UCLA

Taking Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (2017) as an ethical and literary antecedent, this thesis examines Li Bo-jian’s novella The Nine Righteous Ones (2019) and its screen adaptation, Faithful (2023). Although Chinese and Taiwanese educational and institutional contexts differ, both associate teaching with moral exemplarity. I ask how teacher-perpetrators exploit that authority to disguise sexual violence as romance and how literary narratives prompt readers and viewers to reconsider the interpretations that sustain it. My comparative close readings show that these works do not present victims as incapable of voicing their traumatic experiences and passively waiting for outside listeners’ rescue and redress, as envisioned in the post-modernist branches of trauma studies. In First Love, Si-chi rereads and annotates her own diary, undertaking an act of self-witnessing that rebuts the language of romance the teacher has used to disguise the assault. Si-chi’s friends and later readers become witnesses by allowing her counter-interpretation to reshape their previous misunderstandings and to shoulder ethical responsibilities to take action and respond to the tragedy’s unresolved claims. The Nine and Faithful not only feature protagonists who refute the imposition of a patriarchal interpretation on their experiences, but also disseminate this rereading practice to a wider network of survivors, silent bystanders, indirect beneficiaries, and enabling institutions. The pursuit of justice therefore requires a collective labor I call “re-membering”: the work of weaving social relations into an accountable community of witnesses attentive to survivors’ claims. The two later works draw on the classical Chinese concepts of reciprocity (bao 報) and righteousness (yi 義), which function not only as theoretical tools of literary analysis but also as interactive and ethical devices that position outside readers and viewers within unresolved bao obligations. Rather than treating yi as the inherent virtue of a solitary hero, these works reimagine righteousness as an incremental communal practice of remembering, believing, and acting. This practice recognizes power asymmetries, social vulnerability, and survivors’ authority to determine how they participate in the pursuit of justice. Together, these three works begin to form a women-centered literary lineage of self-interpretation and responsive witnessing, complicating both a male-centered Chinese canon and branches of Euro-American trauma theory that favor silence and unspeakability in narratives of trauma.