War Trauma in Young Women's Memories of a Violent Past in Southeast Asia

Children's classics such as Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (1947/1952) have proven to be very influential in helping young readers understand both the horror and the unending tedium of war. They have also been instrumental in encouraging publishers to make available other first-person narratives of children traumatised by war. However, life narratives of war have so far been explicitly white and western, overlooking stories from Asia and other parts of the world. So far, only a few Southeast Asian authors have been represented in the discussion of memoirs of war trauma for young readers, and even fewer of these authors have been young women or addressed the trials of living as a girl during wartime and as a refugee. As Sheila Allan notes in her introduction when explaining the reasons why she published her diary, ‘not many people know there were women and children interned in Changi Prison under the Japanese Occupation’. This article focuses on representations of war in childhood memories from Asian female authors that have been published for children in English, including Sheila Allan's Diary of a Girl in Changi (1994) and the verse novel Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai (2011) . The article especially looks at the effect of war on young women through an analysis of life-writing for young readers related to wars in Southeast Asia, in terms of what these first-person war narratives tell about war trauma and the tools the authors use to represent sensitive and traumatic events.