I'm John Datsu, a Tanya Bronigan. Her new book is Red Memory, the afterlife of China's

culture revolution. It is August 1966. We're at the Beijing Normal University's attached

girl school. This is a girl school, young girls, for the elite of the party, the elite

of Beijing. There is a vice principal, a teacher, Bian. She is murdered over the next several

days. We're introduced to her not in person, but through the memory of her husband, Wang

Jing Yao. Tanya, Wang has assembled a memory of those events, and he was taking photographs

at the time, and he keeps them all these years later. What is it that he hopes someday

those photographs and those memories will achieve? Very much like Pan Qian, he really felt

that the events of the cultural revolution, and particularly the victims of the cultural

revolution, had to be remembered, had to be commemorated, had to be mourned. Because

of course, when his wife first died, even to mourn her, would have been a dangerous

act, and so although he created a sort of shrine to her in their home for him and the

children to remember her by, it was one that they had to hide for many years. So that

very act of love, of loyalty, of mourning in itself was dangerous at that time, but he

really believed, he took the risk of keeping, for example, the clothes that she had been

wearing, of taking pictures of her murdered body to show the brutality that had been

meted out to her by school pupils, her own pupils, keeping the bloodstreams close,

she'd been wearing, keeping the hideous caricatures and the angry, what were known as big character

posters, posters denouncing her that had been put up around their home. He kept all of

this secretly because he wanted people to know what had happened. And I think like

many people, he felt not only that it was about doing his wife's justice, about doing

victims' justice, but about remembering that time so that it didn't happen again.

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