Taiwan’s Port of Lies

Abstract

Taiwan’s de facto official language in spoken form is Mandarin Chinese, but it is far from the mother tongue of the many who live and work on the island. Port of Lies (2023), an award-winning show adapted from a novel, deconstructs the transparency of Mandarin Chinese as a unifying national tongue by foregrounding Taiwan’s “Chinese” complex and the sociolinguistic hierarchies (Mandarin, Taiwanese, Indigenous languages, migrant worker languages) that have structured its democracy and rule of law since the government of the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan in 1949. This paper treats the show’s fictional adaptation of a historical event — the 1986 murder of a Han employer by his employee of Tsou Indigenous descent — as a discursive means to resist Han-centric narratives on victimhood, empowerment, ethnic, gender, and class relations in contemporary Taiwan. Selected scenes where the dialogue and positions between the characters are culturally charged serve as sites to analyze how identities are negotiated and resist being defined. In particular, the female Indonesian migrant interpreter and the male Amis public defender are the parallel protagonist agents who problematize the larger theme of “justice for whom” in contemporary societies where the need for the dominating culture (the host country) to re-negotiate its relationship with the dominated other (the im/migrant) grows ever acute in an era of increased extremist ideology on race, gender, and who belongs.