuages her guilt, so she can avoid moral reckoning for decades.
The representation of the memory of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese cinema has largely accepted this logic of collective victimization. Ordinary individuals are portrayed as powerless, innocent sufferers at the mercy of variously identified culprits of unthinkable horror. Xie Jin’s films, such as Legend of the Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi, 1980), The Herdsman (Muma ren, 1982), and Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, 1988), are exemplary early attempts to understand the causes of the Cultural Revolution. These films blame injustice on certain corrupt and vicious political villains, who twist the well-intended policies of the Party and thereby harm common people. These films present a bipolar model of morality, placing the majority of their subjects on the good end. Paul Pickowicz (2009: 321) problematizes such reductive and redemptive storytelling in his discussion of Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town:
The melodramatic mode provides easy and comforting answers to difficult and complex questions. It offers moral clarity at a time when nothing seems clear. But by personalizing evil, the film leaves the impression that everything would be ne if only the “evil” people were removed from power and replaced by people of “virtue.”
Unlike Xie Jin, whose films tend to smooth out a complex history, Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang in Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, 1994) endeavors to expose “the unhealed wounds, unsolved mysteries, and unresolved tensions in the individual’s relation to history” (Ban Wang 2004: 157). Blue Kite condemns the lethally whimsical and opaque authoritarian order, which continuously shocks and causes suffering. Once again, however, common people and families are depicted as victims of politically engineered disasters. Zhang Yimou’s recent film Coming Home (Guilai, 2014) offers yet another case of employing the rhetoric of victimization. Although Coming Home resembles Red Amnesia in drawing attention to the issue of amnesia about the Maoist era and the lingering effect of the traumatic past, it nevertheless dilutes the moral responsibility of individuals who inflict pain on others by exploiting such notions as forgiveness and reconciliation. In the film, a former official sexually harasses the female protagonist while her husband serves time in a labor camp. When her husband returns home, he shows the offender surprising mercy after learning that he has also been persecuted. It is as though holding him to greater account for his crimes is no longer necessary and is even cruel. The evil of history and politics thus glosses over that of individuals and frees them from blame.16
16 The film also employs touching romance to mitigate the pain and suffering caused by the traumatic past. Yet, notably, the failure to cure the female protagonist’s psychogenic amnesia precisely testifies to the ineffectiveness of such convenient sentimentalism in dealing with trauma.
This kind of mentality of collective victimization and the resultant exoneration of personal responsibility are vehemently decried by Hannah Arendt. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt maintains that moral choice is still possible even in the midst of totalitarianism, terror, or chaos, and that a person must be held responsible for the consequences of his or her choices. However, in the wake of the Holocaust, there was a tendency to speak in generalities rather than to get into details and to target individuals. Arendt (2006: 296) observes: “What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people—the larger the better—in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer be named.” At the time, popular constructs such as the collective guilt of the German people and the collective innocence of European Jews attested to the disinclination against assigning personal blame. Going against the grain of this trend, she incisively points out that “there is no such thing as collective guilt or, for that matter, collective innocence, and that if there were, no one person could ever be guilty or innocent” (298). At stake in Arendt’s thinking are two basic principles: individuals are thinking, moral beings; and they should be held responsible for what they have done.
What Wang Xiaoshuai performs in Red Amnesia is precisely this kind of moral scrutiny, asking just how to conduct oneself in the midst of historical violence.17 The film’s unremitting ring of the telephone and invocation of ghosts are used to awaken and wrest the character from historical unconsciousness and oblivion, the “red amnesia.” Only when one is restored to awareness of moral responsibility can true reflection become possible. In the film, Lao Deng is reminded anew of the sin whose memory she once repressed. Propelled by a seething guilt, she embarks on the journey back to Guizhou to atone. Despite her old friends’ dissuasion— “It has passed, let it go”—she insists on visiting Lao Zhao’s family. Mustering up all her courage to knock on their door, Lao Deng is greeted by Xufang, the widow of Lao Zhao, who is ironically unable at first sight to recognize “the family enemy.” Lao Deng’s long-overdue apology is finally met with an adamant refusal and a slap on her face—a fate many contrite people have known. As thankless as it can be, taking responsibility for one’s actions and seeking forgiveness are essential steps for achieving moral justice. Lao Deng’s introspection and atonement give a glimpse of hope for broader and more in-depth reflection on the responsibility of ordinary individuals in the Cultural Revolution.
The film, however, adds a further twist to this belated effort to reconcile with the past. At Lao Zhao’s place, Lao Deng unexpectedly catches sight of the boy she encountered in Beijing who has come to ask his grandma what is going on. At that instant, all becomes clear: the boy who tailed her in Beijing is Lao Zhao’s grandson, who attempted to avenge his grandfather; this boy is also the criminal responsible for the break-ins and the murder mentioned by the community police. Out of guilt and pity, Lao Deng decides not to report the case. However, when she comes back the second day to resume her apology, she sees a few police officers questioning people about the boy. The scene is followed by a long tracking shot of Lao Deng rushing to Lao Zhao’s place to inform them of the news, gasping for breath but continuing to run. This protracted scene conveys the asymmetry between the urgency to rescue young people from the damaging historical inheritance and the long journey it takes to reach this goal, especially when the process has already been so long delayed. Upon arrival, Lao Deng asks the boy to run quickly, but the policemen soon corner him in a deserted unit on the top floor of an apartment complex. Getting up on the windowsill, the boy threatens to jump off if the policemen step any closer. To everyone’s shock, the windowsill that he holds breaks off, taking him with it. The film then cuts to a close-up of the boy staring at us blankly and ghostly that appears in an earlier scene, and then to a medium shot of Lao Deng collapsing on the ground, overwhelmed and petrified by what has just happened to the boy. A chain reaction has taken place. Lao Deng’s denunciation of Lao Zhao leads to his stroke, which devastates his family, which prompts the boy’s various acts of revenge; his fatal fall is the final link in the causal chain. Although Lao Deng has come to atone for the sin she committed, she does it so late that the damage has gone beyond easy repair. Worse yet, her attempt to help the boy elude capture aggravates the harm she has already done. History falls into an absurd and vicious spiral. The last shot of the film freezes on the frame of the empty window, through which one can see rows of abandoned factory buildings—the relics of a forgotten past ( g. 10). This last shot echoes the opening scene of Shanghai Dreams, which also features a freeze frame of a half-open window. But whereas Shanghai Dreams, zooming in through the window, unfolds a youthful, nostalgic, and lived memory of the Third Front experience,18 Red Amnesia fixates on a view that is decidedly more bleak and ruinous. The boy’s fall opens a new wound on the ruins of the past. The ending gives viewers a heavy parting blow and leaves us to wonder how—or if—the spiral will ever be broken.
17 Critics tend to overlook the step forward Wang Xiaoshuai has taken in Red Amnesia. Joy Weissberg (2014), for example, continues to identify only the film’s general critique of the Cultural Revolution by saying, “The film’s implicit criticism lies not with Mrs. Deng but with the perpetrators of the Cultural Revolu- tion, whose twisted mass experiment ended in so much death and long-lasting misery.” In fact, even Lao Zhao is not portrayed merely as an innocent victim in the film, although he is victimized in his relationship to Lao Deng. As Jun discloses in a conversation with Bing, Lao Zhao, like their mother, Lao Deng, was also an active participant in all kinds of political movements during the Cultural Revolu- tion and persecuted others.
18 This nostalgic sentiment in Shanghai Dreams is akin to what Jason McGrath calls “re ective nostalgia.” McGrath writes, “[re ective nostalgia] arises from ambivalent personal and cultural memo- ries and embraces ambiguity, distance, irony, and fragmentation as inseparable aspects of its object of meditation” (2007, 100). Instead of conjuring up a complacent and reassuring past, Wang Xiaoshuai’s remembrance of the Third Front experience in Shanghai Dreams is fraught with ambivalence, tensions, and traumas.
Figure 10: The freeze frame of the empty window from which the boy falls.
Conclusion
Through the metaphor of ghostly haunting, Red Amnesia reminds us of the urgent need to reflect on the Cultural Revolution, especially as contemporary China continues its frantic sprint to become an economic superpower. Going against the amnesiac, forward-looking, unreflective social trend in contemporary China, this film shows the degree to which the main characters carry on the legacies of the Third Front Movement, which is by no means an irrelevant episode of the past, but a haunting fact in the present. Red Amnesia thus makes a remarkable historical intervention in today’s China insomuch as it not only revisits a historical moment typically ignored but also marks the links forged between past and present and the ways in which the present is actively constituted in its connections to the past.
The culture of forgetting that obscured these connections did not arise just from too fervent a belief in progress. It also resulted from the
60 • Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia
hegemonic control of the Party, which, to consolidate its power, allows only a certain past to be remembered while suppressing other memories that do not t. Using ghosts, who embody the eruption of the past in the present moment, Red Amnesia metaphorically represents the inevitable failure of such attempts to impose forgetting. To families who survived the revolution, it brings back unwanted memories and a truly uncomfortable sense of kinship.
In addition, unlike most previous films about the Cultural Revolution, which emphasize the victimization of Chinese people, Red Amnesia rejects generalities and instead insists on specificity. Rather than retelling familiar stories, it seeks to assign individual responsibility for historical violence. The presence of the ghosts, returned from the past to haunt the present moment, shows how the traumas of history are not simply the result of the victimization of the people at the hands of an all-encompassing state apparatus; instead, individuals, even as they are also victims, are culpable for the violence inflicted on others during this historical moment. Although it seems unlikely, the tale of ghostly haunting should propel both the government and individuals to consider how they perpetuate old mistakes and inflict new wounds.
Glossary
beizhan beihuang 备战备荒
Biandan guniang 扁担姑娘
Bing 兵
Bu san 不散
Chuangru zhe 闯入者
Deng Meijuan 邓美娟
Erdi 二弟
Erya 尔雅
Furong zhen 芙蓉镇
gui 鬼
gui 归
Guilai 归来
Guiyang 贵阳
Guizhou 贵州
haoren haoma shang sanxian 好人好马上三线
Helou guhun 黑楼孤魂
Jiang Qing 江青
jianwang zheng 健忘症
Jun 军
kongchao laoren 空巢老人
Lan fengzheng 蓝风筝
Lao Deng 老邓
Lao Huang 老黄
Lao Zhao 老赵
Lin Biao 林彪
Muma ren 牧马人
Qinghong 青红
Ruhua 如花
sanxian jianshe 三线建设
sanxian sanbuqu 三线三部曲
Shiqisui de danche 十七岁的单车
Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮壮
Tianyunshan chuanqi 天云山传奇
Wo shiyi 我11
Xie Jin 谢晋
Xufang 旭芳
Yanhuang chunqiu 炎黄春秋
Yanzhi kou 胭脂扣
Zhang Yimou 张艺谋
Zuozhuan 左传
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Zeng, Li. 2013. “Ghostly Vengeance, Historical Trauma: The Lonely Ghost in the Dark Mansion (1989).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 2: 109–121. anjie Wang
Wang Xiaoshuai has often been recognized for his gritty, deeply affecting dramas about the life of rural migrants living on the periphery of society. Three of his critically acclaimed films, So Close to Paradise (Biandan guniang, 1998), Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche, 2001), and Drifters (Erdi, 2003), focus on the harsh reality facing the rural-to-urban or rural-to-overseas migrants in contemporary China. As Michael Berry summarizes, “Through his recent work, Wang has pinpointed the complex phenomenon of population movement . . . as one of the most important and defining characteristics of contemporary Chinese society” (2005: 164). Unlike the mainstream media, which tend to ignore migrants or normalize their suffering, Wang Xiaoshuai’s representation refuses to take their displacement and subordination for granted, engaging in what Jian Xu (2005: 434) calls “a critical intervention into the symbolic order of ‘market socialism.’” Wang’s layered depiction of the ambitions and plights of rural laborers not only sheds light on the complex process of their subject formation, but also reveals the economic and institutional violence that a market economy and a socialist state jointly impose on this disadvantaged social group.
Scholars of Wang Xiaoshuai’s films tend to focus on how he portrays characters migrating from the countryside to the city.1 Few have commented on the characters who migrate in the opposite direction, despite the frequency with which they appear in his later films. Wang has repeatedly set his stories in the shadow of the Third Front Movement (sanxian jianshe), a centrally directed, large-scale urban-to-rural relocation project carried out in the 1960s as the Vietnam War escalated and the rift between China and the Soviet Union widened. Motivated by national defense considerations, the Chinese government moved thousands of factories and their workers from coastal regions (which, in the event of war, would likely become battlefronts) to the remote mountain areas of southwestern and western China, a region that became known as the Third Front.2 The objective was to build an industrial system in China’s interior that would allow the nation to keep functioning in the event of an attack (Naughton 1988: 354). Wang’s family joined this massive migration, relocating from Shanghai to Guiyang when his mother’s factory was moved there.
† I am grateful to producer Liu Xuan for allowing me to preview the film and for providing several film photographs for this essay. I also would like to thank Kirk Denton, editor of MCLC, and the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions and insights on an earlier draft.
Regarded as a state secret for many years, this movement has long been excluded from public accounts of Chinese history in China and has rarely been explored in cultural productions.3 Wang Xiaoshuai is among the few filmmakers to depict this often-ignored episode of the Cultural Revolution and the lesser-known struggles of the families most affected by it. Retaining their initial concern for displaced people, Wang’s films on the Third Front nonetheless depart from the exclusively contemporary, urban milieus seen in his earlier works. Instead, they dig deep into a forgotten past, tackling questions about memory and trauma associated with this sociohistorical upheaval. In examining the history and legacy of this program, Wang Xiaoshuai says he ultimately aims to enrich our understanding of the profound impact of the Cultural Revolution.4
1 For further research on Wang Xiaoshuai’s representation of migrant workers in contemporary China, see, for example, G. Xu (2007), Lu (2008), and Gladwin (2012). Xu examines the symbolic and institutionalized violence migrants suffer in Wang’s films. Lu shows how Wang’s rural migrants illuminate a new urban space through the act of navigating it. Gladwin pays attention to yet another aspect: the absence of traditional rites of passage
to adulthood in an itinerant existence of migrant workers.
2 The eastern coastal areas were seen as the strategic First Front, the central areas were the Second Front, and the regions far to the west were the Third Front.
3 Although there have been some introductions of this history on the Internet and an increasing number of journal articles on it since the 1980s, the Third Front Movement has not been widely discussed or represented in of official and cultural discourses.
4 Wang Xiaoshuai (2014a) says: “When conceiving this film, I was not bound
by any specific ideas. Nor did I think
the Third Front was the most important aspect of the film. I just wanted to show that the Cultural Revolution, as a long, significant historical period, had deep and lasting impact on Chinese people. . . . So I proceeded to further investigate the traumatic consequences of the Cultural Revolution.”
Wang Xiaoshuai’s first attempt to retrieve the experience of the Third Front families was his 2005 feature, Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong). Set in an outlying town in Guizhou province in the early 1980s, a couple of years after China’s reform and opening up, this film centers on a father-daughter conflict: the father imposes his dream of returning to his hometown of Shanghai on the whole family, but the daughter is reluctant to leave the town, where she has come to feel like she belongs. The daughter’s eventual psychological breakdown betrays, Richard Letteri (2010: 5) suggests, “the sense of homelessness that engulfs her as well as those people caught up in the dramatic changes taking place in the Chinese economy and society.” Indeed, the father and daughter, in the final analysis, are both victims of politically motivated economic migration that displaces and wrecks the youth of two generations.
Wang’s next film on this subject, 11 Flowers (Wo shiyi, 2011), pushes the time frame further back, to 1975, in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution; it serves as a prequel of sorts to Shanghai Dreams. A semiautobiographical tale derived from Wang Xiaoshuai’s own boyhood memories, the film captures fragments of the life he left behind, a life in which innocence and curiosity unexpectedly intertwine with gruesome historical events. The eyes of a maturing teenage boy subtly reveal a confused, disturbing adult world intruded on by menacing political changes.
Wang Xiaoshuai’s most recent film, Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe, 2014), is the last installment of his Third Front trilogy, expanding on the themes and events of Shanghai Dreams and 11 Flowers. Red Amnesia continues to excavate and meditate on the experience of those families exiled during the Third Front Movement in the all-pervading shadow of the Cultural Revolution. Yet, unlike the earlier two films, both of which are set decades from the present day, Red Amnesia crosses temporal and spatial boundaries, bringing the past into the here and now. Following a retired widow named Deng Meijuan (referred to as Lao Deng throughout the film), a former Third Front factory worker, the film sensitively captures an aging lady’s inescapable bondage to the past. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, Lao Deng is one of the few Third Front workers who has managed to escape a life of toil and displacement in a rural factory and transfer her family back to Beijing. All is well until a series of silent phone calls disrupt the calm of her reclaimed urban life. The appearance of a mysterious teenage boy stalker further disturbs that life. Thanks to the continuous, provocative phone calls and the boy’s haunting presence, traces and memories of the past begin to loom large, eventually propelling her back to the remote factory town in Guizhou province where she once worked. The film thus mingles past with present, and here (Beijing) with there (an unnamed former Third Front town in Guizhou). To effect this mingling, this film transcends the realism of Wang’s earlier films, borrowing from the dramatic toolkits of mystery and horror films. Beginning with the mystery of the telephone harassment of Lao Deng, the film carefully withholds information, letting the viewer’s excitement, anticipation, and anxiety mount. It intensifies this thrilling ambience by including images of ghosts—or at least what Lao Deng perceives as such—that add a new dimension of fantasy to the film.
Why does Wang use these new narrative approaches? What kind of understanding of history, memory, and reality do they help illuminate? Focusing on the metaphor of ghostly haunting that permeates this film, I elucidate how Wang uses this trope to emphasize the unbreakable tie— rather than the division—between past memory and today’s reality. Red Amnesia challenges both the official practice of burying memories of the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and common people’s comfortable consignment of history to oblivion. Both of these practices serve the forward-looking, unreflective post-Mao discourse and its obsession with economic development. Red Amnesia draws our attention to the enduring toll that historical violence takes on people, families, and society as a whole. In exploring the origins of the ghostly haunting, the film aims at more than the usual historical targets: the vast harm that befell the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution was not a mere consequence of Mao’s ruthlessness or the wickedness of certain highly-placed political villains, nor did it result from some inexplicable bout of mass hysteria. Rather, it was enabled by common people.
The Politics of Inheritance
The official state discourse after the Cultural Revolution sought to bring closure to this historical period and to press for much-needed economic development. A landmark speech delivered by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978 made this ideological shift explicit. Although Deng affirmed the necessity to correct all the wrongs resulting from the Cultural Revolution, he nevertheless urged prompt and general settlements, discouraging a thorough, in-depth investigation of past problems. He advised: “We should have the major aspect of each problem in mind and solve it in broad outline; to go into every detail is neither possible nor necessary” (Deng 1999: 449). Driven by a progressive view of history, Deng instructed the Party and the nation to “emancipate” themselves from historical burdens and shift their focus to socialist modernization in the new era. “We must look forward. Only if we consider new situations and resolve new issues can we move forward smoothly” (451), stressed Deng. A forward-looking mentality has henceforth come to mark the developmentalist ideology and the post-Mao identity of the Chinese. As a result, the history of the Cultural Revolution era became cut off from the present and was rendered irrelevant.
Critical of the progressive conception of history, Jacques Derrida brings up the notion of “hauntology,” calling our attention to the lingering presence and innate relevance of the past in the present. The prompt for Derrida’s interrogation was an essay by Francis Fukuyama (1989) in which he heralded “the end of history” and declared the full and final triumph of global capitalism over communism. Whereas Fukuyama’s encomium to capitalism presupposes a clear border between the past and the present, Derrida’s hauntology denies the possibility of such a boundary. Instead, it seeks to break the restrictive enclosure of historical periods and expose the illusion of the ontological existence of the present. Derrida (1994: 54) warns us that we inevitably bear the marks of the past. In his words, “the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.” He therefore proposes to transcend chronological barriers and pursue “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (xix).
Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia echoes Derrida’s hauntology in its manner of probing the remnants of the Cultural Revolution, a period the official narrative blocks off neatly into a decade (1966–1976). Contesting this mainstream view, Wang Xiaoshuai attempts to show that the past is not just past but persists into the present. Rather than just revisiting past experiences, as he does in Shanghai Dreams and 11 Flowers, the director explores how the past has become, as Avery Gordon (2008: 8) puts it for another context, “a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.”
The past seethes into Lao Deng’s life with the aforementioned silent phone calls, which not only disturb her peace of mind but also fuel various speculations of people around her. Recently widowed, Lao Deng lives alone in Beijing, spending her retirement in a humble apartment. She provides support, although often unwanted, for her two grown sons and cares for her elderly mother, who lives in a nursing home. However, Lao Deng’s usual rhythm of life is disrupted by the harassing phone calls; every time Lao Deng answers the phone, she hears only silence ( g. 1). Relentless and mysterious, the calls make Lao Deng utterly distraught and paranoid. When she tries to report the calls to the police, her anxiety robs her of a clear mind, keeping her from coherently expressing what has happened. Everyone Lao Deng appeals to offers his or her own theories about the true nature of the calls. The officers in her neighborhood dismiss them as hallucinations born of a widow’s loneliness; to them, Lao Deng’s complaints are nothing more than a case of empty-nest syndrome (the stress, loneliness, and mental instability that afflict people whose children have left home). This explanation is a convenient one, and indeed the plight of the Chinese empty-nest elderly (kongchao laoren) has grown increasingly pronounced in recent years. Lao Deng’s elder son, Jun, however, blames his contract
Figure 1: Lao Deng receives a silent call.
workers, whom he suspects of retaliating against him for his failure to pay their wages. Jun’s conjecture directs our attention to another contemporary social issue—the struggle of migrant workers, a familiar theme in Wang’s films. Jun’s wife fails to see any cause for alarm, suggesting that the silent callers are just pulling pranks or misdialing. In her account, the extremity of Lao Deng’s response shows just how badly the widow’s mind is fraying.
On the narrative level, these divergent opinions on the mystery of the phone calls build suspense and engender curiosity in spectators. When viewed more closely, however, they also disclose a culture of amnesia in present-day China. Although these characters reach different conclusions, they all share a predilection for a mode of perception that takes the here and now as its default coordinates. They largely neglect inquiries into history and historical inheritance. Whether they blame parental loneliness, the desperate state of migrant laborers, or mental decline, these characters turn a blind eye to the family’s past and its rami cations on the present. The kind of amnesia and denial they practice has gone on in China for decades. Since the market economy began to take root in the 1990s, an ecstatic mood has gripped many Chinese, who are enticed by the promise of a new life. Indeed, postsocialist China fosters the habit of forgetting, quietly depriving its people of memories and the sense of historical depth they provide. As Yiju Huang aptly notes, the immediate historical past “is diverted in a form of transference—the celebrated miracle of economic development, the newfound faith in development, and the fervent gaze oriented toward the future.”5
Bucking this historical trend, Wang Xiaoshuai draws attention to the family’s history, which continues to shape Lao Deng’s character, especially how she interacts with her sons. A stubborn and cantankerous mother, Lao Deng keeps interfering in her sons’ private lives. This irritates Jun’s wife, who resents her mother-in-law’s meddling in her housework and childcare. Lao Deng’s bond with her gay son, Bing, is strained by her open disapproval of the way he lives his life. On the surface, her relations with both her children seem to reflect the growing generational gap resulting from rapid social changes. Lao Deng seems to go against the grain of such new concepts as the nuclear family, privacy, and homosexuality. However, this modern versus traditional dichotomy cannot fully explain why Lao Deng feels so entitled to direct her sons’ lives. This sense of entitlement is most dramatically captured in the scene in which she has a quarrel with Bing. Annoyed by his mother’s frequent barging into his place to cook for him, Bing asks her to respect the privacy of his home. Instantly provoked, Lao Deng yells, “Your home is my home, and what’s yours is mine. You are nothing without me! Don’t think to keep me away.” Here, Lao Deng articulates the enormous debt Bing owes to her—one that goes beyond the average mother’s due. Why does Lao Deng feel so fiercely entitled to direct her sons’ lives?
5 Yiju Huang 2014: 76. Nurturing a for- ward-looking culture does not preclude revisiting the past. In fact, contemporary China has witnessed a surge of popular reminiscence. Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang (2007: 1) note that there is a burgeoning of a “memory industry” characterized by the sentiment of nostalgia. Although nostalgia discloses a sense of discontent with the rising issues of inequality and social injustice, especially for the victims of economic reform, it nevertheless tends to romanticize the past rather than examine it critically.
A fuller explanation can be drawn from her struggles for the family on the Third Front. As Bing eventually learns, the then pregnant Lao Deng struggled exhaustively to obtain a rare transfer allocation, thereby ensuring that he would be born in the city. Through her efforts, he and his brother have been spared the isolation and hopelessness of life in the mountains. Jun and Bing, who enjoy all the comforts and privileges of city living, are oblivious to how much Lao Deng has struggled to secure this life for them. What frustrates her is less the modernity of her sons’ attitudes than their failure to appreciate her sacrifices. Viewed in this light, Lao Deng’s struggle to form meaningful bonds with her children becomes more comprehensible. The long take that follows Lao Deng’s trek to Bing’s place neatly symbolizes this difficulty: the camera shows her pulling a heavy shopping cart into a hair salon, staggering past the front desk, stumbling up narrow stairs, squeezing through a massage room, and finally arriving at Bing’s apartment. Lao Deng seems to have passed through the tunnel of time, only to find herself in a place beyond memory; it is as though her past personal experience is no longer relevant.
Lao Deng’s recalcitrant refusal to give up her role as the caregiver of the family functions as a coping mechanism in the face of the social and familial nullification of her past experience. In February 1965, the Chinese government issued “the Decision on the Third-Front Construction System in Southwestern China,” making heavy use of the slogan “be prepared against war, be prepared against natural disasters, good citizens and horses heading for the Third Front” to promote the system. Responding to the call of the state, Lao Deng threw herself into the cause of building China’s Third Front. Like millions of others, she subjugated her individual interest to that of the nation (Yang 2006: 102). The value of her efforts, however, has essentially come to naught as the leftist policies that dominated the Third Front Movement were repudiated following the Cultural Revolution. Frustrated by the sense of absurdity of her past sacrifices for society, Lao Deng then puts all her energy into aiding her family, whether they welcome her help or not. What we see is an independent, strong-willed, and, at the same time, vulnerable and pathetically isolated Lao Deng struggling to prove her self-worth in the modern, bustling city of Beijing.
If Lao Deng’s situation dramatizes one struggle—that of returnees to the cities after the Cultural Revolution—then the teenage boy who
stalks Lao Deng dramatizes another—that of people still stranded on the Third Front. Unlike educated youths, most of whom returned to the city following the Rustication Movement, the bulk of Third Front families were not allowed to come back. Bound to their factory and constrained by the strict household registration system, the boy’s family, including his grandfather Lao Zhao, must remain in their underdeveloped Third Front factory town in Guizhou. As China shifted into the reform era and refocused on the east coast in the 1980s, the regions once held to be strategically crucial were sidelined. With the decline of government subsidies, coupled with the constraints of geography and transportation, many Third Front plants went bankrupt. Their livelihoods gone, Third Front workers were gradually relegated to the margins of the society. In the film, the boy and his grandparents still occupy their originally-assigned factory dorm, which is now dilapidated and largely deserted. The isolation and decay of the family home serves as the physical embodiment of its being forgotten and forsaken. Had his grandfather won the chance to move back, the boy could have enjoyed all the privileges that Lao Deng’s grandson does. Instead, stranded in a gloomy Third Front town, he grows up in desolate poverty.
The boy’s roaming in Beijing and his strange behavior arise from the trauma of being forever displaced and marginalized. The opening sequence of the film shows the boy after he has broken into a random apartment in Beijing. He takes a shower, gets a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, and sinks into a chair as he takes a drink. His curious, wandering eyes and the conspicuously ill-fitting lady’s slippers on his feet suggest his alienation from this stranger’s home. We learn later that the boy habitually breaks into people’s houses, where he gives himself a taste of daily urban life and indulges his more malicious appetites. He deliberately waters houseplants with boiling water and leaves rooms in cluttered disarray. In sating these dual thirsts for leisure and destruction, he commits acts that are clearly not mere burglary, but are motivated by complex psychic impulses. Growing up in the Third Front region, the boy harbors feelings of envy tinged with hatred: he wants to both live the urban life and spite the system that denied it to him. These mixed emotions are inseparable from the formative environment he grew up in.
The boy’s schizophrenic conduct later gets him into serious trouble. As he continues breaking into homes, he develops a false sense of belonging. In one scene, he sits comfortably on a sofa, eating an apple while watching TV. Wang’s use of slow panning gives the episode a dreamlike quality, which is enhanced when the camera moves from the boy to a fish tank, whose brownish water saturates the entire screen. Through this lens, the boy looks like he actually lives in this apartment and is just passing time on any ordinary day ( g. 2). However, a jump cut disrupts this surreal scenario, and the boy is no longer on the sofa behind the fish tank. As the camera pans left back to its original position, the room is in a shocking mess. On the floor, beside a bloodied knife, lies the corpse of an old man surrounded by his own owing blood. The view implies that the boy was caught off-guard by the homeowner and kills him in a panic. The homeowner’s unexpected return would have reminded him how little he belongs in the city, and the brutal homicide is his desperate response to being woken from a dream. As Cheng Qingsong (Cheng/Wang 2014) laments, his crime is “the harmful toll of history,” whose repercussions are no less striking for the younger generation than for the one that directly experienced it.
Figure 2: The boy spends time in another home he breaks into in Beijing.
Both Lao Deng’s and the boy’s existence affirms the enduring impact of history on personal, familial, and societal levels. However, both of them are seen as unwelcome “intruders”—the literal translation of the Chinese title of the film. Lao Deng’s sons detest her intrusion into their lives; and the mere fact of the boy coming to Beijing, to say nothing of his housebreaking, defies societal expectations. On a symbolic level, the real intrusion derives from the traces of the past that Lao Deng and the boy bear into the present. That they are rejected, in this sense, signifies contemporary China’s rejection of its past memories in the name of an unencumbered march to the future. Lao Deng and the boy seem to run out of sync with China’s historical course and its modernization. The film’s attention to their experience and the heavy historical and psychological baggage they carry thus serves as a counternarrative to the dominant culture of amnesia and a reminder of our inherited existence. Through each character’s journey, we see the close connection between past and present.
Wang Xiaoshuai continually underscores this connection by juxtaposing shots of old, broken-down buildings with modern ones. The very first image he presents in the film is of a run-down two-story building made of gray and red bricks ( g. 3). As it unfolds into view, two features loom large: its broken windows and a withering tree with sparse leaves that stands in front of it, both connoting a strong sense of history and desolation.6 The film soon follows this with an image of a more modern, urban residential building bathed in bright light. Crosscuts of this kind recur in the film, and the contrast between the two types of images is great enough to make it seem as though the shots of the Third Front residential building are flashbacks. But as the film’s conclusion reveals, the musty, derelict building stands as it is in the present day. Although this space holds a wealth of memories for Lao Deng, it is not merely a memory; rather, it is a physical relic that has survived into the present. The past and the present coexist.
Figure 3: The opening image of the film featuring a deserted building.
6 This location is actually where Shanghai Dreams was shot ten years ago (Xiaoshuai Wang 2015: 166–168).
Figures 4 and 5: The ghost of Lao Deng’s husband suddenly appears as she talks.
7 According to Wang Xiaoshuai (2014b), the boy’s silence is also a sign of his marginal position in society. Silent male protagonists have become a signature feature of Wang Xiaoshuai’s films.
One is reminded of Dongzi (So Close to Paradise), Erdi (Drifters), and Gui (Beijing Bicycle), whose silence goes hand in hand with their alienation from the urban surroundings.
As Wang Xiaoshuai (2015: 168) points out, “Red Amnesia is a film suffused with the past, but it is also entirely in the present. Such representation makes us more aware of the lasting impact of the past on the present.”
Ghostly Haunting
Unlike his previous films, which approach their subject matter realistically, Red Amnesia features ghostly images, thoroughly partaking in the tropes of fantasy and horror. Frustrated by the unbridgeable rift between her and her sons, Lao Deng pours out her bitterness in front of the portrait of her deceased husband—her only source of consolation. As Lao Deng mutters, her husband suddenly appears, sitting face to face with her to listen to her grievances. Similar scenes, in which the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband is brought uncannily into an otherwise realistic setting, appear several times in the film ( g. 4, 5). Notably, these ghostly images are typically presented from an objective perspective rather than from Lao Deng’s point of view. In so doing, the film seems to insist that the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband is not an illusion, but a real presence that demands our due attention. For this reason, the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband is represented not as a translucent shadow or a floating apparition, but as a fully embodied human.
Although the boy is not dead in the same sense as Lao Deng’s husband, he is also like a ghost: his silence, solitude, and status as an exile in the city make him a ghostly figure, wandering about in a place he does not belong.7 Interestingly, he is the only person, other than Lao Deng, who appears in the same frame with the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband. Originally thinking the boy to be a young migrant who has come to Beijing seeking work, Lao Deng is kind to him and even invites him home for dinner. During the meal, Lao Deng quite casually speaks to her deceased husband and introduces the boy to him. Her husband shows up at the table looking at the boy, who curiously turns his eyes toward him. Although it is unclear whether the boy actually sees Lao Deng’s husband, their gazes into each other’s direction creates a communicative space between them, suggesting the boy’s special affinity to the realm of ghosts and symbolically incorporating him into it. By contrast, throughout the film, Lao Deng never makes eye contact with her husband, and her husband never materializes at Jun’s home to reunite with his own sons at a family dinner.
How do we make sense of Wang Xiaoshuai’s invocation of the ghostly? When elaborating on the idea of hauntology, Derrida notes that remnants of the past are often embodied in ghosts and specters in response to the repression of the hegemonic order. He writes, “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (1994: 37). Whereas the power structure wishes to keep unwanted memories at bay, Derrida draws our attention to the spectrality of history—the fact that the ghosts of the past always return. “After the end of history,” he asserts, “the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.”8 The return of the repressed by way of haunting not only opens the gates of memory but also produces a different discourse that questions ideological hegemony. As Avery Gordon (2008: xvi) suggests, the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way to “interfer[e] precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us.”
Red Amnesia’s invocation of the ghostly functions in a similar way, both revealing and contesting the hegemonic political regime that wishes to repress the unwanted past. As mentioned earlier, the state has been restricting in-depth investigation of the Cultural Revolution era and pressing the Chinese people to be fully invested in a new phase of the nation’s development.9 However, the wholesale negation of the Cultural Revolution is not driven simply by a faith in linear progress and economic development; it is also driven by an attempt to disown the Party’s infamous legacy. These efforts to seal the Cultural Revolution in the past forestall any further discussion that could potentially undermine the Party’s legitimacy. In this sense, repressing memories that do not fit the official narrative springs from an effort to maintain hegemonic political control.10 The existence of the ghostly is a symptom of this repressive structure, but it is also a powerful medium through which to bring back repressed memories. Both Lao Deng’s husband and the boy bear a forgotten history, and the film, in opposition to the of cial discourse’s efforts to exorcize the haunting ghosts of the past, carves out a space for them to be physically present and demand recognition.
8 Derrida 1994: 10. The spirit that ani- mates Derrida’s discussion is the specter of Marx, whose theory and practice many would think is no longer relevant. Derrida, however, reminds us that Marx’s spirit never stops coming back. This con- tinual return ends up, as Jean-Philippe Mathy (2011: 38) puts it, “preventing the closure of economic liberalism as the end of history, which would make any sur- prise, any revolt, any event, impossible.”
9 Even in 2016, the ftieth anniversary of the launching of the movement was largely ignored and met with virtual silence from both state-run and popular media.
10 The recent revamp and eventual shut- down of the history magazine China An- nals (Yanhuang chunqiu) speaks volumes about the new crackdown on dissenting political opinions on Communist Party history. Sebastian Veg (2016) suggests the government was threatened by the opportunity the magazine offered to “engage more substantively with the most dif cult and contentious issues still raised by the Cultural Revolution.”
Figures 6 and 7: The boy follows Lao Deng like a ghostly shadow.
Whereas the ghost of Lao Deng’s husband mainly serves as a spiritual companion with whom to share memories, the boy, a ghost of a different order, appears to hold more complex significance for Lao Deng and for the film as a whole. Rather than consoling the widow, he confounds and haunts her, forcing her to confront a dark and painful secret. Although the film never gives a definite answer, it hints on multiple occasions that the boy is the mysterious phone-caller, reaching out to her in the mute, disturbing manner of a ghost knocking at a door. He also trails the old woman like a ghostly shadow, approaching her at the bus station, on the sidewalk, and in her apartment building ( g. 6, 7). Besieged by these calls and the boy’s stalking, Lao Deng is driven to distraction and vexation.
The convoluted relationship between Lao Deng and the boy is most dramatically conveyed through a masterfully designed crosscut sequence, in which dream and reality, conscious and unconscious, interweave and become almost indistinguishable. The sequence takes place after a long day, during which the boy accompanies Lao Deng to the outskirts of Beijing as she brings her electronic footbath to the manufacturer for repairs. After the pair return to her house, he sticks around. In this sequence, Wang repeatedly cuts to and from a dream of Lao Deng’s, but does so without fading in or out, depriving the viewer of traditional cinematic cues. In her dream, Lao Deng finds herself tottering along in a deserted suburban area, weak and vaguely conscious. She is followed by the boy, who carries a footbath in his arms. The dream, thus far, largely reenacts what has happened during the daytime. The camera then cuts back to Lao Deng’s bedroom in real life. Here, the boy is seen climbing up onto Lao Deng’s bed and tenderly laying his hand on her arm. Still asleep, Lao Deng warmly holds his hand in response, a faint smile flickering across her lips ( g. 8). Understandably, their shared status as outcasts brings these two lonely souls together and creates a sense of sympathetic intimacy. The boy feels that someone in the city finally cares for him; Lao Deng is delighted to have company.11 The scene then reverts back to the dream world, in which the boy stands behind Lao Deng, poised to strike her over the head with the footbath: the previous sense of warmth is suddenly replaced by chilling horror. In the next scene, which may be occurring in dream or in reality, Lao Deng encounters two incarnations of the boy: one lies beside her, gently holding her arm; and the other stands beside her bed, with a cleaver held above her ready to hack her to death. This long dream sequence ends with Lao Deng waking in a state of fear and confusion. Struggling out of bed to check the other room, she finds that the boy is already gone, although he has left old photos of her family torn in pieces on her desk ( g. 9). The boy’s act of shredding old photos hints at something pertaining to past memory hidden beneath the ambivalent relationship between him and Lao Deng. The way Lao Deng derives both comfort and unease from the boy’s presence calls to mind Freud’s notion of the uncanny, the German original of which, unheimlich, contains a meaning identical to its opposite, heimlich (homely, familiar). For Freud (2001: 930), “the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of and long familiar.” If the sense of the uncanny is actually triggered by the familiar, then the puzzle is why the familiar becomes uncanny and threatening. Freud refers to repression as that which causes the feeling of fright. The uncanny is, in his words, “something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only though the process of repression” (944). In other words, repression estranges what used to be familiar and customary. The dreadful effect of the uncanny thus comes from the fact that what ought to have remained hidden and concealed has come to light. The emergence of the suppressed “stranger” threatens the well-maintained psychological and symbolic order, constituting an unsettling confrontation with ourselves and our time.
11 In a sense, Lao Deng displaces her love toward her grandson, which her son and daughter-in-law have largely rejected, onto the boy. When she invites the boy for dinner, she xes meatballs, saying that they are her grandson’s favorite, but, unfortunately, her son and daughter- in-law do not like her making such meat dishes for him.
Figure 8: The boy lies beside Lao Deng, who warmly holds his hand.
Figure 9: The old photos of Lao Deng’s family are torn up and scattered.
The boy’s presence is so uncanny for Lao Deng precisely because he reminds her of a familiar past—one that both she and the nation as a whole have consigned to a deep recess of the mind. The details of that past eventually come out: she and the boy’s grandfather, Lao Zhao, used to work in the same Third Front factory in Guizhou and competed for the sole spot to Beijing following the Cultural Revolution. Thanks to her vigorous participation in all kinds of political activities, Lao Deng gained enough knowledge of Lao Zhao’s past to attack and defame him, thereby ensuring that she would get the privilege of an urban transfer. The loss of this singular opportunity so shocks Lao Zhao that he has a stroke, leaving him bedridden for the rest of his life and devastating his family. Not long after Lao Zhao’s death, the boy embarks on the journey to Beijing, beginning his stalking and, presumably, stealthy harassment of Lao Deng by telephone. By then, Lao Deng has learned about Lao Zhao’s death from
50 • Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia
Lao Huang, a former coworker of hers. The boy’s haunting presence at this juncture forces Lao Deng to confront this shameful personal secret and her own heart of darkness. With undefined apprehension, Lao Deng con des in her deceased husband, “Since Lao Huang called the other day, telling me that Lao Zhao passed way, things have become weird. I feel like there is always a shadow following me around.” The real shadow of the boy later becomes an internal one, causing Lao Deng to “see” him constantly looming in front of her, even though surveillance video reveals no one other than her. For Lao Deng, the harm she did to Lao Zhao and his family is a haunting shadow of memory both familiar and horrifying—the repressed in Freud’s sense—and the boy ensures that she can no longer repress it.
When evoking the past, the ghostly presence of the boy follows a different pattern than that of some notable characters in earlier films of the ghost genre. Fleur (Ruhua) in Rouge (Yanzhi kou, 1987), for example, attempts to rekindle her past romance, and thereby evokes Hong Kong’s nostalgic fantasization of and fascination with its past (Chow 2001). In another instance, the ghostlike figures in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu san, 2004) seek consolation from the communal experience of watching an old film in a seedy theater (Stuckey 2014). Both cases project an ideal image of the past, which has the power to redeem them. Red Amnesia, by contrast, displays a complex memory that is at once endearing and disturbing, challenging the nostalgic tendency to romanticize the past. Indeed, Lao Deng’s memory of the Third Front experience is an ambivalent one: her youth at that time was filled with romantic idealism, but also tainted by ruthlessness and betrayal. The recurring scenes that show her wandering hesitantly in front of the community recreation center dramatize her conflicted feelings about the past: she is drawn to the familiar revolutionary songs the community choir sings inside, but each time she approaches the doorway, she is instantly overcome by an urge to flee the resounding chorus, whose voices reverberate with too much revolutionary tumult. While she attempts to repress dark memories, the boy’s presence pushes
12 Revenge has been a central theme of the Chinese ghost genre. As Stephen Teo (1997) notes, most Chinese ghost movies depict the revenant seeking revenge and destruction of its victims.
13 The boy’s initial urge to seek vengeance reminds one of the famous horror film The Lonely Ghost in the
Dark Mansion (Heilou guhun, 1989), which also deals with ghostly haunting related to the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. In this film, the ghost is a teenage girl who returns to avenge
her own murder and the death, by persecution, of her parents. Similar to the effect of the boy’s haunting in Red Amnesia, the girl’s uncompromising pursuit of historical justice defies the official narration of the end of trauma. However, whereas the story of The Lonely Ghost culminates with the girl’s vengeance, Red Amnesia goes further to propel confession of sins. For a detailed analysis of The Lonely Ghost, see Li Zeng (2013). Zeng suggests that this film engages in a valuable feminist approach to the historical trauma of
the Cultural Revolution in that it rejects the familiar idea of a male hero as the narrator of history and the savior of the female victim and instead asserts full female agency in the course of revealing unhealed wounds and executing historical justice.
her to break the psychological barrier and confront what she has so far evaded. The ghostly haunting halts her psychic evasion of the past; she becomes aware that she can no longer repress memory of the family she damned through her own actions.
The provocative power of the boy also impels her to eventually confess her sins. Attempting to wring meaning from her recent bizarre experiences, especially after learning of Lao Zhao’s death, Lao Deng concludes that the boy must be the reincarnation of Lao Zhao’s ghost and must have visited her to exact his revenge.12 Bearing his grandfather’s unresolved grievance, the boy initially demonstrates an intention to hurt Lao Deng—it is most likely he who throws a brick through Lao Deng’s window one night. If what appears on-screen toward the end of Lao Deng’s dream sequence partially reflects “reality,” then he also most likely contemplates killing Lao Deng.13 However, what he seems to value more than revenge is an acknowledgment of guilt. In the film, Lao Deng eventually lets her suspicions slip as she answers yet another harassing call: “Lao Zhao, is that you? Have you come for my debt?… I know it is my fault. I feel so sorry for what I did to you and your family . . . I am sorry. It’s all my fault.” Notably, her apology ends the incessant telephone ringing that has haunted her house and her mind. As Judith Zeitlin (2007: 87) explains in a different context, “only when the grievances fueling the phantom’s manifestation are properly redressed can the emotional stasis of ghosthood be ended and the dead soul finally enter a cycle of rebirth or dissolve into silence and nothingness.” Lao Deng’s admission of her guilt assuages the grudge-bearing boy, ceases his ghostly haunting, and allows him to eventually leave Beijing with peace of mind.
In a broader sense, the ghostly haunting embodied by the boy bears witness to the unresolved history of the Third Front Movement, which caused the geographical and social dislocation of countless families. Displaced from their urban homes, these families find themselves adrift, generally unable either to go home or to identify with their new environment. Erya, the earliest Chinese dictionary, defines “ghost” as gui ye, or “that which returns.” With regard to the exact meaning of gui or “return home,” David Der-wei Wang notes that “contrary to common wisdom, ‘home’ refers not to an abode in the human world but to the site of eternal rest” (2004: 266). Referencing Zuozhuan, Wang further explains that “if ghosts have an abode to return to, they will not cause terror” (267). In other words, if a ghost has a home, it will not become a haunting spirit. In light of this understanding, the ghostly haunting in this film points not only to unsettled personal scores, but also to the Third Front generation’s ongoing dilemma of having no home to return to. In this spirit, Lao Huang complains about the rootlessness that state policies engender: “After I die, I do not want to be buried in my hometown Shanghai, nor Guizhou where I am exiled. I belong to neither. I will ask my son to simply throw my ashes into the sky.” Lao Huang spells out the quandary of many left-behind Third-Front workers, including the boy’s deceased grandfather. The return of Lao Zhao’s dead soul, if we accept Lao Deng’s understanding, signals the need to address old grievances. In the same way that his restless spirit haunts her, the memory of countless workers haunts a government that has been evading the responsibility to redress unresolved issues caused by the Third Front Movement.
Moral Interrogation
The question remains as to why Lao Deng’s apology comes so late, especially because she knows precisely what she did to harm Lao Zhao and his family. What allows her to deny her own guilt? I argue that the prevailing story of collective victimization—told in both official and cultural contexts—allows many to shirk deserved blame. A state resolution issued in 1981 marked the official appraisal of the Cultural Revolution; it repudiated the movement for having brought severe turmoil and catastrophe to the nation.14 When tracing the principal causes of the decade of calamity, it charged Mao Zedong with chief responsibility for initiating the revolution,15 and then directed the most vehement denouncement to the counterrevolutionary cliques of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, who enabled the movement’s worst excesses. Although the Resolution gestured toward a more in-depth investigation of social and historical causes underlying the catastrophic revolution, it only scratched the surface of the matter, aiming primarily to uphold the legitimacy of the Party. First, it emphasized the short history of the world socialist movement and used that to excuse the mistakes of the Party, which was not yet fully prepared for “the swift advent of the new-born socialist society and the socialist construction on a national scale.” Second, it blamed the pernicious legacy of China’s feudal autocracy, which contributed to the rise of the cult of Mao and the fall of inter-Party democracy. Valid as they are, these reflections were overly rhetorical and prematurely conclusive, leaving many important questions, including the confused moral landscape during and after the Cultural Revolution, largely unaddressed.
14 See “Guanyu jianguo yilai dang de ruogan lishi wenti de jueyi” 关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议 (Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China). URL: < http://cpc. people.com.cn/GB/64162/64168/64563/65 374/4526448.html>
15 The Resolution decried Mao’s personal mistakes without questioning the rectitude of the theory he created. That theory remains foundational to the ideology of the Party.
In the official appraisal, broad masses of the Chinese people were casually consigned to victimhood. Pitting the people against the forces of the radical left, the Resolution fashioned a simplistic dichotomy between the vulnerable masses and their misguided leaders, with the latter visiting grievous harm on the former. By lumping them into a conceptual category, the Party acquitted ordinary Chinese of any responsibility for the nationwide mass movement, even though its initiatives were not always directed from above. In fact, the official discourse’s lack of attention to individual responsibility accords with an inclination of its participants to deny their oftentimes inseparable victimhood and guilt. In his discussion of the role of the masses within the Cultural Revolution, Roderick MacFarquhar (2016) reminds us:
The essence of the Cultural Revolution is not just that Mao un- leashed it and caused the chaos. The essence is that the Chinese, without direct orders, were so cruel to each other. They killed each other, fought each other and tortured each other. Mao did not go down the streets and say: “You are licensed to torture. Go torture.” It just happened.
Indeed, many Chinese were not just victims, but also victimizers. However, the official narrative of the people’s victimization leaves the question of their responsibility in acts of violence barely addressed. By this logic, Lao Deng is as much a victim of the Third Front Movement as her comrades, even though she has ruthlessly victimized some of them. The sense of her shared victimhood assuages her guilt, so she can avoid moral reckoning for decades.
The representation of the memory of the Cultural Revolution in Chinese cinema has largely accepted this logic of collective victimization. Ordinary individuals are portrayed as powerless, innocent sufferers at the mercy of variously identified culprits of unthinkable horror. Xie Jin’s films, such as Legend of the Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi, 1980), The Herdsman (Muma ren, 1982), and Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, 1988), are exemplary early attempts to understand the causes of the Cultural Revolution. These films blame injustice on certain corrupt and vicious political villains, who twist the well-intended policies of the Party and thereby harm common people. These films present a bipolar model of morality, placing the majority of their subjects on the good end. Paul Pickowicz (2009: 321) problematizes such reductive and redemptive storytelling in his discussion of Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town:
The melodramatic mode provides easy and comforting answers to difficult and complex questions. It offers moral clarity at a time when nothing seems clear. But by personalizing evil, the film leaves the impression that everything would be ne if only the “evil” people were removed from power and replaced by people of “virtue.”
Unlike Xie Jin, whose films tend to smooth out a complex history, Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang in Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, 1994) endeavors to expose “the unhealed wounds, unsolved mysteries, and unresolved tensions in the individual’s relation to history” (Ban Wang 2004: 157). Blue Kite condemns the lethally whimsical and opaque authoritarian order, which continuously shocks and causes suffering. Once again, however, common people and families are depicted as victims of politically engineered disasters. Zhang Yimou’s recent film Coming Home (Guilai, 2014) offers yet another case of employing the rhetoric of victimization. Although Coming Home resembles Red Amnesia in drawing attention to the issue of amnesia about the Maoist era and the lingering effect of the traumatic past, it nevertheless dilutes the moral responsibility of individuals who inflict pain on others by exploiting such notions as forgiveness and reconciliation. In the film, a former official sexually harasses the female protagonist while her husband serves time in a labor camp. When her husband returns home, he shows the offender surprising mercy after learning that he has also been persecuted. It is as though holding him to greater account for his crimes is no longer necessary and is even cruel. The evil of history and politics thus glosses over that of individuals and frees them from blame.16
16 The film also employs touching romance to mitigate the pain and suffering caused by the traumatic past. Yet, notably, the failure to cure the female protagonist’s psychogenic amnesia precisely testifies to the ineffectiveness of such convenient sentimentalism in dealing with trauma.
This kind of mentality of collective victimization and the resultant exoneration of personal responsibility are vehemently decried by Hannah Arendt. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt maintains that moral choice is still possible even in the midst of totalitarianism, terror, or chaos, and that a person must be held responsible for the consequences of his or her choices. However, in the wake of the Holocaust, there was a tendency to speak in generalities rather than to get into details and to target individuals. Arendt (2006: 296) observes: “What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people—the larger the better—in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer be named.” At the time, popular constructs such as the collective guilt of the German people and the collective innocence of European Jews attested to the disinclination against assigning personal blame. Going against the grain of this trend, she incisively points out that “there is no such thing as collective guilt or, for that matter, collective innocence, and that if there were, no one person could ever be guilty or innocent” (298). At stake in Arendt’s thinking are two basic principles: individuals are thinking, moral beings; and they should be held responsible for what they have done.
What Wang Xiaoshuai performs in Red Amnesia is precisely this kind of moral scrutiny, asking just how to conduct oneself in the midst of historical violence.17 The film’s unremitting ring of the telephone and invocation of ghosts are used to awaken and wrest the character from historical unconsciousness and oblivion, the “red amnesia.” Only when one is restored to awareness of moral responsibility can true reflection become possible. In the film, Lao Deng is reminded anew of the sin whose memory she once repressed. Propelled by a seething guilt, she embarks on the journey back to Guizhou to atone. Despite her old friends’ dissuasion— “It has passed, let it go”—she insists on visiting Lao Zhao’s family. Mustering up all her courage to knock on their door, Lao Deng is greeted by Xufang, the widow of Lao Zhao, who is ironically unable at first sight to recognize “the family enemy.” Lao Deng’s long-overdue apology is finally met with an adamant refusal and a slap on her face—a fate many contrite people have known. As thankless as it can be, taking responsibility for one’s actions and seeking forgiveness are essential steps for achieving moral justice. Lao Deng’s introspection and atonement give a glimpse of hope for broader and more in-depth reflection on the responsibility of ordinary individuals in the Cultural Revolution.
The film, however, adds a further twist to this belated effort to reconcile with the past. At Lao Zhao’s place, Lao Deng unexpectedly catches sight of the boy she encountered in Beijing who has come to ask his grandma what is going on. At that instant, all becomes clear: the boy who tailed her in Beijing is Lao Zhao’s grandson, who attempted to avenge his grandfather; this boy is also the criminal responsible for the break-ins and the murder mentioned by the community police. Out of guilt and pity, Lao Deng decides not to report the case. However, when she comes back the second day to resume her apology, she sees a few police officers questioning people about the boy. The scene is followed by a long tracking shot of Lao Deng rushing to Lao Zhao’s place to inform them of the news, gasping for breath but continuing to run. This protracted scene conveys the asymmetry between the urgency to rescue young people from the damaging historical inheritance and the long journey it takes to reach this goal, especially when the process has already been so long delayed. Upon arrival, Lao Deng asks the boy to run quickly, but the policemen soon corner him in a deserted unit on the top floor of an apartment complex. Getting up on the windowsill, the boy threatens to jump off if the policemen step any closer. To everyone’s shock, the windowsill that he holds breaks off, taking him with it. The film then cuts to a close-up of the boy staring at us blankly and ghostly that appears in an earlier scene, and then to a medium shot of Lao Deng collapsing on the ground, overwhelmed and petrified by what has just happened to the boy. A chain reaction has taken place. Lao Deng’s denunciation of Lao Zhao leads to his stroke, which devastates his family, which prompts the boy’s various acts of revenge; his fatal fall is the final link in the causal chain. Although Lao Deng has come to atone for the sin she committed, she does it so late that the damage has gone beyond easy repair. Worse yet, her attempt to help the boy elude capture aggravates the harm she has already done. History falls into an absurd and vicious spiral. The last shot of the film freezes on the frame of the empty window, through which one can see rows of abandoned factory buildings—the relics of a forgotten past ( g. 10). This last shot echoes the opening scene of Shanghai Dreams, which also features a freeze frame of a half-open window. But whereas Shanghai Dreams, zooming in through the window, unfolds a youthful, nostalgic, and lived memory of the Third Front experience,18 Red Amnesia fixates on a view that is decidedly more bleak and ruinous. The boy’s fall opens a new wound on the ruins of the past. The ending gives viewers a heavy parting blow and leaves us to wonder how—or if—the spiral will ever be broken.
17 Critics tend to overlook the step forward Wang Xiaoshuai has taken in Red Amnesia. Joy Weissberg (2014), for example, continues to identify only the film’s general critique of the Cultural Revolution by saying, “The film’s implicit criticism lies not with Mrs. Deng but with the perpetrators of the Cultural Revolu- tion, whose twisted mass experiment ended in so much death and long-lasting misery.” In fact, even Lao Zhao is not portrayed merely as an innocent victim in the film, although he is victimized in his relationship to Lao Deng. As Jun discloses in a conversation with Bing, Lao Zhao, like their mother, Lao Deng, was also an active participant in all kinds of political movements during the Cultural Revolu- tion and persecuted others.
18 This nostalgic sentiment in Shanghai Dreams is akin to what Jason McGrath calls “re ective nostalgia.” McGrath writes, “[re ective nostalgia] arises from ambivalent personal and cultural memo- ries and embraces ambiguity, distance, irony, and fragmentation as inseparable aspects of its object of meditation” (2007, 100). Instead of conjuring up a complacent and reassuring past, Wang Xiaoshuai’s remembrance of the Third Front experience in Shanghai Dreams is fraught with ambivalence, tensions, and traumas.
Figure 10: The freeze frame of the empty window from which the boy falls.
Conclusion
Through the metaphor of ghostly haunting, Red Amnesia reminds us of the urgent need to reflect on the Cultural Revolution, especially as contemporary China continues its frantic sprint to become an economic superpower. Going against the amnesiac, forward-looking, unreflective social trend in contemporary China, this film shows the degree to which the main characters carry on the legacies of the Third Front Movement, which is by no means an irrelevant episode of the past, but a haunting fact in the present. Red Amnesia thus makes a remarkable historical intervention in today’s China insomuch as it not only revisits a historical moment typically ignored but also marks the links forged between past and present and the ways in which the present is actively constituted in its connections to the past.
The culture of forgetting that obscured these connections did not arise just from too fervent a belief in progress. It also resulted from the
60 • Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia
hegemonic control of the Party, which, to consolidate its power, allows only a certain past to be remembered while suppressing other memories that do not t. Using ghosts, who embody the eruption of the past in the present moment, Red Amnesia metaphorically represents the inevitable failure of such attempts to impose forgetting. To families who survived the revolution, it brings back unwanted memories and a truly uncomfortable sense of kinship.
In addition, unlike most previous films about the Cultural Revolution, which emphasize the victimization of Chinese people, Red Amnesia rejects generalities and instead insists on specificity. Rather than retelling familiar stories, it seeks to assign individual responsibility for historical violence. The presence of the ghosts, returned from the past to haunt the present moment, shows how the traumas of history are not simply the result of the victimization of the people at the hands of an all-encompassing state apparatus; instead, individuals, even as they are also victims, are culpable for the violence inflicted on others during this historical moment. Although it seems unlikely, the tale of ghostly haunting should propel both the government and individuals to consider how they perpetuate old mistakes and inflict new wounds.
Glossary
beizhan beihuang 备战备荒
Biandan guniang 扁担姑娘
Bing 兵
Bu san 不散
Chuangru zhe 闯入者
Deng Meijuan 邓美娟
Erdi 二弟
Erya 尔雅
Furong zhen 芙蓉镇
gui 鬼
gui 归
Guilai 归来
Guiyang 贵阳
Guizhou 贵州
haoren haoma shang sanxian 好人好马上三线
Helou guhun 黑楼孤魂
Jiang Qing 江青
jianwang zheng 健忘症
Jun 军
kongchao laoren 空巢老人
Lan fengzheng 蓝风筝
Lao Deng 老邓
Lao Huang 老黄
Lao Zhao 老赵
Lin Biao 林彪
Muma ren 牧马人
Qinghong 青红
Ruhua 如花
sanxian jianshe 三线建设
sanxian sanbuqu 三线三部曲
Shiqisui de danche 十七岁的单车
Tian Zhuangzhuang 田壮壮
Tianyunshan chuanqi 天云山传奇
Wo shiyi 我11
Xie Jin 谢晋
Xufang 旭芳
Yanhuang chunqiu 炎黄春秋
Yanzhi kou 胭脂扣
Zhang Yimou 张艺谋
Zuozhuan 左传
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