Discovering the History Around Us

He said he was currently responsible for two projects — one, the National History Writing Contest for Middle School Students; the other, a series of public lectures for history teachers. Before coming, he had asked the organizers whether there would be any middle school students present today. “There are,” they told him, “but very few.” Fewer still, he added, were history teachers.

That led him to his central question: since both projects were meant for students and teachers, would today’s audience find them irrelevant? Maybe many did. So he decided to do what he often did when training students — ask a few simple questions. “If you can still answer them easily,” he said, “then I’m wrong.”

He always began the same way: “Raise your hand,” he would tell them, “if you know your great-grandfather’s name.” Very few hands ever went up. The exception, he said, was usually students from Guangdong, where family lineage still ran strong. “But overall,” he said, “less than ten percent.”

Then he’d move on: “Alright, maybe great-grandfathers are too far back. What about your grandparents or your parents?” The room would come alive again — everyone could name them, laughing as they spoke.

And then he would ask the question that always quieted them:

“Do you know what historical events your parents or grandparents lived through? Do you know what difficult choices they made? Do you know what sacrifices they made for your family or for themselves?”

The room always fell silent.

He turned to the audience in front of him now. “Think carefully,” he said. “The people who live under the same roof as us — those who eat at the same table, watch TV beside us — are they really people we know? Or are they our ‘most familiar strangers’?”

On the screen behind him appeared a photo of a little girl and her grandmother. The girl’s name was Zuo Xinlan, a student from Dongguan Songshan Lake High School. “This child,” he said, “helped our contest tremendously.”

When they had first launched the competition in 2011, everything was uncertain. “There was no model to follow,” he said. “We had to make the path as we walked.” During the first three months after the announcement, hundreds of submissions poured in — none of them what the team had hoped for. “They were all copied from Baidu Baike,” he said wryly. “Every story was about hometown towers, temples, and old monuments — dates and legends, nothing personal.”

They realized they had to teach students and teachers how to find history nearby — how to recognize what was worth writing and how to write it. But before training others, he needed an example — something authentic, something to show what was possible. “I couldn’t use my own reporting,” he said. “I needed to know what a student could truly do.”

Then one day, a local teaching supervisor sent him a student essay — Zuo Xinlan’s. “I read it,” he said, “and I was stunned.” The girl had written about her great-grandfather — a Nationalist officer who lived through the chaos from 1938 to 1950. “She told his wandering life with a sense of movement and image, not moralizing, not lecturing.” It was a story alive with detail and compassion.

That single piece became the foundation of the first successful training session. “We analyzed its structure,” he said, “how it built scenes, how it turned memory into narrative.” It later inspired dozens of other excellent essays. “In many ways,” he added, “that one work shaped the whole first year of the contest.”

He paused on the image of the grandmother in the film clip. She had once said something that stayed with him — a belief shared by many parents: that family history is trivial, full of “chicken-feather matters,” unworthy of being told, that only national heroes or major events deserve to be remembered. “But her granddaughter wrote it anyway,” he said softly, “and the story moved them both.”

They even made a short documentary about it, titled The Most Familiar Stranger. The grandmother hoped one day the film could be shown in Taiwan — because her own brother had lived there since the war, and they hadn’t seen each other for more than fifty years.

Another slide appeared — a young man, a student from Shandong Normal University named Lei Zongxing. His entry, too, had begun with a casual remark from his grandmother: “Our family was once rich — we had cars, drivers, servants, a Western-style house.” Curious, he started digging.

He learned that his great-great-grandfather’s name was Gao (or Guo) Baolin. But when he began asking older relatives, his great-great-uncle — the only surviving son of that ancestor — angrily forbade him to continue. “Just focus on your studies,” the old man said. “Don’t stir up the past.”

Through persistence, Lei uncovered why. His ancestor had been assassinated by Communist guerrillas in the 1940s, accused of being a collaborator. The accusation, he discovered, had ruined the family for sixty years. His ancestor’s sons were humiliated, imprisoned, forced to labor on the streets. The stigma never left them.

But as Lei kept researching, the truth shifted. His ancestor turned out to have been a respected agronomist — one of the founders of Shandong Agricultural University — and his death had been based on false suspicion. “Even the local Political Consultative Conference had long since cleared his name,” he said. “The family just didn’t know.” When Lei brought them the official documents, decades of silence and shame broke at once. “A family that had fallen apart,” he said, “came together again.”

He clicked to the next story — a girl named Yao Huiyi from Qingcheng High School in Qingyuan, Guangdong. He remembered her vividly. “When I first met her,” he said, “she begged me for an autograph.” Weeks later, after he’d already traveled north to Shandong, she suddenly sent him a message on QQ.

“Li laoshi,” she wrote, “I need to tell you something important.”

He asked what it was.

She wrote: “You were right.”

He laughed and asked, “About what? I say too many things.”

She said: “You said that they — the people in our family — are our ‘most familiar strangers.’”

She had gone home to interview her great-grandmother, a woman nearly ninety. Normally, they barely spoke. But for the contest, she sat down with her and asked questions. “She told me things I’d never imagined,” the girl wrote. “When she was born, they almost threw her away because she was a girl. She’s lived through more pain than I can count.”

He asked her later what had changed between them. “Not much,” she said. “Except that now, when I go home every two weeks, I stay with her. I sit next to her, even if we don’t talk.” He smiled when recalling it. “That,” he said, “is change.”

Each student, he explained, discovered something different — some found truth, some found empathy, some found belonging. And then came the parents.

He read from a letter sent by a teacher in Anqing No. 1 High School, whose child had also joined the contest. The girl had written about her great-grandfather, a local scholar and official — once a section chief under Zhang Naiqi, the finance minister of Republican-era Anhui. As she dug deeper, she uncovered forgotten family documents, linking their story to regional history.

The grandmother photocopied the recovered materials ten times — one for each branch of the family. “A family once scattered,” he said, “was re-woven by a child’s curiosity.” The mother, a teacher herself, wrote back to him: “I have a bold plan. I want my daughter to spend every vacation writing down our entire family’s history, piece by piece.”

He smiled and said that plan made him deeply happy.

Then came another family — a student named Xu Yiding from Shandong Normal University. Her mother, a television director in Jinan, had accompanied her back to their ancestral home for the project. “In the process,” he said, “it was the mother who gained more.” She realized that tracing history wasn’t just her child’s task — it was hers, too.

She asked if she could enter the contest herself. “Of course,” he said. “Everyone can join — you just won’t get a prize.”

The next year, she returned again, asking to volunteer for the program. “She told me,” he said, “‘As long as you’re doing anything in Jinan, I’ll help however I can.’”Then he spoke about the teachers — the ones, he said, who quietly carried the contest on their shoulders. “I’ve traveled through twenty provinces,” he said, “visited nearly a hundred schools. The one mistake I made was not planning any benefit for teachers. Because this is a civilian project, the certificates aren’t officially recognized, so they don’t receive any professional advantage. And yet,” he said, “so many of them stayed committed, for no reward but conviction.”

He told the story of one such teacher — Chen Suhong from Jinhua No. 4 High School in Zhejiang. During the previous summer’s teacher workshop, she had chosen to come to Beijing instead of joining her colleagues on a school-funded trip to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. “Everyone told her she was crazy,” he said. “Her husband, her coworkers — all said, ‘Why waste your vacation on this?’”

But she came. In Beijing, she met volunteers, historians, and other teachers who shared her passion. “She wrote me later,” he said, “to say that the experience changed her — that it was worth more than any trip she could’ve taken.”

Then he moved on to the experts — people like Professor Shen Zhihua, a well-known Cold War historian. Shen hadn’t been part of the project from the start, but when invited, he immediately agreed — not only to serve as a judge but also as a volunteer lecturer. “We found,” he said, “that teachers desperately needed training. Many didn’t actually know how historical research was done.”

He recalled the first Public History Lecture for Teachers, scheduled for May 5 at Beijing No. 4 High School. Shen had just arrived when they received word from an official department: the venue was no longer available. “It hit him hard,” he said. “He thought maybe it was his fault — that someone objected to him personally.”

Shen kept blaming himself, even suggesting they replace him with another scholar, Professor Ma Yong from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “He just kept saying,” he recalled, “‘Maybe it’s me. Maybe I ruined a good thing.’”

In a rush, they found a new location nearby. On the way there, someone asked Professor Shen whether the incident had shaken him. “He said, ‘Yes. I’ve lost the mood to teach.’” But once they began, Shen gathered himself. “He stood up, cleared his throat, and delivered one of the best lectures we’ve ever had,” he said.

Then he mentioned one more person — someone, he said, who reminded him of many in the audience.

During last year’s training, they had set aside only five spots for members of the public. One young man, named Chang Jiang, managed to get one. He had a stable job as an engineer at China National Radio. After the course, he approached him and said, “Teacher Li, I want to join your project.”

He warned him: “If you come here, you’ll suffer. Your income will be cut in half.”

But the young man insisted. “I still want to come.”

It took months of negotiation and effort to secure an additional staff slot, but eventually, Chang Jiang joined the team. “He’s here today,” he said, nodding toward the first row.

He paused then, and looked across the room. “If you take anything from all this,” he said, “it’s that this isn’t just a project for middle school students. It belongs to everyone — parents, teachers, experts, and citizens. Every person has a place in it.”

He encouraged the audience to get involved — to become participants, volunteers, sponsors, or even critics. “Criticism helps us, too,” he said. “It keeps us honest and growing.”

Then he shifted the tone. “Let’s talk,” he said, “about the meaning of history itself.”

Whether we’re aware of it or not, he continued, we always use the past to understand the present and anticipate the future. But that’s not the whole reason history matters. “China,” he said, “is a nation without religious comfort. But within our cultural tradition, we had something close — something like faith: family memory.”

He quoted the story of The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains. When the wise man of the river mocked the old man’s stubbornness, the old man replied with confidence: ‘After I die, my sons will continue, and their sons after them — endlessly.’ “What gave him strength,” he said, “was not the idea of success in his lifetime, but the belief that his name and his purpose would live in the memory of his descendants.”

In traditional China, he reminded the audience, to die and be buried among one’s ancestors, to have one’s name inscribed in the family genealogy, was to achieve peace. “For Chinese people,” he said, “history carried an ultimate spiritual significance.”

But that chain, he said quietly, was shattered half a century ago. “Ancestral halls destroyed, spirit tablets smashed, family records burned. Families turned against each other. When our parents and grandparents sang that ‘the Party’s kindness is greater than heaven and earth,’ when they said ‘the Chairman is closer than father or mother,’ our bloodline of memory — thousands of years old — was torn apart.”

He let that sink in. “If we don’t want to live meaningless lives, waiting for death,” he said, “we must begin our own redemption.”

And one way, he believed, was to start by asking about our own histories.

He quoted Carl Becker: ‘Every man is his own historian. When we realize that history is not bird’s nest or shark’s fin, but the air we must breathe every moment, history returns to its rightful place.’

“History doesn’t preserve itself,” he continued. “It fades in seconds — leaving behind only shadows, light and dark, straight and crooked. It’s up to us to trace those shadows.”

“Can we ever find the truth of history?” he asked. “Perhaps not fully. But we can approach it — step by step, with reverence and with doubt.”

Reverence, he said, as Chen Yinke called ‘sympathetic understanding.’ Doubt, as Hume and Marx both advised — to question everything. “Respect history,” he said, “but don’t worship it. Empathize, but always ask: Is this true? Show me the evidence.”

He repeated Hu Shi’s principle: ‘Boldly hypothesize, carefully verify.’ Let the facts give rise to the argument, and the argument grow from the facts. “Methods mean nothing,” he said, “unless someone uses them.”

For thousands of years, history writing had been the privilege of court historians, and its subjects were always emperors, nobles, and generals. “Ordinary people,” he said, “were erased — reduced to numbers, forgotten.”

But in the past decade, that had begun to change. “We’ve entered the era of citizen historians,” he said. “It’s messy, uneven, but it’s real. It’s breaking history free from the grip of power, and reopening the door to renewal.”

And in his eyes, the most meaningful history wasn’t the grand kind — the distant narratives of nations and kings — but the intimate kind that flowed quietly through our own lives. “The stories that deserve our memory,” he said, “aren’t those of saints and sages, but of the ordinary people who gave us life and shaped our character.”

“They lived without applause,” he said softly. “They are the missing ones of history — the faceless data points in the margins. Except for us, no one will remember them, no one will listen to their stories. As descendants, that duty is ours.”

He ended there — calmly, earnestly. “Seek out the forgotten ones,” he said. “Bring them back to the center of the stage. Let their lives become the main story, and let the great events of history become the backdrop to their humanity.”

Then, after a pause, he added: “From this moment on, start tracing the source of your own life. That’s where history begins. And I hope,” he said, “we can walk that road together.”