Portraits in White

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-231-22010-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 141 mm x 215 mm, Gewicht: 352 g

After the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang imposed authoritarian rule on Taiwan in the name of anticommunism. The White Terror, as martial law and state repression were known, would last for decades, casting a pall of uncertainty and fear over Taiwanese society—and its legacies still haunt Taiwan today. Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White explores everyday life under the White Terror, illuminating how the violence of martial law pervades even the most mundane moments.

The book is composed of three novellas, each telling the story of an ordinary person. Mr. Ch’ing-chih, a schoolteacher, keeps his head down and avoids harming others despite pressure to do intelligence work. Ms. Wen-hui, an old woman who had served as a housekeeper for elites of different backgrounds since the Japanese occupation, faces death alone in the digital age. Ms. Casey, discriminated against for not being of mainlander descent, moves to Europe and must navigate the politics of diaspora. Even if only alluded to obliquely, the White Terror always hovers in the background, shaping the characters’ experiences and inner worlds. Elegantly written and keenly observed, Portraits in White provides a panoramic view of the ways authoritarianism seeps into daily life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lai, Kaori

Weitere Mitwirkende

Goldblatt, Howard

Lin, Sylvia

Lin, James

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatur: Sammlungen, Anthologien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction, by James Lin
Translators’ Note
Portraits in White
Mr. Ch’ing-chih
Ms. Wen-hui
Miss Casey
Author’s Afterword: Delayed Memories, the Far Side of the Moon
Translations of Foreign Texts

Über Autor(innen)

Goldblatt, Howard
Howard Goldblatt, a Guggenheim Fellow, is an internationally renowned translator of Chinese fiction, including the novels of Mo Yan, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kaori Lai is an acclaimed Taiwanese writer, now based in Berlin, who has received numerous honors including the Taiwan Literature Award and the Taipei International Book Exhibition Prize. Her previous works include the novel Afterwards, the short story collection Island, and essays on Taiwanese history and culture.

Sylvia Li-chun Lin is a former professor at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film (Columbia, 2007).

Howard Goldblatt is the translator of more than sixty works in Chinese, including the novels of Nobel laureate Mo Yan, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lin and Goldblatt have collaboratively translated nearly two dozen books by writers from China and Taiwan, including Notes of a Desolate Man by Chu T’ien-wen (Columbia, 1999).