Question posed by classmate: How does the girl’s distorted perception of her mother’s face reflect the larger theme of memory and trauma in There a Petal Silently Falls, and what does it suggest about the difficulty of confronting painful past experiences?
Previous classmate response: I think our questions are similar and I’d like to try to answer yours. It’s a really astonishing and weird that the girl thinks her mother’s face is ugly after she tries hard to follow her mother in the crowds and follows her to take the bus. I think the reason why the girl has to follow her mother even though she tells her to stay at home is because the girl is lack of sense of safety and she might also have a feeling that something bad is gonna happen. Thus, she knows she has to follow her mother even though she doesn’t know the reason clearly. This part happens when the girl is recalling the final memory with her mother, and in her recalling, she asserts that her mother looks ugly when she’s looking outside of the window. I think this is because she’s trying to erase the tremendous pain caused by that day by making her final memory less “beautiful”, because it’s unacceptable to her if she sees the contrasts between her mother’s lively and pretty face and the scene that her mother falls on the ground with holes on her body.
As [the previous classmate] mentions, it is possible that the girl’s mind distorts the memory of her mother because it would be a painful form of cognitive dissonance to remember beauty in the face of such trauma. In multiple instances, we see that she hallucinates and incorrectly identifies things, such as the man who reminds her of her brother and the grave of a stranger she treats as his. I’d like to propose an additional perspective: rather than avoidance to protect herself, perhaps the event was so traumatic that its ugliness colored surrounding memories. Either way, the intricacies of her narrative reveal how subjective experiences are, and how outsiders may not ever be able to understand the depths of one’s trauma.