When Huang Jiani’s father finished reading the story she had written about his mother, the usually quiet man told her, “I feel like I’ve come to know my mother again. Her life was so interesting. We should treat her better.”
At the time, Huang was a freshman studying sociology at Fudan University (FDU). For a class assignment, she and her classmates were asked to interview an older person about an event that took place before they were born. Huang chose to interview her grandmother, who had left her hometown of Quanzhou at 18 and traveled to Ninghua county in Fujian province to build a kindergarten from scratch.
The assignment was designed to cultivate what the course called a “sense of history”. But for Huang, her father’s reaction revealed something more personal.
“I realized that recording a person’s life story could change the way a family understands one of its own,” said Huang, now 21 and a junior at FDU.
That realization soon grew into a larger project. Huang began assembling a team dedicated to helping older people tell their life stories.
The project, Yishu Guanghua — or Lumemoir — officially launched in early 2025.
According to Huang, the team now has more than 10 members spanning all four undergraduate years, most of them from the humanities and social sciences. One recent recruit studies microelectronics and is exploring how AI can support the project’s work.
So far, the team has completed eight memoirs totaling more than 200,000 Chinese characters, along with around 100 minutes of video footage.
The work involves far more than simply asking questions and taking notes.
“People’s memories are scattered, leaping from one moment to the next,” Huang said.”We can’t force elders into a strict timeline or box their lives into neat categories — that only makes them hold back. We want to step into their memories as they actually are: rich, messy and full of surprises.”
Before each interview, team members research the elder’s era, hometown and related historical records. During conversations, they begin with gentle, open-ended questions before gradually moving toward more specific topics.
Old photographs or film clips often help spark memories. Sometimes an elder might start by correcting what appears on screen: “Oh, things weren’t like that back then.”
Then the stories begin to flow.
Drawing on her sociology training, Huang uses what she calls a “transcribe first, then code” method. The team first transcribes each interview, then organizes fragmented memories into a structured narrative web that can stretch across dozens of pages, tracing family ties and the values passed between generations.
Alongside written memories, the team also produces short videos, a format some elders prefer. A few have even asked the students to use AI to restore images of their younger selves at work.
One elder, who had spent his youth working the fertile black-soil farmland of Northeast China, had no footage from those years. When he watched the AI-generated video, he said it had finally fulfilled a lifelong dream.
“For children, seeing their parents on video is also a direct way of getting to know them again,” Huang said.
Fu Xiaoqing, a 22-year-old senior majoring in journalism at FDU, handles much of the team’s video production. She joined the project in her junior year after seeing a recruitment post on a classmate’s WeChat Moments.
Her decision was personal. A political science assignment had once led her to interview her grandfather, who she had only known in his 60s as gentle and easygoing. Through those conversations, she discovered someone different: a driven young man who had risen from a rural village to a managerial position in the city.
“I saw a side of him that was ambitious, proactive and full of energy,” Fu said.
Since joining the project, Fu has edited about 20 memoir videos for elderly participants. One moment left a deep impression on her: during an interview, a veteran of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53) picked up an accordion and began to play and sing.
“It felt as though I had been transported back 70 years,” she said.
The project also changed something in her life outside work. During the winter break in February, Fu went home and sat with her grandfather again — this time with patience and full attention.
“Before, whenever he started reminiscing, I would get impatient or let my mind wander to other things I could be doing,” she said. “Now I sit quietly and listen, with genuine curiosity and respect for everything he has lived through.”
Learning through lives
Li Yiyan, a 20-year-old sophomore majoring in Chinese language and literature, joined Lumemoir two months ago, hoping to connect what she had learned in books with real lives.
“As a Chinese literature major, I often wonder what words really mean to the world,” Li said. “I’ve spent so much time absorbing stories and ideas, but not enough time giving something back. When I saw the recruitment post mentioning ‘life narratives’, I thought this might be a way to put words to use for others.”
After joining Lumemoir, Li and her teammates visited a nursing home. Conversations with the elderly residents helped turn that abstract question into something concrete.
“While talking with the elderly residents, something inside me settled,” she said. “I came to understand that the value of practice lies in the act of practicing itself.”
One of Li’s assignments was to help a senior write about her late father, a prominent local figure whose life was closely tied to the region’s educational history.
The team chose to trace his contributions to education through the perspective of his daughter. What stayed with Li was one small detail: despite moving homes many times, the father had carefully kept every school award his daughter had ever received.
The story reminded Li of her own grandmother, who still keeps her childhood drawings in an old tin box.
“In that moment, I realized we had both been touched by the same kind of sincere love from our elders,” she said. “It connected two different generations in such a quiet but powerful way.”
“In a society that is always moving forward, we also need to look back. Preserving the stories of yesterday and passing them on to tomorrow — that is the mission of our generation,” she added.