Recorded interviews with family elders, with full transcripts.
Their memories are preserved intact — in tone, in pauses, in their own words.
When my grandmother passed away in 2021 and we were sorting through her belongings, we discovered that she had kept my great-grandmother's wartime flight diary. The moment we opened it, the paper was already beginning to crumble. In that instant I realized: if we did not start now, it would be too late for many things. This was not a romantic decision—it was one forced upon us by time.
My grandfather was a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in Hangzhou during the Republican era. He often said that every inch of this Jiangnan land holds a story. My later research in modern history truly took root in the things I heard him tell as a child. When I went to America in the 1980s, the first time I had been so far from home, it actually let me see Jiangnan more clearly.
When I graduated from Stanford in 1990, my adviser urged me to stay. There were so many opportunities in Silicon Valley back then. I hesitated for several months. In the end, what made up my mind to return home was not some grand principle, but a letter from my grandfather. He wrote: "For a man of learning, what matters is whether, over the course of your life, you have made the land beneath your feet a little better." That was the line. In 1992 I returned to Beijing, borrowed money from three friends, rented an office, and just got started.
In those days everyone had nothing, yet nothing was lacking. Materially we lived with the barest minimum, but spiritually we were rich beyond measure. At night we had no electricity, so we read by oil lamp. When Mr. Wu lectured on quantum mechanics, the blackboard would get soaked by the rain, and he would simply wipe it with his hand and carry on. No one felt this was hardship—it was simply daily life. I went on to teach physics my whole life, and what I think of most often is still that rainy night in 1947.