Wang BingFengming, A Chinese Memoir, 2009
Fengming, a Chinese Memoir is a quietly devastating act of witness: a three-and-a-half-hour interview with He Fengming, an elderly Chinese woman whose life was indelibly shaped by the violent upheavals of twentieth-century China. Filmed almost entirely in her modest apartment, Wang Bing’s camera remains still and unwavering as Fengming recounts, with extraordinary clarity and emotional restraint, her experience of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and the personal cost of ideological purges. Once a devoted socialist and journalist, she and her husband were denounced, separated from their children, and sent to brutal labour camps—from which he never returned. In the shifting light of her home, as day turns to night, her voice constructs a counter-history: personal, intimate, and morally unflinching. In its refusal to intervene or editorialise, Wang’s film recalls the formal gravity of Shoah, allowing memory itself to do the work of indictment. Fengming is not just a personal testimony, it is a profound meditation on the fragility of truth, and the quiet courage of remembering.
