Implicated in an examination scandal, the early-Qing poet Wu Zhaoqian (1631-84) was exiled to Ningguta in Manchuria, where he spent twenty-two years. Wu's writings provide us a rare opportunity to glimpse the exile's experiences and to study the poetics of exile in late-imperial China. This paper explores the element of traumatic memory in Wu's literary and religious endeavors in his early exile years. We conduct close readings of Wu's texts, mostly those produced in the first half-year of 1661. In the rich life story of Wu, this period was but a slice of life, but it was a particularly poignant moment in which we can situate his evocation of memory within a number of broader discourses that are political, historical, cultural, religious, and psychological. The spring of 1661 was personally momentous for Wu, for he entertained hopes of an imperial pardont-the Shunzhi emperor had passed away and the succeeding emperor granted the country a general amnesty. At this historic juncture, Wu cried out to be remembered. Wu's writings in 1661 can be contextualized by his works from 1658 to roughly 1662, within which Wu's traumatic memories are tightly interwoven with the different strands of his early exile experiences. Both Wu's creative imperative and fervent religious commitment subtly point to his earlier trauma. Within the dialectical relationship between memory and narrative in Wu's texts, we are more interested in the psychological and emotional expressions and their implications than the truth of the claims embedded therein. We observe that Wu's acts of memory are psychodynamically determined; the narratives that emerge defy the general character of chronotopically framed autobiography. We understand Wu's ruminations and writings as a process of self-constitution and identification more than as enumeration of experiences; and that, be the emerging narratives truthful or fabricated (or, many times, both) they invite reading, understanding and interpretation to complete the processes of signification and communication.