When “the state” is the absence of a sour red date

Abstract

Early in Gail Hershatter’s The gender of memory: Rural women and China’s collective past (2011) something becomes clear about the nature of memory. Hershatter’s interlocutors, women from rural Shaanxi Province, had lived through the end of the old Republic, through land reform, collectivization, and famine, through the Great Leap Forward and theCulturalRevolution.Alongside their fathers, husbands, and brothers, they had sat through the same reeducation meetings where they were taught to “speak bitterness.” But, while men’s accounts followed the patterning of orthodox history, frequently women’s accountsdidnot.And,whenwomendidrecall apivotal event, the memory was often made material. Hershatter notes that, while “all the women we interviewed understood the term ‘Great Leap Forward,’ . . . none of them used it in describing theirownhistories.Theydidnot see theGreatLeap as a unified national phenomenon; their version of local campaign time disaggregated it into constituent elements that had meaning for them. They talked about ‘the time whenwesmelted steel’or ‘the timewhenweate in collective dininghalls’”(2011:26).“Everymemory,”Hershatternotes, “is also a creation—not necessarily awhole-cloth invention (although there are those), but a product of the confluence of past events and present circumstances” (2011: 22). Hershatter’s careful rendering of the nature of memory, and her articulation of the fact that orthodox chro-