Bitterness as Emotional Language: Narrating Suffering and Making Collective Memory in China, 1946–1963

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 3. Memory Politics & National Narratives

Abstract

Suffering is not only experienced but narrated and morally interpreted through culturally specific vocabularies. This study examines how “bitterness” (ku)—originally a sensory term referring to taste—became a durable emotional language through which suffering was interpreted and incorporated into collective memory in modern China. During the Mao era, practices of “speaking bitterness” (su ku) appeared across multiple political campaigns, encouraging individuals to publicly recount past hardship. Existing scholarship has largely interpreted these practices as tools of political mobilization or expressions of lived experience. This paper instead asks how bitterness itself became institutionalized as an emotional language that structured the recognition, attribution, and remembrance of suffering. Drawing on collective memory theory, the study analyzes how dominant narratives emerge through processes of selection, framing, and contestation rather than transparently reflecting experience. The empirical analysis focuses on articles published in People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) between 1946 and 1963, as well as retrospective accounts and anthropological materials that illuminate relationships between official discourse and lived experience. Using qualitative discourse analysis combined with historically oriented process tracing, the paper examines how emotional vocabulary, narrative structure, and textual form shaped interpretations of hardship across changing political contexts. Preliminary findings suggest that bitterness often required discursive elicitation rather than spontaneous expression; attribution of suffering shifted across campaigns toward politically defined targets; and formulaic reporting normalized emotional transformation by modeling expected narrative trajectories. Speaking bitterness also functioned as an organized collective performance shaped through interaction between institutional staging and participant enactment. The study argues that emotional vocabularies themselves can become stabilized through repeated discursive practices, linking state discourse, lived experience, and the long-term formation of collective memory.

Author

• Yunyi Li, University of California, San Diego