Publisher's Synopsis
"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 lif
