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The mid-seventeenth century in China, from the 1620s through the 1670s, was one of the most acutely violent in the country's long history. Keeping things in turmoil were roving-rebel movements, political purges, defeat of the Ming dynasty by the Manchu-led Qing regime, repressions attending the Qing conquest and consolidation, and attempted defections of major feudatories from Qing rule. The impact of such destabilizing politico-military developments on the highly literate stratum of Chinese society is manifest in every genre of belles lettres favored by the contemporaneous elite, poetry and drama probably offering the best examples according to the criteria of expressivity and pertinence to memory studies.1 Most remarkable, however, and overflowing the banks of belles lettres, is the impetus that events gave to a general growth in self-writing—the emergence of fully autobiographical voices from behind the screen of biographical historiography, which, as Pei-yi Wu shows, had been especially evident in China since the latter part of the sixteenth century.2 A focus on autobiography per se allows us to see only part, however, of a much larger phenomenon. Because of a concatenation of factors—rising literacy, the populari-zation of a philosophy that stressed individual thoughts and feelings, unprecedented political struggles and extraordinary experiences born of both natural and manmade calamities such as widespread epidemics and warfare—the middle of the seventeenth century in China was marked End Page 14 by a phenomenal outpouring of memoir-like personal accounts, which, in their variety of content and general lack of genre adherence, are best subsumed by the inclusive term ego-document.3 In number per capita, social range of provenance, and quality of expression these Chinese ego-documents are matched only by those of contemporaneous England, torn by civil war. Moreover, personal writings from the Ming-Qing transition exhibit for us the workings of human memory to a degree that rarely is seen in materials prior to the letters, diaries, and memoirs of Europeans and Americans in the nineteenth century.4 The particular work examined in this article stands out among many dozens of its kind primarily for the tender age of its author and the relative explicitness with which he was willing to recall for posterity his own physical and mental pain. The violence of the fall of the Ming and the Qing conquest having been so protracted and extensive, it is not surprising that many of the personal accounts evince great psychological as well as physical suffering. It made little difference, so far as the infliction of individual suffering was concerned, that much of the violence was sanctioned by the political institutions and cultural values of the people involved, such as the organized military conflict, righteous suicides, and jailings that we see in this article, rather than "deviant," as in the commission of atrocities and injustices (also culturally defined).5 The precise ways in which suffering was psychosomatically absorbed and dealt with, how shocks were remembered and understood, however, had much to do with individuals' particular social positions, felt obligations, creedal orientations, and community resources. In other words, sociocultural factors then and now are important in determining whether stress becomes traumatic, whether the traumatization is prolonged, and how (if ever) trauma-induced disability is overcome.6 The syndrome that we today call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not defined as such until Western civilization repeatedly experienced the terrors of modern warfare.7 Yet it need not be assumed that PTSD is an affliction only of "the modern mind." In one particular memoir from seventeenth-century China, the Yusheng lu (Record of life beyond my due) by Zhang Maozi, written when the author was perhaps nineteen years old,8 we find a virtual catalog of ways in which the violence of warfare and political upheaval are known to disintegrate what is integral to the life-spirit of human beings anywhere, rendering End Page 15 them first...
Lynn Struve (Thu,) studied this question.