Trauma: A living archive

Luoyang Chen

How do you archive trauma? Like you archive posts on Instagram that people can no longer see, if they weren’t there to see it. That you yourself can’t see unless you seek it out. If it were that easy, I would not be stuck with this one. I would be able to handle ten thousand traumas if it were that easy.

I wish it was that easy.

Dr AI still doesn’t know me. Neither does his supervisor – Head of Discipline, nor Head of School to whom I should be grateful (should I?). 

I was invisible in his class. Week one, week two. Weeks went by. Week ten, his email found me. Then I was in his office:

Yes please, close the door. Tell me about what you know about the ‘One.’ Is this what Simone de Beauvoir means by the ‘One’ or is this what you think Simone de Beauvoir means by the ‘One’? I don’t believe that you wrote this essay. As a teacher of ESL students for many years, I can tell. This essay is too well-written. The language doesn’t look like it’s written by a non-native English speaker. You know I study German and…Did someone help you write this? I am not sure if I should believe you. No, don’t take this as an offence. I will think about it – whether or not to raise an academic misconduct investigation. You may leave now. Yes, please leave it open.

I wasn’t sure how to take it. As I walked down the stairs – more like dropping, step by step – I felt detached, disoriented, and depleted. I couldn’t make it to the ground floor. Instead, I found myself curled up against the wall in the corner of the first floor, sobbing. I texted my friend Eddie, feeling painfully alone, and immediately he replied with the f-word.

‘That is pure rot,’ he said.

I belonged to the least desirable demographic of international students in Australia, which is to say, Chinese. I was aware of that. Chinese – so many; dishonest; awful English. I was aware of that. That’s why when a barista asked me if I was Japanese, I replied, ‘Unfortunately.’

‘It is unfortunate that this happened to you,’ one might say. Really, this incident is bad but it is not that bad. I know that. Sometimes I do feel maybe I am dramatising this.

But I cried whenever I talked about this. This was what happened the day following the meeting: at 1pm, unexpectedly I saw my teacher J and unexpectedly, I cried out loud while talking about what happened yesterday; at 2pm, in company with my teacher R, I burst into tears while consulting with student advocacy who didn’t support me that much, emotionally and strategically; at 7pm, I texted my friend Kye and burst into tears. I found myself repeating the same story, same tears, to different people including those who I did not consider myself close to during that period. I didn’t know I was that easy.

It took over a month for the Head of School to respond to my concerns. I showed up in her office because she didn’t reply to my emails. But she was not there. I was so fragile. I gradually felt aggressive as well. I pictured myself smashing the window in her office and jumping to my death. I thought that could be her punishment. But I didn’t dare to do it.  I dared only to imagine. In the meantime, the Head of Discipline attempted to intervene because Dr AI told him that my writing was suspicious. My teacher P said the Head of Discipline is a coward because his initial email began with ‘investigation’ and his final email ended with ‘I hereby withdraw my invitation’. He is a coward because I told him that without any valid reason for his so-called ‘investigation’, it would only be bullying, though teacher P called it racism. ‘I hereby withdraw my invitation,’ I laughed.

Because, really, there was no valid reason for suspecting me of collusion or plagiarism, except that Dr AI believed that it was too well-written. Another teacher certainly disagreed that it was well-written. She marked my essay because the mutual trust between Dr AI and I was broken, and the mark I received was 78. I mean…

If my essay was too good to be written by a non-native English speaker, why 78? If it was not that good, and only deserved 78, then what was all this about? From the beginning, I was not expected to be good. If I were good, I would be seen as too good and thus too bad. Too bad.

To be powerless, one is expected to encounter absurdity. I suppose Dr AI didn’t know that I would fight back…