A History of Pain probes the restaging, representation, and reimagining of historical violence and atrocity in contemporary Chinese fiction, film, and popular culture, exploring what these representations tell us about history, memory, and the shifting status of national identity. This book examines five specific historical moments spanning more than six decades: the Musha Incident (1930); the Rape of Nanjing (1937-1938); the February 28 Incident (1947); the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976); and Tiananmen Square (1989). There is a sixth section on the Handover of Hong Kong (1997).

From films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness (1989) and Lou Ye's Summer Palace (2006) to novels such as Ye Zhaoyan's Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age, Berry charts the many ways in which trauma has been imagined in modern China. A History of Pain identifies two primary modes in which the restaging of historical violence operates in the context of nationalism and popular culture: centripetal trauma, referring to violence inflicted from the outside that inspires a renewed examination or articulation of the Chinese nation, and centrifugal trauma, used to describe a radical shift in the creation of traumatic narratives introduced from within and projected outward into a new transnational vision of global dreams and, sometimes, nightmares.