The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

Chapter 1

Literary Memory and Postmemory of a Traumatic Past

Trauma Literature as Testimony

In modern Chinese literature traumatic writings are abundant, but notably absent are studies of testimonies. While there are Holocaust studies,¹ studies of testimonials in Latin America,² and studies of atomic bomb survivors in Japan,³ we have yet to see similar efforts linking and exploring the relation between trauma and testimony in modern Chinese narratives. One notable work filling this void is Yomi Braester’s Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China,⁴ which should have inspired similar studies, but publications have remained few and far between. This is somewhat odd given the violence the people of China have experienced in the past one-hundred-plus years, particularly between 1947 and 1976, when tens of millions of people died of starvation, torture, murder, and execution as a result of policy errors, large-scale abuses of power, ideological campaigns, and totalitarianism. The number of deaths caused by the Great Famine has been pegged at 30