My distinguished padlet by XING LE WONG https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03 Made with a dash of wit en-us 2022-02-24 00:23:21 UTC 2026-02-02 04:32:30 UTC hello@padlet.com What is trauma in Literature? xingle_wong06 https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063589355 - Intertextuality, repetition, fragmentation, and language manipulation
- Trauma literature is at least as much about the problematics of storytelling as it is about actual traumatic events. It’s about the difficulty of representing the truth of an experience so horribly extraordinary that it cannot be contained within the human mind, let alone within the borders of a page. It’s about, in the words of trauma scholar Dori Laub, the simultaneous “imperative to tell” and “impossibility of telling.”]]> 2022-02-24 00:25:25 UTC https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063589355 Guan Yin / Mother (P3 and P11) https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063594292 - 'My sister told me that, after he beat us, he would go to the statue to ask for forgiveness. I refused to believe it. The statue was small and only as long as my forearm: how could it give mercy? It sat there, its eyes mere slits with tiny white pupils. With its right hand clasping a lotus, the statue looked more bored than divine.' -> they do not believe that their mother would give their father forgiveness for mistreating them 
- 'I told her that she probably looked like the Guan Yin statue. She said that she thought so too.' -> their mother is a distant figure, so much so that she had been replaced by the Guan Yin; the Guan Yin is the only semblance of a 'motherly' figure to the children, one that their father goes to to beg for mercy, almost as if the Guan Yin provides protection of some sort
- 'The Guan Yin statue I place in my house, on the altar with a picture of my father. Whenever Yun comes over, I notice how she casts long glances at the goddess. I think that she wonders why something so broken and old rests here although she may have guessed that it must be important enough to remain in the house']]> 2022-02-24 00:29:40 UTC https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063594292 Marriage, Fatherhood (P10) https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063594733 - 'When my daughter Yun was born, I had thought that my violent days were over'
- but he is still combative, even if not verbally. "to find an enemy we could share", "I feel almost betrayed", words like enemy and betrayed show his inability to break free from his years of violence, using these harsh terms with his family
- shows how his years of violence and trauma shaped him irreversibly

]]> 2022-02-24 00:30:02 UTC https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063594733 Pa's Stories - Heroes (P7) https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063595582 - 'His stories were always about men who seemed to see the world from a distance, who had no concerns for love but only for loyalty, courage, and power.'
- 'The stories about himself were rare and distant.'
- 'He seemed certainly to us a person much more content with his past than with his present.'
          - in the past he had love! now he is loveless! he's become the men in his stories]]> 2022-02-24 00:30:50 UTC https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063595582 Thesis jermaine_lee06 https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063607768 Role of Protagonist's mother: she is absent from his life and is why he lacks a 'guiding hand' to break the cycle of generational trauma that his father entraps him in. She was not a protective figure for her children, fictionalised to the point that she is symbolised by the Goddess of Mercy because the children don’t remember what she looks like)
The role of the father is that of an antagonist in his children's lives who inflicts trauma onto his son and continues the trauma cycle. The only kind of love he shows his son is how to survive in the world and 'toughening him up'.

Protagonist as a father: he plays a similar role as his father in the sense that he inflicts violence onto other people (his wife, his father) as a result of his childhood trauma. Protagonist uses violence as a coping mechanism/asserting dominance makes him feel powerful and forget how much control he lacks in his life as his father taught him to do when he was young.

]]> 2022-02-24 00:41:35 UTC https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2063607768 are the parents protective or harmful p7 https://padlet.com/xingle_wong06/1lozevv9zv92eu03/wish/2068608881 -  told stories but rarely about himself
- the heroes he talks abt are 'men who had no concerns for love but only for loyalty, courage, and power', possibly imparting these values into his own children -> not necessarily 'harmful' in the moment, but in the long run; although the stories are of powerful 'heroes', they're violent and lacking in emotion
- 'stories about himself were rare and distant', making the connection to his children lesser -> they cannot relate or understand their father, and even get the impression that he was 'much more content with his past than with his present'



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