If one were to follow the prompt of Jie Li, author of Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, and visualize the memory landscape of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the scenery could be strangely bifurcated. At eye level, one might see a well-manicured orchard brimming with brightly colored fruits hanging from sturdy boughs (though, on closer inspection, some of the fruits might be wax replicas, while others might be eaten by worms). As soon as one lowers one's gaze, however, the orchard might well give way to a bramble-strewn field where wild berries cling to thin twigs amid weeds and shrubbery.

The eye-catching fruits are, of course, state-sponsored memories “tended by a giant—the Chinese Communist Party” (p. 19), that relentlessly prunes, grafts, and selectively breeds the perfect specimens while hacking off ivies that might have crept up the trunks from below, picking off wild fruits that might have attracted too many bees, and uprooting any saplings that might have sprung up unbidden. Humanity's weediness is the only reason this giant gardener could not deliver a pristine orchard freed of all unwanted undergrowth. Indeed, our ability to make, retrieve, and share memories is what makes who we are and constitutes us as historical subjects. It is also what makes rulers lose sleep. But, as decades of empirical research has shown, memory is fragile. When deprived of felicitous conditions, personal episodic memories can wither and decay or be easily choked off and overrun by hegemonic semantic memory—what passes as a society's shared knowledge and facts.

Li casts herself as a curator endeavoring to construct an “imagined memorial-museum-in-book-form” (p. 6) with which to memorialize the utopian dreams and ruins of the Mao era and to make visible the connecting tissues between them. She also calls her book a “botanic garden of memories” (p. 19), cuing the reader to see her as a botanist who goes poking through the brambles to identify, sort, and record unofficial memories while also shadowing other freelance gardeners and documenting their work. Her botanical exhibits feature many “archetypal and rare memory flora” (p. 19), well tended and capable of further growth. Such a feat is possible only from someone wearing many hats, including those of an archivist, an ethnographer, a media theorist, a curator, a critic, and an activist.

True to its stated mission, Utopian Ruins painstakingly simulates exhibitionary accoutrements such as discursive signposting that evokes the ubiquitous “you are here” signage. But the book never entirely severs its umbilical cord to the scholarly monograph—hence the dutiful citation of the ballooning scholarship in museology and trauma studies and, more importantly, the analytical interventions of making connections, supplying contexts, noting omissions, drawing out implications, and offering the kinds of formal and thematic interpretations that could only come from a seasoned critic.

In six chapters composed of nimble prose and copious illustrations, Utopian Ruins immerses readers in a media-focused tour of life under Mao: the searing agonies and ecstasies as well as the quotidian doldrums and pleasures. Li defines media in an expansive way to include not only the technologies of writing, recording, and transmission, but also modes of embodiment (blood as ink, regimented bodies as both medium and message). The exhibits thus encompass a wide variety of textual, audiovisual, and material evidence, including (1) the blood testaments of Lin Zhao, who openly defied and denounced the Maoist regime and was jailed and executed; (2) fragments of Nie Gannu's personnel dossier, which forced those implicated to reckon with questions of complicity; (3) photomontages of cornucopia during the Great Leap Forward, in contrast with the conspicuous absence of famine photography; (4) the guerrilla tactics adopted by memory entrepreneurs to churn up a whirligig of nostalgia, revisionism, remorse, recrimination, empathy, and retrospection.

All of these exhibits are tied to specific historical figures, events, and places, but none are frozen in their valence and fungibility. Li is at her best in tracing the zigzag of mnemonic memes as they are reprised and remediated by “barefoot historians,” collectors, memorial minders, artists, filmmakers, bloggers, and academics. Most surprising is perhaps the post-Mao reception of Chung Kuo, Cina directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. However it may have displeased the regime that commissioned it, the film has come to be appreciated for its relatively unvarnished portrayals of the everyday under high socialism, of moments in which people were not posing for the gaze of the state. These moments do not necessarily index privacy or authenticity, and yet they have the allure of wildflowers plucked by a passing stranger and fashioned into an artful ikebana. The film thus restores to a generation, whose memories are long on bloated propositions and short on modest verities, a small treasure trove of the kind of factual truths (as opposed to mathematical or scientific truths) that Hannah Arendt considered most vulnerable to the onslaught of power.

Remember that the memory landscape of the PRC, for all its officially orchestrated collective amnesia, is not a wasteland riddled with “memory holes” á la 1984, but rather a flourishing orchard full of luscious (if monocultural) fruit trees. As we know, the memories of certain events and experiences have been kept alive overseas in the forms of mass vigils, online archives, memoirs, oral histories, documentary films, reportage journalism, and academic studies. Can these heterotopic gardens cross-pollinate with the memory ecosystems inside the PRC so that the stymied undergrowth there may someday unfurl into a vibrant, biodiverse forest—in all the inventive ways that Li envisions in the epilogue? The very act of writing this book implies an affirmative response to the question. Both for its poignant insights and blended methodologies and for its get-down-on-one's-knees search-and-rescue operations, Utopian Ruins will be treasured by scholars and lay readers alike.