Description
"Portraits in White" explores the White Terror, the post-World War II decades of martial law and authoritarian state violence in Taiwan, through the eyes of its three main characters. Beginning with a gesture toward Chiang Kai-shek's Annex to the Principle of People's Livelihood on Matters of Education and Leisure, which drove cultural production as an anticommunist project, "Mr. Ching-chi" is a schoolteacher who considers the whitewashing of history while going about his life and evading state surveillance, even as his friends fall prey. "Ms. Bun-hui" is an elegant elderly lady who served Japanese colonial officers, Chinese Nationalist officials, and then Mainlander elites before finding her new master caught in a political storm. "Ms. Casey" is an overseas Taiwanese in Europe. Gifted with a beautiful voice and skilled in singing Taiwanese, Mandarin, English, and French, Ms. Casey carefully crafts lyrics that narrate the arc of her life, from attending the elite National Taiwan University to her journey to Europe and back, covering her life as a "rootless orchid" over 50 years of changing tides within Taiwan and its contested communities abroad. Drawing the White Terror into the background is a strategy by which the characters get on with their lives. Yet, as the author clarifies in the afterword, titled "White, Do you See It?", the book does more than evoke this background through its mix of historical fragments and personal memories. Rather, it interrogates the very nature of seeing and unseeing, of writing and remembering. White is the color of canvas, of paper, and of public executions. Reflecting on the process of "painting white with white" by adding brushstrokes to dyed cloth, the author produces vivid, lyrical images that come into view through sharp focus.
