The Epilogue summarizes the main findings of the book. It discusses mainlander identity formation in democratized Taiwan in conjunction with contemporary social survey data and the historical trajectory delineated in the preceding chapters. The discussion offers an alternative way to contemplate the current and future relationship between Taiwan and China from the perspective of conflicting historical memories. The Epilogue also reveals the author’s personal background and subject position – as a descendant of native Taiwanese political victims who tries to understand mainlander trauma. It cautions against the Caruthian psychoanalytic assumption that human suffering constitutes some kind of universal experience that will automatically bring diverse peoples and cultures together. It also questions the sociological approach’s tendency to see shared traumatic memories as mere instrumentalist “social constructs” for power and identity, which sometimes obstructs the larger ethical goals of recognition and reconciliation. Based on the author’s inner struggle and transformation in researching and writing about the misery and displacement of his perceived oppressors, the chapter proposes “multidirectional empathic unsettlements” as a modality to build historically informed cross-cultural empathy that could reconcile nations and communities with entangled but incompatible memories of past suffering.

Throughout the 1950s, most mainlanders thought their stay in Taiwan would only be temporary. According to their shared recollections today, Chiang Kai-shek’s vow to retake China was the main reason for this wishful thinking. Based on the study of major newspapers and magazines published in 1950s Taiwan, this chapter identifies a different source for this unwarranted optimism. It argues that the mainlanders’ “sojourner mentality” should be understood in the longue durée of war/displacement that straddled the temporal boundary of 1949 and the geographical boundary of the Taiwan Strait. Many of the expellees had previously been refugees during Japan’s invasion of China. In 1950s Taiwan, their earlier displacement became a major source of consolation, inspiration, and optimism. This “sojourner mentality” and memory production was therapeutic. But it nevertheless contributed to the mainlanders’ “unholy alliance” with the authoritarian Nationalist regime and their continued estrangement from the local Taiwanese population, whom they looked down upon as “coachable compatriots.” The chapter ends with the shock of the Sino-American Joint Communiqué in 1958 during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. The event greatly reduced the mainlanders’ hope of return. It shifted the focus of their memory production from earlier wartime displacement to provincial native places.

The Introduction starts off by drawing attention to the “memory boom” in contemporary Taiwan among the “mainlanders” – the elderly Chinese civil war exiles and their Taiwan-born children. The mainlander “memory boom” revolves around their traumatic expulsion from China in the mid-twentieth century, which had been suppressed for nearly half a century. It then introduces the book’s main argument – the great exodus serves as the collective “cultural trauma” for the mainlanders to reinvent themselves as deserving citizens of a democratized Taiwan. Next, the chapter provides a brief history of Taiwan. This is followed by an overview of Chinese civil war historiography. The historiographical discussion segues into a theoretical discussion that problematizes the “single event” model of both the psychoanalytic approach and the sociological approach to trauma and memory. The theoretical discussion offers an alternative model based on the multi-event trajectory of mainlander trauma. It makes a categorical distinction between the mnemonic “cultural trauma” and the substantive “social trauma.” The chapter then connects this new understanding of trauma and memory to theorizing diaspora, which underscores dispossessed people’s temporal displacement. The chapter ends with an assessment of the research and debate on mainlander identity formation in present-day Taiwan.

Chapter 1 presents a social history of the great exodus. It argues that in late-1940s and early-1950s Taiwan, the influx of civil war refugees from China produced two forms of social dislocation or “social trauma” – one experienced by the mainland refugees themselves; the other experienced by the native Taiwanese population who resided in the island’s major cities. The mainlander social trauma is illustrated by both personal testimonies given decades later at the present time and historical evidence: population census, archival social data, and newspapers. The Taiwanese dislocation due to the social upheaval generated by the incursion of a large number of dispossessed mainlanders is not remembered collectively nowadays. It is nonetheless revealed by the same sets of documentary evidence that illustrate mainlander displacement. By highlighting the discrepancy between what is remembered and what is forgotten in today’s Taiwan with regard to the great exodus, the chapter illuminates the difference between history and memory. It underlines the methodological point of the book: scholars need to conduct historical research to put contemporary memories in perspective.

Chapter 3 uncovers the memory production that centered on the mainlanders’ native places in China, which emerged after the shock of 1958. When people realized that they might never see home again in their lifetimes, a profound sense of loss and depression began to set it. The need to mitigate this “social trauma of the diminishing hope (for return)” resulted in efforts to gather, preserve, and disseminate “local references” – historical and cultural information about one’s home provinces, counties, towns, and villages in China via shared memories. These efforts manifested themselves in the publication of provincially based magazines and books, as well as in public exhibitions and the construction of temples and cultural museums. The mainlander native-place associations became the main driving force behind these mnemonic projects from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. Going against the previous interpretation that saw these activities as part of the state-led Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, the chapter argues that the production of native-place memories was closely associated with mainland exiles’ attempts to rebuild community, to seek roots locally in Taiwan, and to pass on their native-place identities to their Taiwan-born children. Unfortunately, young mainlanders were uninterested in their parents’ native-place memories and identities.