The items in this exhibit, divided into six months, is likely one small part of a larger series of booklets filled with Tongshan's diary entries, contains entries that begin on July 25, 1976, and end on December 13, 1976. There are a total of 140 entries written on 178 pages. The diary's author was a Tianjin high school student who was about to become a sent-down youth in the countryside. His name was Tongshan, and he lived on Shengli Street in Heping District in the center of Tianjin. Tongshan was one of a family of six, comprised of his parents, an older sister, and two younger brothers, one of whom had chosen a "life of crime' and had recently begun serving a fifteen-year sentence. At the time of the quake, Tongshan was about to graduate from high school and had been assigned to become a peasant in a village in Jixian County, about seventy miles north of Tianjin. Click here to browse and view the diary.
These diary entries are the basis of Sha Qingqing and Jeremy Brown, "Adrift in Tianjin, 1976: A Diary of Natural Disaster, Everyday Urban Life, and Exile to the Countryside," in Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China's Era of High Socialism (Harvard University Press, 2015), 179–195.