READING THE WOUND: TRAUMA IN LISA SEE’S SHANGHAI GIRLS

The paper is an endeavor to negotiate the implications of trauma which is entrenched in Chinese women’s life through a reading of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls. It tends to advocate how mental wound surpasses physical agony which creates a rift in a victim’s personality. As trauma is an inseparable part of human challenges, for Chinese women it validates the shadowed part of their existence in a patriarchal society coupled with devastation following war. Various traumatic events engulf Chinese women and psychical trauma enters the mind which remains inseparable from their memory. The novel entails how a person inflicted with severe mental injury negotiate trauma.