This paper explores Eileen Chang’s relationship with her father and its influence on her later work, Affinity of Ha/f a Lifetime. Focusing on Chang's traumatic experience of being locked up by her father at an early age, I will argue that the tragic scene of the female protagonist’s imprisonment in Affinity is a retelling of the author’s own painful past. By adopting the trauma theories of Heinz Kohut, Judith Herman, and Jonathan Shay, and referring also to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I point out that the traumatized subject, Chang, may have suffered an irrecoverable internal wound, and show how this injury became a powerful force in shaping her later writing. By examining Chang's own familial background, her male and female protagonists and the imprisonment episode in Affinity, I will try to show that the author’s retelling of her own traumatic experience in her narrative writing was a way of releasing or liberating her from her long confinement, indeed, that this therapeutic retelling was necessary to the trauma victim’s very survival.