Piecing Together the Past

Abstract

Writers and filmmakers in Taiwan have sought to use the narrative techniques of classic detective fiction to recover events of the Nationalist government–imposed White Terror of the early 1950s to bring the once-concealed past to light. Fiction writer Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) pioneered this technique in short fiction written in 1983 to bring before the public the events of the White Terror and to consider how guilt for the atrocities should be affixed. Wan Jen’s (Wan Ren) 1995 feature film Super Citizen Ko explores possibilities for memorialization and the notion of victimhood in its recovery of the Nationalist repression of progressive political movements and its impact on a former political prisoner and his family. Finally, Tseng Wen-Chen (Zeng Wenzhen) in her documentary Spring: The Story of Xu Jinyu offers a portrait of a woman White Terror survivor turned political activist living in an era when the White Terror has been commemorated but remains poorly understood by the younger generation.