The necessity of defending memoryIn the end, it all points to human freedom
What is the value of our individual and family memories?
At the end of October, Kan Ideal held an annual meeting of idealists entitled "The Road Ahead" in Beijing, where National Taiwan University historian Yang Zhao, Peking University historian Luo Xin, and writer Zhang Yueran shared the need to defend memory. 
It is only when we use our flesh to refuse to forget, to compete with the grand narrative, that it is possible to retain the real part.
Yang Zhao said that if people do not need to live according to the standard answers, or even to transform their own experiences and memories, then it is called freedom. The necessity of defending memory ultimately points to human freedom. 
Competitors and enemies of memory
Luo Xin said: I regard memory forgetting and even historical writing as a kind of competition, this kind of competition is not a competition with your own memory, but there is a power to make you forget, there is a power to make you remember, there is a power to make you think you remember, and so on.
These forces come from ourselves, but also from society outside of us. What we forget, and what we remember, is not determined by our personal will. In this sense, free will is actually fighting. Most of the things in history we don't know, not necessarily because they are not worth remembering, but because some people think they are not worth remembering, and they have lost in a huge competition that is going on. Therefore, our own memory, the memory of society, and the memory of a certain group are also in a continuous competition. If you think you want to defend certain memories, maybe you're fighting for something outside, above you, with the help of violence. So defending memory itself is a dangerous struggle, and countless people have paid a huge price for it throughout history. The Twenty-Four Histories is the result of the continuous intervention of the power of the state in the writing of history. In ancient China, if there was a struggle against forgetting, it was against the forces that represented the interests of the emperor. I'm not saying that Sima Qian, Sima Guang, and Ban Gu, the people we respect, are all **. They are also struggling to find a way to put certain words in their writings in some kind of code. However, the materials they rely on are also formed through the deletion and modification of various forces. In Sima Qian's time, when he wrote history books, he would put different statements together without judgment. However, the later official cultivation was purely a government institution, and the space for historians to exert their personal initiative was very limited. 
Conflict between personal memory and the memory of the times?There is a question that says: Individuals have personal memories, and the times have memories, but personal memories may sometimes conflict with the so-called memories of the times, how should they be reconciled?
Luo Xin said: I want todayIn this era, there is no longer a single memory of the era, and now our memories are all plural and belong to everyone。If you are worried that your memory will be swallowed up by someone else's, raise your voice a little so that others can hear you and participate in this competition. The way in which history responds is to have a chain of evidence to support a certain memory to become something that can be solidified. This kind of thinking can protect our mental health, not for the past, but for the future. Zhang Yueran said: I think writing itself is valuable. When you write down your memory, it's already separated from what surrounds you. It's already helping you organize your memories and help you take them with you for the future. Family Biography Editorial Department: I am also deeply touched by this. Three years ago, we wrote family biographies for more than a dozen retired cadres at or above the deputy department level of the Zhejiang Provincial Electric Power Bureau, and the difference between the oldest and the youngest was 30 years old, that is, when the latter first joined the company, the former was already a department-level cadre. Young cadres feel a little uncomfortable thinking that two generations are in one sequence. The relevant leaders mobilized and said that they had their own angles and successfully dispelled their doubts.
Please: leave your experience behind
Luo Xin said: I want to encourage everyone, in fact, I also want to ask everyone, I, a white-haired person, want to ask you about this, this is your responsibility. You have to keep looking for different ways to keep and tell your experience, and keeping and telling are basically the same thingYou can't keep it without telling it
In addition, I would like to remind everyone that you should not only speak, but also find a way to make people want to listen. I want more people to have that sense of responsibility, I want to tell my story, I want to tell my memory, I want to tell my record, but I want to tell it that is engaging, I want to persuade others. If each of us worked in this way, we would not hear a story, and this era would not be fixed by a unified voice. There is no standard answer for an era。In such an era, people do not need to live according to the standard answers, or even modify their own experience and their own memories, which is called freedom. It was a special kind of freedom, but for me, to live to be 60 years old, I think it was the most precious freedom. Family Biography Editorial Department: This is also what we recommend to each of our elders.