'Viewing mainlander Chinese as refugees, Yang breaks new ground in applying the lens of trauma studies to modern Chinese history, illuminating heretofore unexplored processes of ethnic identity formation leading them to become Taiwanese.' Madeline Y. Hsu, University of Texas, Austin 'Yang provides a most compelling study of China in the 1949 crisis. Mapping out multivalent modernities across the political, historical, and psychic territories in Cold War China and Taiwan, he looks into the contested modes of memory through which Chinese people have reckoned with their experience from ideological confrontation to familial split, from exile to homecoming.' David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University 'This book is an exceptionally careful and interesting study of the politics of memory by an author who is passionately engaged in this subject.' Henrietta Harrison, Journal of Interdisciplinary History