This essay presents a comparative reading of Li Ang’s The Lost Garden (1991) and Ye Zhaoyan’s Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (1996). Both texts deal with moments of historic trauma that were once public secrets: the February 28 Incident in the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Nanjing Massacre in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), respectively. My analysis of the novels is performed concurrently with a contextual investigation of the way both events emerged from the pall of secrecy by redrawing the boundaries between public and private. In both cases, this redrawing was central to the (re)formation of national identity, and my analysis shows how both novels participate in, and challenge, the wider context of nationalistic (dis)avowal with and against which they are written. Beginning with a focus on the theme of time, I suggest that Li’s work, emerging as part of a wider movement to uncover a repressed Taiwanese history, offers a picture of various temporalities interpenetrating and transforming one another. I contrast this with the treatment of time in Nanjing 1937, showing how Ye radically sunders a private past from the public discourse of the present so as to challenge the historiographic practices prevalent in the PRC since the Nanjing Massacre’s emergence from public secrecy. Beyond these differences, however, I argue that in their probing of the public/private boundary, each of the texts utilizes sexual politics to confront the reader with ethical questions that throw into crisis any attempt to construct simplistic nationalist histories. I suggest both Li and Ye thereby insist on the impossibility of historical closure and the fundamental openness of the past.