Trauma and resilience in literature

Abstract

When reflecting on the Chinese one‐child policy, most accounts have focused on its social, political, and economic implications, which are usually explained by means of statistics. As a literary scholar, I think that the Chinese family‐planning policy should also be studied in terms of ethical and moral problems in the larger context of human identity. This more comprehensive perspective has mostly been ignored or hidden on purpose, and it will require the complexity of creative writing to embrace the larger context. Wa (Frog, 2009), a novel by Mo Yan, the Chinese Nobel Prize winner in 2012, is one of the few literary works that deal with the impact of and the responses to the one‐child policy from this point of view. Integrating letter writing, fiction, and drama, the novel experiments with its narrative to confront readers with the vulnerability, trauma, and redemption of those who became victims or survivors of the Chinese family‐planning policy for over 30 years. Supported by theories of trauma and resilience, this article shows how literature, with its multifocal creative complexity, is capable of breaking the silence and giving voice to victims that may bring them beyond victimhood.