I'm John Batchew with Tanya Bronigan.

Her new book is Red Memory, the After Lives of China's Cultural Revolution.

It is August 1966.

We're at the Beijing Normal University's Attached Girls' School.

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

There is a vice-principle, a teacher, Bien. 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, Wong 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 Pung Chien, 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 bloodstained clothes she'd been

wearing, keeping the hideous curricatures 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.

...