This is the author Tanya Branigan and journalist.

Her new book is Red Memory, The After Lives of China's Cultural Revolution. This is the Red Guard remembers and Tanya in

examining all the anecdotes takes on the question of why are they remembering this so sentimentally?

Why are these now senior members of the Chinese society talking of these moments of horror and

fear throughout the land when people were reduced or murdered.

And Tanya brings forth a very fresh understanding of how teenagers become sentimental about their teen years.

That might have been very difficult for their parents, for themselves.

In an event, here's Tanya explaining why it is that so many of the Red Guard now having survived their lives,

their lives of violence and with the memories of those hard times can speak of them in a in a fashion that

autobiographical at the same time heroic sometimes for them is Tanya.

So I think people do have very strong memories of their

adolescence. We know that psychologists talk about what they call a memory bump between about

the age of 15 and 25 roughly and these are clearly such

intense experiences as well that it's not surprising perhaps they would recall

them and even find sort of pleasure where they could. And nostalgia as well is always

about what we think of the world today, isn't it? So people were looking at a world in China that they saw as being much more focused on money,

thinking much less about other moral values perhaps, where there was growing inequality,

there was grotesque corruption in many cases and people were really

harking back to what in a sense they saw as a more innocent time as as strange as that sounds

and that was obviously easier for people who had had a less painful experience of the

Cultural Revolution, but in some cases even people who had quite bitter experiences still wanted to meet up and talk about it and perhaps gain some sense of meaning a feeling that it wasn't all just wasted that there was some purpose to their experiences and it's

not something that's unique to China of course you think about a show like the Waltons it's

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