War, Trauma and Diasporic Identity in Vyvyane Loh's <i>Breaking the Tongue</i>

ABSTRACT Japan's involvement in the Second World War offers provocative narrative material for authors who write about the cultural politics of race under wartime conditions, such as the internment experience of Japanese Americans in the United States and the mass killings of Chinese (Operation Sook Ching), suspected of anti‐Japanese sentiments in Singapore. In 2004, Malaysian‐born Chinese American author Vyvyane Loh published a historical novel, Breaking the Tongue , thematising the widespread and systematic torture and killing of subjects of ethnic Chinese descent then living in the British colony of Singapore. The Japanese invasion of Singapore affords Vyvyane Loh historical and narrative materials to represent the cultural politics of loyalty and betrayal, the body in pain (Elaine Scarry), forms of nationhood and manifestations of subaltern subjectivity. This invasion transforms the local and racial(ised) body into a site of trauma that complicates conceptions of racial, cultural and national identity.