As a graduate history student earning his PhD at the University of California San Diego, Jeremy Brown specialized in China’s Cultural Revolution, that decade-long phenomenon of social upheaval Mao Zedong unleashed on the country in 1966.

During Brown’s time at UCal, Michael Schoenhals, one of the world’s leading experts on the Cultural Revolution, came to the university to lecture. He offered the graduate students some advice.

History, he told them, was often consigned to the dustbin. It was there you could find the unofficial and more human story.

“He came,” Brown said, “and he said if you wanted to research the Cultural Revolution, you’ve got to become an expert in ‘garbology’ as he called it — meaning you’re looking through other people’s garbage, you’re going to flea markets, and he showed us some of the stuff he had bought there.”

It was a back-alley approach dictated by necessity. While the Communist party had officially renounced the Cultural Revolution as a period of chaos, the government was less forthcoming about making public the history of that period. Access to official archives was controlled, and often required official permission.

Brown, who is now a history professor at Simon Fraser University, ran into that official reticence in his own studies. In Tianjin, the largest port city in northern China, Brown, who speaks Mandarin, tried to get access to sensitive historical information by ingratiating himself to the archival staff there.

“I tried to to do the Maoist practice of the Three Togethers — you know, eat together, labour together and live together. So I’d eat with them in the cafeteria, and afterwards I’d go up with them and play ping-pong — I usually lost but I was getting better near the end — and I even helped in the annual cleanup of the archival building during the Chinese New Year. It didn’t work, though. I made some friends … but I didn’t get to see the stuff that I really wanted to see.”

He had better luck with garbology.

“The next time I went to China (in 2002), I went to the flea market in Tianjin … and I found a pile of Red Guard newspapers from the Cultural Revolution. I was paging through them and this man came up to me and said, ‘Hey, are you interested in seeing Cultural Revolution material? I’ve got a lot more material at my house. If you want to take a look, come on over.’ So I did. He had boxes and boxes of documents, so I went through them and picked the ones I wanted.”

Brown began to haunt the Saturday morning flea market. He liked the unconventionality of the work.

“It makes it really fun. I just have this instinct that if something’s being covered up, then there’s probably a story worth telling there. It’s sort of a combination journalistic-detective-scholar amalgam of what you have to do in order to cover the history of the Mao period, and for me, it’s a much bigger adventure than only sitting in a comfortable, well-conditioned archive.”