Chapters 3 and 4 focus on “public memory.” Chapter 3 focuses on various patterns of literary memory in the 1980s and later and shows that the pattern of “good people but the bad event” became dominant. The variations and trend in the literary memory can be explained by the interplay of several factors: the dominant doxa of realism and unusual dynamics in the literary field in the 1980s, major authors’ habitus, the lower-class position of the returning zhiqing, and the state’s political use of the Maoist past.