Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: Trauma and Healing in Contemporary Asian American Literature ………1

CHAPTER 1: Discovering Beauty through Illness and Failure in Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered…………………………………………………………………………...23

CHAPTER 2: Open Wounds and Half Lives: Post-traumatic Illness and the Struggle to Heal in Lan Cao’s The Lotus and the Storm………………………………………...66

CHAPTER 3: Testimony in Asian American Literature………………………………………116

CHAPTER 4: Intergenerational Trauma in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous………………………………………………………………………………………..159

CHAPTER 5: The Trauma of Citizenship: Collective Healing in Lawson Inada’s Internment Poetry……………………………………………………………………………….188

Index