Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang. The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan.

Abstract

After Japan’s surrender in 1945, war ­­continued in China—civil war between Communist and Nationalist forces. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s ­­awarding-winning book examines the million Nationalist refugees who made it to Taiwan—not only the traumatic paths of their journey (1945–1956) but also how they reshaped Taiwan and were themselves reshaped by Taiwanese society over subsequent decades. Yang’s findings have implications far beyond twentieth-century Taiwan: for constructing a multiple-event model of collective trauma; recognizing the therapeutic functions of social memory; and understanding diasporic identity in relation to social, temporal, and political displacements. Yang’s Memory Studies Association 2021 First Book Award is well deserved. He evaluates memoirs, fiction, and oral histories against contemporaneous documentary sources, including newspaper and magazine reports, op-eds, letters to the editor, and personal advertisements, as well as recently declassified military and government records of population statistics, crime and suicide rates, mental health treatment, and military-court trials of political prisoners. Yang’s...