Post-trauma Narrative
Chapter 4 further explores fragmented memories in post-trauma narratives in Red Amnesia, Shanghai Story, and Blue Sky Bones. In these post-trauma films, the past penetrates the present, constituting a postsocialist reality that accommodates different ideologies and temporalities. There is a tension between amnesia and remembrance, between the past in demolition and the present in reconstruction in contemporary China. The repression of the past in turn causes the resurfacing of unwelcome memories of past trauma. To many of the Cultural Revolution Generation, the lingering pain of the past still haunts the present and becomes a form of belated, persisting tragedy for their sons and daughters. Different from previous traumatic narratives that conclude the trauma in the past tense, post-trauma narratives unveil the continuity between the past and the present. Just like the prefix ‘post-’ in postsocialism, post-trauma implies a reconfiguration of trauma rather than a complete break from it.