Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang examines one of the least understood migrations in modern East Asia - the human exodus from China to Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek's regime collapsed in 1949. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs, he tells a very different story from the conventional Chinese civil war historiography that focuses on debating the reasons for Communist success and Nationalist failure. Yang lays bare the traumatic aftermath of the Chinese Communist Revolution for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who were forcibly displaced from their homes across the sea. Underscoring the displaced population's trauma of living in exile and their poignant 'homecomings' four decades later, he presents a multi-event trajectory of repeated traumatization with recurring searches for home, belonging, and identity. This thought-provoking study challenges established notions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and reconciliation.

Winner, 2021 Memory Studies Association's First Book Award, The Memory Studies Association

‘Viewing mainlander Chinese as refugees, Yang breaks new ground in applying the lens of trauma studies to modern Chinese history, illuminating heretofore unexplored processes of ethnic identity formation leading them to become Taiwanese.'

Madeline Y. Hsu - University of Texas, Austin

‘Yang provides a most compelling study of China in the 1949 crisis. Mapping out multivalent modernities across the political, historical, and psychic territories in Cold War China and Taiwan, he looks into the contested modes of memory through which Chinese people have reckoned with their experience from ideological confrontation to familial split, from exile to homecoming.’

David Der-wei Wang - Harvard University

‘This book is an exceptionally careful and interesting study of the politics of memory by an author who is passionately engaged in this subject.’

Henrietta Harrison Source: Journal of Interdisciplinary History