In China, memory deletion is turning the younger generation into selective-memory automatons. The act of deleting memories, however, is about actively winnowing out people’s memories of the present and the past. Forgetting can result from the passage of time. The amnesia I’m talking about is the act of deleting memories rather than merely a natural process of forgetting. Have today’s 20- and 30-year-olds become the amnesic generation? Who has made them forget? By what means were they made to forget? Are we members of the older generation who still remember the past responsible for the younger generation’s amnesia? From time to time, guilt - along with painful memories of the past and thoughts about losing the memories - torment me and refuse to leave me alone. Ever since, thoughts about the loss of memory in China on a national scale, a phenomenon that people have long been discussing but only in private, remain lodged in my heart like thorns. Her students responded with stunned silence, as if she, a teacher in Hong Kong, was brazenly fabricating history to attack their mother country.Īfter we exchanged these stories, Professor Loden and I sat sullenly in a quiet Vietnamese café, speechless. She had asked her students from China if they had heard about the death by starvation of 30 to 40 million people during the so-called “three years of natural disasters” in the early 1960s. That reminded me of something another teacher told me. All the students from China looked around at one another, mute and puzzled. He told me that while briefly teaching at Hong Kong’s City University he asked the 40 students from China in his class what they knew about the June 4 Incident, the pro-democracy movement that ended in bloodshed in 1989, and if they were familiar with the names Liu Binyan and Fang Lizhi, two prominent democracy advocates of that era.
IN March 2012 I met Torbjorn Loden, the Swedish professor of Chinese language and culture, in Hong Kong.
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