Echoes of Silence. Memories, Trauma and the Voices of Comfort Women in Twenty Two

Abstract

This article examines Twenty Two (Ershi’er 二十二, dir. Guo Ke 郭柯, 2015) through trauma and memory studies in Chinese cinema. Recording the lives of the last surviving Chinese “comfort women” subjected to sexual slavery during the Sino-Japanese War, the documentary foregrounds the embodied presence of aging female survivors and the afterlives of gendered violence. The analysis places the film in dialogue with mainstream feature-film representation of the war, often structured by spectacle and male-coded heroic arcs, to clarify how distinct representational regimes shape what can be seen, said, and remembered about wartime trauma in contemporary Chinese cinema. It asks how Twenty Two articulates female-centered memory and trauma through documentary form, arguing that it develops an alternative ethics of witnessing grounded in durational framing, silence, and testimonial intimacy. By shifting attention away from spectacular victimhood schemata toward the conditions and textures of testimony, the film complicates the relation between individual recollection and collective historical memory.