1,000 Cuts
Description
They told her she was healed. They didn't expect her to remember.
Rebecca Chen survived a brutal system that rewired her mind in the name of rehabilitation. Years later, she lives quietly, archivally, until a single file-planted in her car-reawakens everything she wasn't supposed to recall. At its center: Dr. Allen Morrison, her former therapist, and the pharmaceutical trial that erased names, histories, and lives.
As Rebecca unspools the threads of her own stolen memory, she uncovers a hidden network of youth detention experiments, altered identities, and clinical betrayal. She's not alone-others survived, too. Some are silent. Some want justice. One of them wants revenge.
Told in razor-edged prose and laced with psychological tension, 1,000 Cuts is a literary thriller about what happens when the body heals but the truth remains buried. It's about institutional violence disguised as care. And a woman who decides, finally, to unbury the archive.
What they did to her was systematic. What she does back is personal.
More details
Person
1,000 Cuts was never conceived as just a thriller. From the beginning, it was a compilation of personal journals. In my attempt to navigate a reflection note, I ended up writing a fictional novel. Writing this story meant confronting the uncomfortable truth that institutional violence is what society hopes to have happen while a person is in custody.
The novel's psychological and institutional landscape draws from documented histories of misconduct in British Columbia's youth custody system, to which I was exposed to. A central influence was Public Report No. 34, Building Respect: A Review of Youth Custody Centres in British Columbia (BC Ombudsperson, June 1994). That report examined the Victoria, Burnaby, and Prince George Youth Custody Centres and revealed disturbing patterns: peer-on-peer abuse, inconsistent staff intervention, coercive control framed as "behavior management," and the routine use of isolation as a disciplinary shortcut. Most troubling was the system's architecture of oversight?its ability to appear compliant on paper while permitting an environment where young people absorbed lasting psychological injury.
Although the events in 1,000 Cuts are fictional, the emotional logic of the story is grounded in these real-world findings. The report documented how minors?some as young as twelve?were placed in settings that prioritized custody over care, compliance over humanity. When I read survivor interviews and examined the policy language surrounding these practices, it became clear how easily trauma can be disguised as procedure.
Writing 1,000 Cuts required balancing realism with narrative restraint. The goal was not to sensationalize trauma, but to portray it honestly. The novel asks a simple but difficult question: What happens when the systems designed to protect us become the source of harm?
This project is, ultimately, a contribution to an ongoing conversation in British Columbia and across Canada?one about accountability, transparency, and the dignity owed to every young person in state care. Fiction can't fix systems. But it can witness them. And sometimes, it can make visible what official reports and archived files cannot fully hold: the interior cost of being harmed, and the quiet courage of surviving.
