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. For a class assignment, students were asked to interview an older person about an event that took place before they were born. Huang chose 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.
"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 Fudan.
That realization grew into a larger project. Yishu Guanghua — or Lumemoir — officially launched in early 2025. The team now has more than 10 members spanning all four undergraduate years. So far, they have completed eight memoirs totaling more than 200,000 Chinese characters, along with around 100 minutes of video footage.
"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 and hometown. 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.
The team also produces short videos, which 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.
Fu Xiaoqing, a 22-year-old senior majoring in journalism, handles much of the team's video production. An 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.
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," she said. "Now I sit quietly and listen, with genuine curiosity and respect for everything he has lived through."
Li Yiyan, a 20-year-old sophomore majoring in Chinese literature, joined two months ago. One of her assignments was to help a senior write about her late father. 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. "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."