In “The Passed Made Present: Trinh Mai’s Still Quiet and Live Relations” Kelsey Chen explores how Trinh Mai’s Still Quiet (2023) reconfigures time and being, proposing that the “passed” are not simply past but remain vitally present through rituals of address and communion. Still Quiet is a speculative portrait of a sister lost to war, rendered on lettered banners addressed to the late Chi Dung. Through close analysis of Mai’s letters, this paper argues that Chi Dung, though no longer biologically alive, inhabits a quiet yet relational condition, resisting biocentric definitions of life. In this way, Mai’s work asserts that those taken by war may be silenced but not erased: “you can kill us, but you can’t make us dead.” Rather than reconstructing a lost past or assembling fragmented histories, Still Quiet uncovers an alternative temporality where the passed actively shape the present. The work rearticulates trauma and loss not as absence, but as sites infused with persistent life, showing how even death-like silence may hold continuity, vitality, and connection.
Xiaowen Xu in “Intangible but True Ghosts in Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) by Madeleine Thien” traces how pre-modern conceptions of spectrality reemerge in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Early Chinese ghost stories from the 4th century often appeared as unofficial historical records, positioning ghosts as evidence that “the way of spirits is not a fabrication.” By the 9th century, however, ghosts evolved into a literary device within fictional narratives, written in Classical Chinese, that addressed the unresolved grief of readers traumatized by the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763). Since then, the ghost has functioned as a compelling trope for Chinese writers who translate collective trauma into intimate encounters with spectrality. In Thien’s novel, spectrality enables the female protagonist’s spiritual journey across generations of Chinese revolutionary trauma. Thien’s narrative insists that the dead endure, not only in memory but through the act of storytelling: “They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but intangible as ghosts” (Thien 461). The paper argues that spectrality becomes a narrative strategy for reinhabiting erased histories and reimagining relational possibilities in the aftermath of trauma.
Finally, Tavleen Purewal, in “Archive Trauma: Disciplining Punjabi Queer Presence in the Diaspora,” explores Asian spectrality within colonial archives in Vancouver to trace an intergenerational diasporic map of trauma that diverges from familiar narratives where the homeland dominates diasporic identity. Focusing on Soraya Peerbaye’s documentary poem Tell, which engages the 1997 murder of Reena Virk—a 14-year-old Punjabi girl killed by her white peers in Saanich, B.C.— Purewal examines how Peerbaye constructs a necro-poetics that reveals Reena’s queer spectral presence through court documents. To deepen this analysis, the paper juxtaposes Tell with early 20th-century police records documenting Punjabi migrants in Vancouver arrested for alleged sodomy. Purewal argues that Peerbaye’s work is haunted by these criminalized queer Punjabi men, whose racialized and pathologized presence in the colonial archive forms a spectral lineage that shapes—and forecloses—Reena Virk’s survival. The poem thus becomes a site where layered queer and racial traumas converge, revealing how archival structures discipline diasporic Asian bodies across time through silence, erasure, and spectral return.