Memory has been an increasingly familiar trope in academic discussions on modern Chinese history, literature and culture. With Rubie S. Watson, Xiaobing Tang, Yomi Braester, Ban Wang, Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, memory and its representation in literary and visual media has been invoked time and again as a powerful tool to argue against a simplistic, teleological sense of a ‘forward-going, change-driven’ process that prevails as the master narrative of modern history and time. In recent Chinese history, this master narrative specifically goes hand in hand with an official historiography that assigns a predominant role to socialist revolution and development, conducted on a mass scale and sweeping individual and specific experiences under the cloak of Party-guided national movements. History in modern and particularly socialist China becomes a hegemonic concept that amasses records of past events and occurrences in accordance with official considerations. Toward the last quarter of the twentieth century, this consistent line of envisioning socialist development was broken at the end of the Cultural Revolution, but immediately mended by an adaptable and smart logic with Chinese characteristics: under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, the country shifted to a market economy, while still retaining the name and political practices of socialism. After this point, with a rapidly built economic physique, China became an important player in the global economy. This latest part of official mainstream historiography seems to find itself in line with an overall teleological historiography of modernity that sees the twentieth century driving along a single-minded ‘course of human civilization through time’ as if guided toward progress by an immanent force. To effectively question this discursive hegemony and pry it open to other perspectives and forms of the past that were once silenced, scholars invest in various projects of excavations and reinterpretations through which writings of ‘discords’ ‘against the grain’ of history are identified, recovered and mobilised for an alternative, if not readily consistent but certainly insistent, line of experiences and testimonials.

In this search for distinctive evidences and fresh methodologies in order to achieve a more accurate understanding of past and present, memory as an epistemological trope assumes a particular significance, because of its associa-tion with those realms of knowledge and opinion that lie outside of, if not in direct opposition to, official historiography.