This is a great question!

My home country of China has 5000 years of recorded history, and my city has had inhabitants in the area for at least 10,000 years. As a Canadian, that boggles my mind! Ten thousand years ago, my country was nearly empty - the first people had only recently arrived (from Asia, no less - a fact which staggers my Chinese students, who know almost nothing of Canadian history).

I haven't done much learning of ancient Chinese history, but I have learned a LOT about the history of the 20th century, mostly through first- and second-hand accounts. I've heard some pretty harrowing stories, particularly from the days of the Cultural Revolution.

One of my ESL students is in his 60s and told me a lot of stories from his childhood, for example when the teachers at his school were taken out and publicly castigated and humiliated, even tortured. After the schools were closed, he and his classmates were left to their own devices, and he wound up working in a factory at age 12, while some of them got into trouble and criminal activity.

A man I met told me a story of his university classmate being arrested for accidentally ripping a photo of Chairman Mao Zedong in a newspaper. He was reported by his fellow students.

My husband's great-grandfather was a general in the army during the Communist Revolution. He had a 14 year-old "bodyguard". During the famine, their family enjoyed cake, as did the families of all high-ranking officials.

When my husband was a child in the 1980's, food was still rationed and people earned almost nothing. (It's kind of incredible how much things have changed in 30 years.)

One of my students has a great-grandmother who is still alive. She has told my student stories of her life, including of her father's eight wives. Another student has a living great-grandmother with bound feet. Not too many women are left who have undergone this procedure.

Before coming to China I had learned something of the Sino-Japanese war and the atrocities committed by the Japanese army against the people of China (the "Rape of Nanking", for example). However since living here I've been able to really learn about the personal impact of these events. The scars on the national psyche run very deep and there's a hatred of Japan and Japanese people that is considered to be patriotic, or nationalist at least. Though, I do have to say that my younger students don't always buy into it, and some of them really love Japanese culture.

One interesting thing is that since much of China's modern history has been suppressed by the Chinese government, and the Chinese people haven't been allowed to learn of it (or have learned a highly propagandized version of it), they don't know of major events such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. I recently held a class for my high-schoolers where we watched news footage of the 1989 riots and of Tank Man - an iconic figure around the world who is virtually unheard-of in mainland China. Afterward we were able to have a discussion about it. One of my students told me his father had actually participated in some of the demonstrations. So in some ways, my students teach me about their countries history, and in other ways, I'm able to teach them a few things - though I'm careful about my commentary with such political topics.