'Red Memory' aims to profile people shaped by China's Cultural Revolution
Tania Branigan, once China correspondent for the Guardian, makes the strongest English-language effort yet to reconstruct what it was like to live through, and then with, this part of Chinese history.
China should be a reporter's dream: more than one billion people, a rich history, and extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. And yet China-reporting these days resists the profile. Rarely do journalists based there get enough material to write up convincingly full-bodied portraits.
There are obvious obstacles to reporting that humanizes, such as the constant surveillance and the threat of state retaliation taken against foreign and Chinese reporters. The state often intimidates sources for speaking to journalists as well, and a nervous interviewee will not divulge enough detail to create an intimate rendering of a person's life.
But I found people with weighty stories were still willing to
