The traumatic narratives of sexuality in Taiwanese writer Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy

1.1 Social and historical context of Chu’s trilogy

The social and historical background context of Chu’s trilogy is traditional and patriarchal during the late 1990s. The social status of a woman is lower than a man’s. Traditional women were supposed to stay home and serve the family until the 1970s. Since the mid-1970s, the development of integrated circuits (IC) has driven the overall development of the electronic industry in Taiwan (Kong 2021). It brought female workers into the workplace because of the need for considerable human power after the late 1970s. The continuous productivity of the industry brought forth more women into the workplace. The transformation from labor-intensive industries in the mid-1980s to technology-intensive sectors and its impact on the female workforce is reflected by Mathi’s working experience as an executive secretary at a prosperous electronic products company in Sad Coffee Shop. Su-Yuan, another married young office lady in Sad Coffee Shop, is a typical example of how a married woman is judged and demanded in a traditional patriarchal Taiwanese society. She works hard at the office all day, and after work, she serves her husband as a subservient wife and a meticulous caretaker of the family.

However, it is not easy for a woman to get a divorce and end her marriage in the late 1990s. Mathi’s husband left home to go to South America for work soon after their marriage and came back annually for merely a few days to visit his parents, but during these few days, he acted like a stranger to Mathi. He always stayed in his own room, which Mathi had no right to enter. The abnormal marital relationship of this couple never ended until Mathi’s husband came to her and demanded she sign the divorce document before Mathi started her trip to Madagascar. In Chu’s trilogy, the unhappy marriage life and the problems hidden behind the wedlock are scarcely described but implied. The mothers in Chu’s trilogy are brave in a certain sense. All the mothers of the trilogy left their homes, with or without taking their children. In Sad Coffee Shop, Mathi’s mother took little Mathi with her when she left her husband, though she had to face a poor financial situation hereafter. In The Swallow, Ah-Fang’s mother left home immediately when her baby girl was born, and in Thirty Thousand Feet Under, Jun-Xia’s mother even had to poison her husband to death to end her marriage.

What drives these mothers to leave their homes in despair? The marital relationship can be a blessing. However, it is an unbreakable and painful bond for the wives and mothers in Chu’s trilogy. None of the mothers in the trilogy get a divorce. Divorce was difficult in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Chu’s trilogy was published. According to Taiwan’s Divorce Law, divorce can only succeed in three ways: 1. Divorce by consent, 2. Divorce by litigation, and 3. Divorce by mediation. Divorce by consent is hard to get if the spouse disagrees. However, divorce by litigation is even more complex and much more complicated to obtain because the case must be in line with the ten statutory reasons, such as bigamy, adultery, domestic violence, intention to kill, intentional crime sentenced to more than six months, life and death unknown for more than three years, an incurable disease, and a major incurable mental illness. Separation or irreconcilable differences are not grounds for filing for divorce. That is why Mathi cannot get a divorce even though she and her husband have separated for years. The mothers in the trilogy can neither get a divorce by consent nor do they have statutory reasons to file for divorce.

The dissatisfied party in a marriage still has an alternative to file for compulsory mediation with the court to seek a divorce. As early as 1934, when Taiwan Civil Procedure Law was amended, it was stipulated in Article 573 that the lawsuit of divorce should be mediated by the court, which is the so-called “mediation pre-ism” or “compulsory mediation” (Liu 2012, p. 3). However, mediation of divorce has taken a circuitous route to become possible for more than 70 years since 1934. In the meantime, especially after 1985, it was the long, gloomy period “prohibiting the establishment of divorce mediation.” Consequently, the rate of divorce through mediation is meager. Take 1999, for example, only 1.4 % of mediations were successful (Liu 2012, p. 6), and child custody was usually given to the divorced father. In May 1998, the Domestic Violence Prevention Act was established to offer legal support to women and their children under the threat of violence in the marriage. Not until June 2009 was the above-mentioned judicial method that explicitly stipulates to “prohibit the mediation of divorce” finally abolished (Liu 2012, pp. 5–6).

1.2 Parental wedlock secrets and children’s traumatic experiences

Based upon such a background context, this paper explores the relationship between traumatic experiences and female sexuality in the narratives of Chu’s trilogy, where problems of female sexuality and resistance to parental wedlock tragedy become traumatic experiences. In Chu’s trilogy, the traumatic past keeps haunting the child and hinders the pursuit and consummation of love and sexual desire as the child grows up. This study takes the traumatic symptoms as signs in the process of Peirce’s triadic semiosis. Through the model of Peirce’s triadic semiosis, the process of tracing the negative influences of traumatic experiences together with their formation of personal identity and the associated depressive disorder of the protagonists could be analyzed.

The scenes portrayed in Chu’s traumatic narratives of female sexuality are implications and representations of how female sexuality is conceptualized and confined by the traumatic events while backgrounded with regulations and restrictions of a traditional patriarchal society. The stories of Chu’s female narrators unveil the persistent, resisting female power that probes into the mysterious dark corner of traumatic events and releases the imprisoned traumatic survivors’ souls and bodies from their haunting reminiscences. While we adopt the intertextural reading strategy and place the fictional narratives under the spectacle of gender, the protagonists’ symptoms of illness will act like Peircean representamen (signs). They do not stick to one meaning but represent different significations as the interpretants/traumatic survivors’ perspectives and mindsets change their understanding of the Peircean representamen (signs). Behind the turns of the causes shifting from the physiological to the psychological, the semiotic approach and the reading strategy of textual analysis prove their worth. It demonstrates strength of compassion that brings forth a saving light to the protagonists who survive their traumatic past.

2.1 Family secret as hermeneutic code

The stories of Chu’s trilogy evolve around the same enigma – family secret. Chu’s narrators projected these enigmas into their narratives as hermeneutic codes that deserve a sophisticated understanding and interpretation. When taken from a broad and general view, Chu’s trilogy shows its unique and pivotal success through unanimous consistency in delineating the quest for freedom in different walks of life. However, when we read the three novels as interrelated components of an organic texture of a fictional world, the traumatic symptoms of family secrets are the signs that combine the trilogy and cross-signify each other. The family secret that causes the traumatic event is the hermeneutic code in the narrative of Chu’s stories. Once we discover the hermeneutic code, the truth implied in the textual network will be found.

While analyzing the narratives in Chu’s trilogy, we find that all the traumatic characters refrain from telling their stories. Their traumatic experiences can only be recognized through the symptoms of trauma. As Judith Herman’s research on trauma and its recovery pointed out, “The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event” (Herman 1992, p. 1). Although the traumatized characters resist telling their stories, there are certain clues for us in the narratives because the traumatic past tends to keep haunting their present life and leave some traces in the stories. The traumatic past interferes with their understanding and interpretation of their world and experiences. The repetition of the reminiscence becomes the traumatized characters’ nightmare, and the impact of and reaction derived from the haunting traumatic experience change as the characters gradually construct their way of life and personality development.

The symptom or sign of trauma is, hence, a representation or an indication derived from a matrix of various significations of the traumatic event (object) to the interpretant (the trauma survivor) according to the survivor’s current mental state. Herman noted this phenomenon in her long practices and research on trauma and its recovery and concluded, “Resolution of the trauma is never final; recovery is never complete. The impact of a traumatic event continues to reverberate throughout the survivor’s lifecycle” (1992, p. 230). In the healing process, as the trauma survivors gradually learn how to recover from the impacts of the past trauma, the traumatic events and influences on them will consequently be observed and treated with different attitudes. Once the survivors’ cognition of their traumatic experience is changed, the trauma and its haunting returns will represent quite a different signifying system to them. Chu’s traumatic narratives firmly reveal the opportunities for the survivors’ probable recovery. Although all the characters’ recovery processes are at the initial stages, they represent the possibility of new understanding and interpretation of their traumas and new representative significance of the sign system in the traumatic narratives.

2.2 Peirce’s tripartite semiosis

In the following sections, this paper will apply Peirce’s semiosis of the triadic model of signs to analyze the trilogy narratives. The interrelated connection and bondage among sign (representamen) (a first), object (subject matter) (a second), and interpretant (mental concept/meaning) (a third) constitute an appropriate model for reading the traumatic narrative and interpreting the healing process because the dynamic features of Peirce’s semiosis encompass possible variations and flows of change as interrelated actions and reactions of the tripartite are concerned (Atkin 2023; Nöth 2011; Peirce 1982, 1991, 1998, 2011).

Traumatized people frequently feel abandoned and forced by trauma. Their reminiscences of the traumatic event force them to relive their earlier struggles over every construction phase of personality development, such as autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy (Herman 1992, p. 57). Trauma survivors go through various stages of recovery while their understanding of the trauma and its impact on them modulate through time. The process of recovery from the traumatic past will keep on going, and there is no definite resolution of when the trauma survivors can completely regain their health.

Herman’s research pointed out a fundamental phenomenon: the symptom (sign) of trauma will signify different things (object) to the survivor (interpretant) according to the survivor’s state of mind in different phases of personality construction. When a trauma survivor becomes an interpretant, the trauma symptom as a sign will incur various meanings, and the significance of the traumatic event, consequently, will not remain the same. Based on this discovery, we could apply Peirce’s semiosis in the analysis of the trauma case because Peirce’s semiotic theory allows a dynamic of significance based on the interrelated relations of the triadic model of signs. Peirce, in his 1867 paper “On A New List of Categories” (Peirce 1982), noted a dynamic and flexible relationship between representamen and interpretant, which leads to consequent varieties of the understanding of the object. Any changes to either one item of the triadic elements will bring forth a new approach and interpretation to the triadic model. The interpretation and performance of the sign model and significance are thus open to infinite varieties:

In particular, Peirce thought that while our interpreting the signifying relation between sign and object relied upon understanding the basis of signification on any given case, he also thought that the generated interpretant itself functioned as a further, more developed sign of the object in question. And of course, as a further sign, it will also signify that object through some features, which again, we must interpret, and generate a further interpretant. (Atkin 2023)

Peirce’s triadic model of signs is a dynamic system of significance. Once the interpretant (mental concept) generates a different interpretation of the sign (representamen), the whole sign system and its significance will construct a certain level of shifting and adjusting as the interpretant, the representamen, and the object would dynamically and concurrently modulate with each other through the varieties of interpretations derived from the interpretant, and therefore, a change in the significance is to be expected:

Let us return to the trauma case. The unspeakable family secret (Peircean object) is the hermeneutic code waiting to be discovered. The traumatized character (interpretant) tends to repeatedly relive the traumatic experience and reinterpret the distress and powerlessness brought forth by the trauma. The unrepresentable and unspeakable family secret, therefore, can be traced by the reader through the traumatized person’s remapping and restructuring of the traumatic experience. In the narrative, the traumatized character might gradually find a way to recover through the reliving and remapping process. In the reading process, the reader vicariously goes through the traumatized character’s experience. The traumatic symptom as the Peircean sign (representamen) indicates the presence of the traumatic experience (object). As the reader (interpretant) gradually establishes his/her understanding of the narrative through the traumatized character’s involuntary repetitive reminiscences of the haunting event, the enigma in the traumatic narrative is exposed, the discovery of the traumatic secret is not far beyond, and the traumatized character’s possible recovery is no longer unattainable.

2.3 Gendered narratives

As the character’s perspective and the narrative voice both contain specific individual differences, the gender of the narrator and the traumatized character play essential hermeneutic functions. Susan Lanser, while bridging the feminist approach into the circle of narratology, states that the female narrator, as long as she tells a story of other females or her own, whether she conforms to the strategy and confinement abided by the male narrator in the patriarchal society, will bring forth complexities to the formation of diegetic scenes and narrative sounds. Lanser contends that the female characters might have personal reasons and worries that they would refuse and reject to let their secrets out through male narrators (Lanser 2018, p. 226). For Lanser, there are outstanding differences that would, in one way or another, distinguish her and her group (“we”) from the male other(s) (Lanser 2004, p. 124). To extend her construction of gendered narratology, Lanser takes works situating “in the intersecting fields of feminism, gender studies, and ‘queer theory’ that has been concerned not only with the revisionists’ constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality but also with questions of propriety, denotation, categorization, and fixity,” to strengthen the foundation of feminist narrative studies (2018, p. 225). The differences in the narrative raise the positions and perspectives possessed by the female narrator and characters to the counterparts of the male narrator and characters.

In Chu’s trilogy, all the narrators are female. Her first and third novels have a third-person narrator (intraheterodiegetic) (Genette 1980). Her second novel, The Swallow, has the first-person narrator (the autodiegetic narrator). The configuration of the three narrators increases the differences of voices in the narratives. While interpreting the hermeneutic codes in Chu’s trilogy, the attitudes of every female narrator and every female protagonist play a critical role in reading the stories. Chu’s female narrators have their narratives focusing on the female protagonists’ traumatic sexuality and the male protagonist’s bisexual or same-gender loving tendencies. The female narrator occupies an advantageous position to stand together with the female and male characters. The narrator’s empathy toward the characters’ traumatic sufferings allows them to get close to the characters’ unspeakable anxiety, depression, fear, shame, and powerlessness.

2.4 Female resistance

As to the functions of differences that divide the female narrator from the male narrator, Shoshana Felman’s discussion on the function of resistance as a strategy offers an inspiring perspective (Felman 1993). Felman explains female resistance with her own writing experience. It is not the flow of female sexuality that wells up to the writing of her book but the burgeoning conception of female resistance that appears and inhibits her writing.

Female sexuality, being repressed, disguises itself as a mythic mass to resist being portrayed or interpreted. Its silhouette reemerges in the foreground as Felman brings in the germination and execution of male domination and violence while discussing the question of female sexuality and resistance. The reason for the presence of this obscuring mist that shadows and covers the revealing, representing, and interpreting of female sexuality, according to Felman, is that “we” as women do not act like ones, for we do not have our voice, and not even knowing from where we borrowed one. We must become the women who can “get personal” while shifting to the autobiographical and the confessional mode where one’s lived experience and voice emerge. Felman says she solved her problem by adopting Nancy Miller’s strategy in Getting Personal (Miller 1991). She takes up “a subtly nuanced feminist position” while reading through and identifying the autobiographical with the personal and the confessional (Felman 1993, p. 155).

Felman thus points out two possible ways to look at the problem. Firstly, women tend to disguise and cover up their actual sexual flow of desire with resistance. Secondly, the secret of female sexuality veils itself under the effects of patriarchy in education and social cultures. Resistance is thus the way to shun patriarchal repression and restriction. To get close and be compassionate and empathetic toward her characters, especially the traumatic survivors, the female narrator has to undergo this process of resistance in two ways. On the one hand, the female narrator needs to understand and identify with the “we” group, to share and be compassionate with this group to understand all their sufferings and unspeakable fears. On the other, the female narrator must conquer the resistance from her inner self that refuses to let out the secret, partially because her compassion and empathy with the traumatic characters move her to resist letting the secret out to be exposed and written down.

In the traumatic narratives of Chu’s trilogy, the female narrators, while compassionate and empathetic toward the traumatic characters, vicariously experience the traumatic events as the characters relive fragmentally the traumatic experience. The narrators’ sharing with the characters their resistance to letting out the secret and their suffering of the traumatic fragments are part of the traumatic survivors’ recovery process. Herman noted the difficulty of having the traumatic experience revealed in linguistic expression for the observer while seeing what the traumatic survivor has endured:

Witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen. (Herman 1992, p. 2)

However, besides being a patient and empathetic insider and listener to stand together with the traumatic characters and take their traumatic experiences and impacts personally, the narrator is responsible for writing down the traumatic story. They carry with them no less anxiety, pressure, and resistance than the observer of the traumatic patient.

2.5 Narratives and sexual differences

Narrative as writing bears the becoming of a desire driven out of female sexuality and self-resistance. However, it is not a decision between two possible choices but a practice. It represents the dangling mood and dilemma that troubles women who suffer the revealing and covering of passion and desire. Such an ambivalent and vital exemplification of the practice of desire presents a situation in which Felman reads the secret of the entrapped female sexuality. The difficulty of self-resistance unveils the desire that refers to a woman’s lack of awareness of herself as a woman and the lack of an identity of her own:

The self-resistance, not simply of reading as a woman … but of assuming one’s own sexual difference in the very act of reading; of assuming, that is, not the false security of an “identity” or a substantial definition (however nonconformist or divergent) but the very insecurity of a differential movement, which no ideology can fix and of which no institutional affiliation can redeem the radical anxiety, in the performance of an act that constantly – deliberately or unwittingly – enacts our difference yet finally escapes our own control. (The italics are original.) (Felman 1993, p. 10)

Self-resistance offers an opportunity to reclaim and resume the disguised female sexual difference. Self-resistance lays bare an identity lost, and behind it is an anxiety that never gives up the hope to reach out for security. The traumatic survivor tends to use self-resistance and repress female sexuality as self-protection. The communication and interaction between the narrator and the character are more intimate and obscure since the family traumatic event has its roots in wedlock, and the child becomes the scapegoat of the family trauma derived from the unhappy parental marriage. Female sexuality, through the power of self-resistance, demands a reclaim and retrieval of the female reader’s and writer’s genuine acceptance of and mutual trust in their sexual difference. It is not a story of “some other woman,” but a story of “the traumatic woman” that demands her reader to both read and write with her – to bring significance to the story’s narrative, to re-write her story, and to map out the hidden and hampered female desire and sexuality. However, the female narrator’s awareness and rebirth of her sexual difference would nevertheless bring forth a sense of insecurity as well as her traumatic character, who senses the upcoming internal anxiety, whether it is from the unhappy wedlock of the parents or the teaching and regulations of the dominant reign of the social and cultural signs of sexuality.

Starting from seizing for herself the position of sexual difference, Felman uses the concept of the Other – the female Other – as the reading (and the writing) position for the female writer (who is also the female reader of the story). By seizing this position in reading and writing, Felman takes back the controlling power of interpretation. This reading strategy takes the female Other and her voice into the reading of the text – the process of reconstructing and remapping cognition under the female perspective of re-vision. Felman’s reading strategy of revising female resistance illustrates and enriches Barthes’ textual network of the scriptable, writerly text – “the writerly text is ourselves writing” (Barthes 1990, p. 5). The textual network where the writerly text extends its possible networking textuality is where the decoding and recoding of the hermeneutic code reveal the mystery embedded within the polyseme of the text.

In the narratives of Chu’s trilogy, the female narrators and characters share this kind of identity and the “we” position of the female Other. While the female narrators and characters stop resisting and concealing their femininity and sexual differences, it is time that the traumatic sensual and sensational embedded in the narratives reach out to the reader with a sense of sharing. This sharing of emotions, passions, and lived experiences of anxiety, powerlessness, shamefulness, and dissociation draws the reader into the circle of the traumatic “we group” where the domain and knowledge of the narrative under the female narrator’s perspective encourage the emergence and flow of hampered and battered femininity and female sexuality to be revealed in the text.

The problem of female sexuality and resistance embedded in the textural enigma discloses the traumatic experience that keeps haunting the child and hinders the pursuit and consummation of love and desire. Tracing the signs and implications in the narrative initiates the discovery of various interpretations that link to sexual difference and identity. The following passages will illustrate the crucial functions of claiming traumatic experiences as a reading strategy in the study of Chu’s trilogy.

5.1 Sad Coffee Shop

In Sad Coffee Shop, Mathi is genuinely not a tragic character, though she feels her life is not satisfying. She is attracted to the bisexual Hai-An but refuses his invitation to have an affair with him. She has no prejudice against Hai-An’s sexual orientation. Her hesitation and doubt derive not from any gender problem but from her fear of facing and admitting her sexual desire and taking any action.

The narrator of Sad Coffee Shop avoids putting women under an umbrella of common female experience because placing women within a specific continuum to emphasize their mutual support, affection, and commonality in their sisterhood risks ignorance of the precarious female bonds and the nuances of female friendship (Butler 1990, p. 19). The enigma can be revealed and truly understood only when the narrator understands and adopts Mathi’s perspective.

Mathi was three years old when her mother took her to leave her father. Little Mathi suffered scary imagination when she was left alone by her working mother in a small and dark rented room with no window. The horrible nightmares scared little Mathi of being deserted and abandoned. The childhood memories disrupt her from securing an identity. The experience left Mathi with a dark and cold void in her mind. Her mother could offer her no maternal love she desperately needed nor the brightness and warmth of a home to defeat the imaginary monsters hiding in the darkness. She was taken back to her father’s house after her mother’s death but found herself an outsider facing new family members – a stepmother and two stepbrothers.

It is Mathi’s side of the story. Mathi, as a victim, suffers from the traumatic events of her childhood, fear of being abandoned, and surrounded by scaring loneliness. Mathi’s hostile attitudes toward her new family members are the aftermath of her childhood traumatic experiences. The haunting memories as a never-ending nightmare disrupt her self-esteem and identity as a young woman and bereave her of the ability to establish a normal social relationship with others. According to the research of Berntsen and Rubin, traumatic experiences through involuntary repetitions will become the central component of the trauma survivors’ identity. The survivors’ rationale understanding of identity and social roles are sequentially and negatively influenced and contaminated by traumatic events and memories (Berntsen and Rubin 2006, 2007). The disrupted identity and hampered self-esteem become the symptom of childhood trauma, as the textual narrative reveals to us.

However, the narrative offers the reader another version of Mathi’s life with her father’s new family. The female narrator delineates several scenes to reveal quite a different aspect from Mathi’s and allows the reader to peep into Mathi’s relations with the other family members. This strategy offers other characters’ perspectives as mirror reflections for the entrapped Mathi. Since childhood, Mathi has been accustomed to loneliness. She is not inclined to share personal feelings and passion with the new family members around her. She could never build up a normal relationship with them. Mathi takes herself as an outsider and treats her stepmother with open hostility. Mathi’s homecoming does not offer her any opportunity to retrieve amicable relations with her stepmother and stepbrothers. The sweet and cozy at-homeness Gaston Bachelard portrays in The Poetics of Space (1992) cannot be found in Mathi’s experiences of her various homes and shelters. At this stage, the childhood trauma preserves its original form of love and hate represented in Mathi’s human relations.

Once, Mathi angrily accused her stepmother of taking her as an enemy all the time and said to her stepmother’s face, “[You] hated me and took me as an outsider from the very beginning … you are not capable of loving anyone!” (Sad Coffee Shop, p. 146). Mathi’s memory was challenged by her stepbrother, who pointed out that she was the one who was very hard to please and kept finding faults with all the other family members since she returned home to join their family. On another occasion, Mathi’s stepbrother reminded her to beat the distortion the painful growth process might have left in her memory (Sad Coffee Shop, p. 164). Mathi, as a grown-up, thought for the first time whether her growing experience distorted her judgment. Mathi then considered whether the restrictions that she believed seriously infringed on her freedom were derived from society or her distorted personality full of growth scars (Sad Coffee Shop, p. 146). The first part of the narrative ends with the revelation of the cacophony of human relations as symptoms of a traumatic past and its possible counterfeit as social maladjustment disorder. The second part of the narrative focuses on the journey to Madagascar. It offers us another aspect to relate to Mathi’s anxiety and desire to take the trip with her practice and meditation to learn the way of life.

Judging from hindsight, Mathi’s quest for freedom is a two-faced sign. On the one hand, it indicates a physical escape from the traumatic past of impacts and restrictions on desire and sexuality. On the other, it signifies a leap of spiritual transformation that allows Mathi to comprehend and fulfill the ultimate goal and joy of apprehending the way of love by sacrificing her life for the guru in Madagascar. What lies behind the curtain of the sign of freedom is not a fixed significance but a dynamic semiosis that incorporates various traumatic signs and the interrelated significances when different stages of Mathi’s growing process are concerned and analyzed (Tsai 2007, 2013).

Will any lines of flight help Mathi escape the troubled past and the battered memories overloaded with her mother’s unhappiness in marriage and the unknown scare of an abandoned child who desperately desires parental love and care? After a long travel adventure wandering in Madagascar, Mathi finds the answer to her quest when she finally establishes her identity and admits her desire and love with the flow of sexuality.

5.2 The Swallow

In Chu’s second novel, The Swallow, the female protagonist, Ah-Fang, has no interest in men. The first time people in the dance troupe knew she had asthma was when she was taking a lesson guided by their dance instructor, Miss Zhuo, to practice deep meditation. Miss Zhuo demanded every dancer to imagine oneself as a baby in the mother’s womb and thus feel the freedom and bondage within the maternal space and the unbreakable liaison with the mother. Miss Zhuo firmly believed that this practice provided good stimulation to strengthen all the dancers’ imaginative experience of the mutual coalition of the spiritual and the corporal. The linkage between female sexuality and maternal love is vividly envisioned and emphasized in the narrative. However, this imaginative image of a mother carrying the baby in her womb triggers Ah-Fang’s asthma attack. Dancers in the meditation class took Ah-Fang’s asthma as a sign of illness. However, asthma as a Peircean sign turns out to indicate the lack of a mother’s love and care – the significance of Ah-Fang’s trauma. Asthma is not a pure sign of illness but a symbolic sign of trauma. Ah-Fang’s asthma is the imaginative linkage between the leaving mother and the abandoned baby. Ah-Fang had no image of her mother because her mother left her when she was born. For Miss Zhao, the imaginative womb correlates the fulfillment of female sexuality and jouissance with the joy of the expectance of the beloved baby. Nevertheless, for Ah-Fang, the mother’s womb is the symbol of the threatening menace of deep sorrow and death of love transferred from mother to baby.

Later in the narrative, elements such as asthma, death, female sexuality, and jouissance will further develop to form a unique death-and-life correlation. Miss Zhuo related Ah-Fang’s asthma to her resistance to passionate interaction and detestation of desires and sexuality. She firmly believed that the resistance to any physical contact with men makes Ah-Fang incomplete while her female sexuality is being “bracketed.” Resistance to physical interaction is the symptom of Ah-Fang’s willingness to bury her female sexuality, abandon her female identity, and imagine herself as a person of no sexual desire. In The Swallow, asthma changes from a sign indicating illness to becoming the enigma, the hermeneutic code, to open Ah-Fang’s hidden family scandal. Ah-Fang had no memory of her mother. The trauma of losing her mother when she was born became an ineffable family secret. Rejection and resistance to sexual desire and female sexuality, therefore, become the protective layers that wrap up the family scandal, and asthma is the enigma and symptom.

While analyzing traumatic cases and the possible recoveries of the survivors, Herman describes the symptom of the traumatic event as the object that the trauma stands for. According to Herman’s research, “The central dialectic of psychological trauma is the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud … But far too often, secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom” (Herman 1992, p. 1). In Ah-Fang’s case, asthma, instead of the traumatic loss of her mother and loving care, becomes the symptom that signifies the trauma. Ah-Fang’s mother stopped speaking when she was pregnant and left home immediately after her baby girl, Ah-Fang, was born. Ah-Fang could never fill the void caused by her mother’s sudden leave without a goodbye. The loss of a mother’s love turned into a physical “lack” of air instead. The desire to hide in her mother’s womb becomes ineffable. Since the reason for her mother’s sudden leaving was unknown, it finally became the untouchable family secret of her parents’ marriage. Ah-Fang could not find enough air to fill the void in her body. It is an internal and spiritual void. Female sexuality is furthermore repressed and replaced by illness. As the autodiegetic female narrator, Ah-Fang could delineate the lack of a mother’s love, but the protagonist, Ah-Fang, never had the opportunity to fill the dark void (Tsai 2014). Asthma is the linkage Ah-Fang connects herself with her missing mother.

The autodiegetic narrator Ah-Fang, the narrative voice of the first-person narrator and protagonist in The Swallow, habitually refrains from revealing the cause of her mother’s detachment and unsociability. The female narrator/protagonist constantly suffers inner resistance as she writes/reads her own story. As a narrator, Ah-Fang must relive her mother’s numbness, understand herself (the voiceless little girl Ah-Fang), and conquer her resistance as a writer. While the female narrator Ah-Fang and the protagonist Ah-Fang can get a truce with their inner resistance and not blame themselves for the existence of the traumatic void that tortures the two pairs – the narrator and the protagonist as a pair, and Ah-Fang’s mother and Ah-Fang as another – then the female narrator can stand together with the voiceless female Self/Other and to decode the enigma. Only when Ah-Fang obtains the power to love, appreciate, acknowledge, and accept others’ love and errors can Ah-Fang, as a narrator, approach the narrator’s inner world and that of Ah-Fang (as a protagonist). Consequently, as “we,” the narrator and the protagonist Ah-Fang, can start re-reading the secret and solving the enigma.

5.3 Thirty Thousand Feet Under

If, as Herman pointed out, “an understanding of psychological trauma begins with rediscovering history” (Herman 1992, p. 2), the female narrator faces a different challenge in Chu’s third novel, Thirty Thousand Feet Under. The female narrator has to go through the traumatic past that troubled the female protagonist, Ji-Lan, and the bisexual male protagonist, Jun-Xia. Ji-Lan could not escape the history of being rejected by the same-gender loving man whom her brother loved. Jun-Xia could not release himself from the family trauma and kept committing serial crimes of home break-ins and rapes. Writing the stories of Ji-Lan and Jun-Xia becomes a process of rediscovering their family secrets. Ji-Lan’s failures derive from the self-deny of her physical charms and female sexuality. Jun-Xia is imprisoned in his past inability, for he was too little and powerless to rescue his father from death. While Ji-Lan was too young to understand gender problems and sexual orientations, Jun-Xia was too little and weak to save his father’s life. Ji-Lan and Jun-Xia are similar yet different in their response and attitude towards their traumas. They both suffer from traumatic events and involuntary, repetitive, haunting memories.

According to Garbutt, Rennoldson, and Gregson’s research on shame and self-compassion, they found that childhood experiences of adversity brought trauma survivors the negative emotions of shame as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (Garbutt et al. 2023, p. 7194). Herman’s research showed, “Shame is a response to helplessness, the violation of bodily integrity, and the indignity suffered in the eyes of another person … In the aftermath of traumatic events, survivors doubt both others and themselves” (Herman 1992, p. 58). This kind of trauma survivors has emotionally damaging memories of the traumatic past, which form sufficiently in them their central self-understanding and view of the world. Through repetitive trauma memories, the sense of shame will later bring forth depressive disorders (Thompson and Berenbaum 2006). In the novel, Ji-Lan tries to fight the trauma with frequent careless dating with men, although she lacks confidence in her charms. Jun-Xia suffers a sense of shame and uses the power of the scalpel in violent break-ins and rapes to arm his fragility. Shame as a symptom of trauma points to different kinds of personality development and leads to different kinds of consequent inflictions on the trauma survivors.

The narrative reveals many tiny yet lively interactions among Ji-Lan, her brother, and her brother’s roommate, whom she liked. Ji-Lan frequently visited the dormitory room of her brother and his roommate. She tried to squeeze herself into the narrow space between her brother and his roommate. However, she cannot mix herself into the two boys’ gendered space. The two boys’ secret kept Ji-Lan out of their circle. The female narrator carefully reveals another layer of mutual understanding and harmony between the two same-gender loving young men in the narrative, entirely out of Ji-Lan’s expectation and projection. The semiotic isotopic layer, though it seemed hetero to Ji-Lan, preserves its uniqueness or isotopy (Greimas 1983, 1987, 1990) of the same gender-loving young men.

The joyful interactions between Jun-Xia and his father are daily routines between father and son. However, the separate rooms Jun-Xia’s parents respectively occupied tell us another story. The father’s room is downstairs, and the mother’s is at the upper level. Jun-Xia was too little to know the cause of the family tragedy. The innocent adoration of the boy toward his father, paralleling his mother’s tears, his father’s occasionally not returning home, and his mother’s poisoning his father to death, makes the significance of the Greimasian semiotic square of the family a vivid construction of contradictory pairs (Greimas 1983, 1987, 1990). The narrator’s intentional concealment of the horrible dying scene of the father shows her sympathy toward the little boy. The female narrator partially keeps the secret and reveals fragmented truth in the narrative, thus enabling her compassionate notice to flow between the lines.

Jun-Xia suffers the traumatic experience of his father’s death. The last scene of his father’s being poisoned and desperately struggling before death to get out of his room was a shivery nightmare to little Jun-Xia. This traumatic family secret becomes a scar that drives him to commit crimes under the excuse of relieving men and women from the prison house of shriveled desire and stagnant sexuality. His father’s tragic death dissolved the close relationship among the family members and destroyed the little boy’s belief and trust in the possibility of love flow. When the two kinds of distrust and inability meet with the seemingly invincible power of the scalpel, the young and promising adolescent becomes a serial rapist and lover of home break-ins. Jun-Xia internalized the harm inflicted on him through repetitive traumatic experiences and memories. In the overwhelming release from traumatic powerlessness and the joy of break-ins, he turned his victimization into the mastery of violence and finally became a victimizer.

The narrator lays emphasis firstly on Jun-Xia’s indulgence in the determination to open any closed door and set free the people and their passions as if he were releasing his father and a father’s love for his son from the prison house. Every time Jun-Xia intruded into a house, he insisted on an inquiry with a tone of loving care to the victims whether they released their pressure and enjoyed the flow of sexuality after consummation as if he had provided the scenario as compensation to redeem his father’s and mother’s “prisoned” and “poisoned” desire and sexuality. The complex post-traumatic stress disorder, through the violence of home break-ins and rapes, ironically builds up a relationship with false hostage rescue and takes forced sex as the liberation of an imprisoned flow of sexuality (Tsai 2018, 2019).

Jun-Xia’s mother never said anything to him. Her resistance to communication cuts all the possible exchanges of concepts and feelings. On the contrary, under Jun-Xia’s threat, the raped women and men cannot but express what they want. The narrator compares and contrasts the two situations and points out the enigma behind the family tragedy. In this novel, Jun-Xia and Ji-Lan are mercifully allowed to begin with their recovery processes. They became each other’s savior through a coincidence when Jun-Xia went to find Ji-Lan one evening and saw their neighbor, a moron boy named Sha-Di, outside her garden. Jun-Xia did not show up to the boy to accuse him of his wrongdoings as he saw Sha-Di peeping at Ji-Lan taking a shower. Ji-Lan gave Sha-Di her kind understanding of and comfort toward his physiological sexual reaction with a bosom hug when she got out of her bathroom. Jun-Xia witnessed Ji-Lan’s open-mindedness and compassion toward Sha-Di’s misdemeanor and desire. Ji-Lan’s concern and loving care toward Sha-Di bring forth another kind of loving care, understanding, forgiveness, and compassion for Jun-Xia. This episode releases Jun-Xia from his traumatic restrictions and confinements of weakness and impotence. Jun-Xia’s and Ji-Lan’s handling of this event transformed the thing’s nature and consequences. Shame not only triggers harm to others but could also mediate compassion toward others (Garbutt et al. 2023, p. 7198). Jun-Xia’s distorted understanding of the family secret generated from his shame and desire for mastery stimulated him to violently release what he believed the “imprisoned” men and women from sexuality. However, Ji-Lan’s compassion not only brought the moron boy an experience of the fulfillment of the drive of passion and the flow of sexuality but also initiated Jun-Xia to another level of understanding how the need to fulfill a desire and release the flow of sexuality can be obtained not through violence and threat but compassion and altruistic love (Tsai 2018, 2019).