Quest for Roots: Trauma and Heroism in Wu He’s Yusheng and Tang Shiang-Chu’s Yusheng: Seediq Bale

"Musha 1930", a chapter in Michael Berry's monograph A History of Pain : Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, details how Taiwanese and Chinese nationalists have appropriated the pain of the Musha Incident, including both Mona Rudao's rebellion and the Japanese reprisal, for nation-building or profit.  Numbers can give some sense of the magnitude of the pain. Of the 1,236 people living in the six rebellious Tgdaya villages before the attack that Mona Rudao led on an assembly of Japanese officials on October 27, 1930, only 298 survived the Japanese reprisal.  The pain lingers, particularly in memories of the force relocation to a new village called Chuanzhong / Kawanakajima (川中島), which was renamed Qingliu (清流) after the war and is know as "Alang Gluban" to the Seediq people, in the concentration camp-like conditions that the survivors from the rebellious villagers endured there; and in the bad blood between the Tgdaya and the Toda as a result of the Toda collaboration during the reprisal, particularly during the Second Musha Incident, when Toda warriors were allowed to attack the defenseless Tgdaya rebels in two shelters.