Finished The Great Exodus from China

I just finished reading Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. I can't say I enjoyed the book--it's about trauma, after all--but I appreciated Yang's work on it and especially his generous use of Taiwan scholarship in the process. I've complained elsewhere about English-language books on Taiwan that don't cite Taiwanese scholarship as much as I think they should; I'm glad to see that Yang took that scholarship seriously. (My one complaint is that in his bibliography, the titles of Chinese-language books and articles are only written in pinyin--I'd prefer characters. But perhaps that's an editorial decision that Yang had no control over.)

The book is an interesting combination of archival work, interviews, readings of fiction and non-fiction from the time periods discussed, along with some statistical information (as when Yang argues that the numbers of mainlanders coming to Taiwan during and after the KMT defeat was less than usually assumed). I appreciated the variety of sources he brought to his study. I also appreciate his reflections on his own positionality in relation to his subject. I think it was an important (but probably controversial) move. I'll have to look at some reviews of the book later on to see how reviewers responded to this approach. (I am having trouble accessing NU's library databases right now, so I'll come back to this later.)

What's the next book on my list? I'm not sure right now. Yang's discussion of Long Ying-tai's 《大江大海1949》 makes me want to read that book just to get my own impression of it. We'll see, though... Maybe I want to read something less traumatic!

Update, 9:33 p.m. I found some reviews of the book. Here are a few:

Qian, L. Behind the History and Sociology of Memory: A Review of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2021, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Int J Polit Cult Soc 37, 291–298 (2024). https://rdcu.be/eagUR  

Yang, D.MH. A Reply to Licheng Qian’s “Behind the History and Sociology of Memory: A Review of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2021, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)”. Int J Polit Cult Soc 37, 299–307 (2024). https://rdcu.be/eagVZ

A couple of quotes from Yang's response to Qian that caught my eye--they expand on the question I had above regarding his discussion of his positionality in relation to his topic:

My family immigrated to Canada from Taiwan when I was a young teenager. Taiwan is located in the strategic contact zones between Chinese, Japanese, and American empires. I learned about my home island’s painful and multilayered history of migration and colonialism belatedly as a graduate student returning from Canada. This history included my family’s anguish and sorrow caused by the arrival of the mainlanders in the mid-twentieth century, a past that my grandparents and parents had kept largely silent. Faced with the complexity and nuances of different but interconnected traumatic experiences on the island, I was absolutely overwhelmed. My [305||306] conflicting emotions of loyalty toward my own victimized family members and the profound empathy that I gradually developed for the hundreds of thousands of waishengren families through my archival research and fieldwork had tormented me. Given my positionality, I did not know how to tell the waishengren story adequately and “objectively.” How should a descendent of the colonized and victimized write about the trauma of the former colonizers and victimizers? (305-306)

...... 

Many are going to be skeptical about the modality, as well as the sincerity of my transformation. The skepticism is understandable. Building empathetic understand-ing and rapprochement among communities, people, and nations holding serious grudges against one another is easier said than done. It is a long and difficult “working through” process where all parties have to be wholeheartedly committed. I have been told in private by a number of colleagues in Taiwan that intellectuals in certain local circles on both ends of the mnemonic divide do not really appreciate what I am doing. A second-generation mainlander professor told his German colleague who was attending one of my talks in Taiwan: “Who does this guy think he is? We don’t need his sympathy!” (306) 

Harrison, H. (2021). [Review of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang]. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52(2), 306-307. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/803869. 

Yung, K. K. (2023). Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan. International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 6(1), 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1163/24688800-20221258

Gustafsson, K. (2023). [Review of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan, by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang]. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 83(1), 231-235. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jas.2023.a922635.