Portraits in White

Kaori Lai's intimate portraits of "ordinary" people, set against the backdrop of Taiwan’s ever-evolving political landscape, tackle a profound project: assembling a cohesive understanding of Taiwan’s past for a generation whose stories were lost to the erasure of authoritarianism. Elegant and moving, Portraits in White feels more timely than ever. -- Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island: A Novel
Through three novellas, Portraits in White pieces together quiet details from “ordinary” lives to illustrate a tumultuous and extraordinary era. Kaori Lai’s characters are not gunned down in the streets or imprisoned in labor camps, but by merely trying to map out family life and sustainable careers, they find themselves grazing the red lines of White Terror again and again. A schoolteacher unwittingly recruited into the military; a housekeeper drifting from Japanese to Chinese to Taiwanese employers; a scholar who cannot escape Taiwan’s censors whether in Paris or Berlin: politics, Lai shows us, permeates even the lives of the apolitical. Sylvia Li-Chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt maintain the linguistic complexity of the original, which interweaves Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, English, French, and German, presenting a timely and rare opportunity for English-language readers to consider everyday life under authoritarianism. -- Lin King, translator of Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue
Portraits in White can still be read as three interesting stories of people reaching the end of their lives and wondering if the decisions they took were the right ones. * Tony's Reading List *
Kaori Lin’s (賴香吟) focus in this delicate trio of tales is different. In a twist on Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil,” the protagonists of these long short stories reflect the mundane cruelty of the KMT system. * Taipei Times *
Shifts the lens away from heroic resistance or overt political violence to the quieter, more uncertain lives caught between silence and survival. The White Terror persists not only in prisons and protests, but also in the everyday compromises of those who lived through it * Asian Review of Books *
By attending to the small, the ordinary, and the fragile, Lai demonstrates how literature can make history resurface and resound within everyday life, while at the same time revealing the subtle ways in which state violence lingers even in the most mundane of occasions. * Cha Journal *