The Book of Secrets: A Personal History of Betrayal in Red China by Xinran is a thought-provoking historical account as well as a gripping personal story. As a non-fiction book mainly consisting of the protagonists’ letters to his daughter and wife (most of them never sent) spanning decades, it drops the readers right into China’s tumultuous 20th century.
Snow, the daughter of the protagonist, who gave these letters to Xinran, grew up under the care of Red Guards while her parents were imprisoned in labour camps. Because of the clandestine nature of her parents’ work (they were both Communist party members involved in highly-classified national projects) and their own complicated emotional entanglements, they never told her about their lives, shutting her out from family history. Only after her father had passed away did Snow learn about everything from his letters and recordings hidden within heavy tomes of foreign dictionaries.
The first part of the book reads like a normal memoir. The father, Jie, with deep nostalgia, narrated to Snow his upbringing in a prosperous business-owning family in Shanghai. The second part consists of Jie’s letters to his wife, Moon, written since they met in the Communist Military Academy. In the Academy, personal letters must be inspected, so some of the letters were meant for Moon to read in person. Most letters, however, especially as their relationship became increasingly wrought with secrets, distrust, mutual spying and open resentment, were never shown to Moon. When Snow told her mother about the letters, Moon refused to read them, said they had “nothing to do with me.” (Xiran, 21).
I will not share in details the events documented in this book. Contrary to my conviction that good books cannot be spoiled, this one actually can. It is not only non-fiction - it is the raw, flesh and blood primary sources. You must dive into the letters uninformed. Only then can you appreciate the extremes of human nature and what it was like for an individual to be tossed and battered by historical forces.
Instead, I want to address the concept of “collective amnesia” Xinran mentioned in the prologue. She believes it was an amnesia created by the country’s politicians. Similarly, Yan Lianke, a famous Chinese writer, claims that
Memory and what is remembered, together with natural and forced amnesia, all fall under the category of national memory and national amnesia, thereby becoming a kind of revolutionary choice and method that can be systematically implemented.
It is indeed shocking and lamentable how much of modern Chinese history is undocumented, unknown, undiscussed. But what do we mean exactly when we talk about “collective amnesia”? Is it a collective determination to forget? A genuine lack of primary sources? Collective ignorance because of the state’s erasure of history?
Only when we understand the complicated mechanisms of “collective amnesia” can we strive for a cure, and “reclaim the history of my country and the people who have had to suffer to survive it” (Xinran, 12).
The state control of “collective remembering”
When people use the term “collective amnesia”, they usually refer to the younger Chinese generations who had no knowledge of certain events. This group is represented in The Book of Secrets by the daughter, Snow, although she knew much more compared to those born after the 80s. “Amnesia” in this case is more metaphorical than realistic, assuming the agent of memory to be the Chinese collectivity across generations, while the younger individual don’t actually “forget” what they have never experienced or known.
The reason for this amnesia is the state control of “collective remembering”. While collective memory is a body of knowledge, collective remembering is a space of contestation where different versions of the past collide and compete for dominance (Wertsch and Roediger III, 2008). In the modern era, the state have become increasingly present in people’s daily life, with local culture increasingly eclipsed by a standard, national culture. In the past, each local community would have their own ‘‘cultural tool kit’’ (Bruner, 1990) to form their own collective memory. Now the state controls most of the tools, from the very language we use, to textbooks, museums, memorials and national holidays. In the Chinese context, it goes without saying that events like the Tiananmen Square Incident is not mentioned in textbooks. Nor is it allowed to be openly discussed and debated.
The Book of Secrets reveals the specific aspects of state information control from an insider’s perspective. During the Korean War, photos from the battlefields were inaccessible to trainees at the Miliary Academy, and only circulated amongst a limited number of intelligence officers. As Jie wrote to Moon, “we get to see countless items of intelligence that the state doesn't allow the average person to see; material kept in the state archives, much of which contradicts the state’s own press reports and propaganda.” (Xiran, p.151) In Jie’s later years, he, along with some other senior members of the Qinghua clique, signed a petition for the opening of state archives. For that they were “escorted” by uniformed officers from their homes and detained (Xiran, p.304).
Collective Aphasia, the inability to tell personal stories
What I find more fascinating about this book, however, is the “aphasia” of the silent protagonist, Moon. She lived within Jie’s letters. We never get to hear her side of the story. That’s not because the author chose to ignore her perspective, but because she never told her daughter anything, even after Jie had died.
Sometimes the book read like horror to me, as Moon had been completely voiceless throughout all the traumatic events she had experienced. When half forced into a party-endorsed marriage with Jie, she couldn’t raise any objection or even express grievances. When Jie decided to send their daughter, only thirty days old, to his parents in Shanghai, he took it for granted that Moon would agree with his decision. It seems like Moon, although upset, didn’t argue with Jie at the time. The only time she spoke out was during the Cultural Revolution, when she was interrogated by the Red Guards. She reported her own parents as bourgeoisie and confessed intense feelings unimaginable to Jie. Yet after that outburst under extreme circumstances, Moon became reticent again. Towards the end of her life, she remained to her daughter “a woman rarely seen or heard, even in her own home” (Xinran, p.14).
Jie had always felt a strong urge to tell his story. The only thing that stopped him was party policy, and he got around that by leaving a “book of secrets” to his daughter in his posterity. In contrast, Moon’s silence was a fundamental one. Yet her case was unlike Gayatri Spivak’s “the subaltern cannot speak”, where the subaltern’s voice was suppressed by the epistemic violence of imperialism. In her time, Moon was by all means a member of the elite. She was born in a wealthy family and attended a missionary school in Nanjing. Later, she mastered several foreign languages, danced with the party leaders, and became the leading engineer in China’s development of the modular machine tool. Although, as a woman, she was bound to experience gender inequalities, she was for the most part in as good a position as Jie to speak.
Yet she chose not to. She said she might leave her letters to her daughter Snow, but was very hesitant about it. Moon’s symptoms resemble that of PTSD, but there was something else to it. Based on her conversation with her daughter, it seems like she saw little value in constructing her own narrative, on top of the possible fear of reliving traumatic experiences.
This is a sentiment I noticed when I talked to my own grandparents. When I asked them with ardent interest what their youth was like, they often brushed it aside with “What’s there to talk about?” What appears to me an exciting first-hand historical account is to them a life so different from their grandchildren’s that they didn’t even know how to describe it in modern language. My grandparents’ lives weren’t laden with political intrigues and betrayals, but what they might share with Moon was the difficulties in fitting their stories into the contemporary society. During the last century, China had gone through too many political and social upheavals accompanied by 180-degree turns in ideological directions. It’s not surprising that people caught up in this disorientating era found it hard to define what was right, what was wrong, and what’s beneficial for future generations to learn.
Jie has found a purpose for his narrative - his regrets about what he did to Moon, and, on a higher level, the acknowledgement of the party’s wrongs. It was a narrative of conflicts and pain, but Jie had found a meaning in his story. Yet so many of his contemporaries, educated or uneducated, let their past lives slowly decay in the dump of history. I’d like to call this “collective aphasia”, which results in a genuine lack of historical sources.
Conclusion
While the discourse around China’s collective amnesia centres on the state’s control of collective remembering, I venture to suggest that the relatively unnoticed collective aphasia is causing more “memory loss”. As the conventional collective amnesia discourse focuses on the binary of state propaganda vs opposition voices, a lot of complicated human stories get lost in between, like Moon’s story. It is imperative to find cures to the collective aphasia while fighting for the freedom of speech. If most are left incapable of speaking, the freed space will be nothing but an unpopulated square.
Reference:
Wertsch, James V. and Roediger III, Henry L. (2008) 'Collective memory: Conceptual foundations and theoretical approaches', Memory, 16:3, 318-326
Xinran (2024) The Book of Secrets: A Personal History of Betrayal in Red China
It's really interesting that you picked up on the two opposing attitudes Jie and Moon take on telling their personal stories.
For me, I think there are two main reasons to the reluctance of sharing personal stories. The first one is as stated in the other comment and I paraphrase here: we have taken all the details of our lives for granted and have been so deeply ingrained in that cultural environment that we couldn't figure out what there is to share that might be new and valuable to others; whilst the other one might be a total lack of feeling self-important. Jie has found the reason and siginificance to his personal narrative, he thinks that there's meaning to it and he has the responsibility to tell, but most others in that era have been completely robbed of their individuality, they erase their personhood and deny the importance of their own stories. And that, I feel like might be somehow related to the overall sino-cultural scene, where most people lack a firm personality, especailly the women, as stereotypical as this may sound....
This was a great read. These lines really stuck with me:
"When I asked them with ardent interest what their youth was like, they often brushed it aside with “What’s there to talk about?” What appears to me an exciting first-hand historical account is to them a life so different from their grandchildren’s that they didn’t even know how to describe it in modern language."
I did that myself when I left Saudi Arabia, when everyone asked me what it was like to live there, and I genuinely didn't have a starting point to tell the stories, or know what would be valuable to share. When I wrote Driving by Starlight, a lot of the challenge was actually forcing myself to remember little details that felt completely mundane to me (e.g. that restaurants had signs forbidding women and dogs entry) but would be important to help others get a view into that world.