Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White is a collection of three novellas of ordinary Taiwanese people who lived through the White Terror period - the period of martial law imposed by the KMT in 1949 and lasting until the late 80s.

This is primarily a history work, and I recommend it to people interested in this period of Taiwanese history, or in the limiting of consciousness that occurs under authoritarian rule. Though none of the subjects is particularly lucky, each still makes choices they need to survive - learning new languages, joining the army, losing track of old friends. The book is imbued with a sense of loss - mostly, of the lives these people could have led.

I particularly liked 1. The analogy drawn in Casey’s story with the Iron Curtain and cross-straight relations 2. Wen-hui’s broken and messy family that still came together for her and 3. Ch’ing-chih’s journey with poetry.

This shares the choppy and distant prose style of other Mandarin-translated works I’ve read, and I wish this particular work could have avoided it. There are a lot of characters in each novella and I did have a hard time tracking who was who and which were important. Even though this was very interesting, the two issues above limited the emotional impact.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.