Portraits in White

About

After the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang imposed martial law on Taiwan for nearly four decades. The White Terror — state repression in the name of anticommunism — imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands. Kaori Lai's novel reconstructs this era through the lives of ordinary Taiwanese caught in its machinery: families torn apart by denunciations, lovers separated by suspicion, careers destroyed by a single misinterpreted remark. The "white" of the title carries a double meaning — the political terror and the silence that followed, the way an entire generation learned to erase its own memory in order to survive. A novel about what happens to a society that spends decades being afraid to speak — and about the people who carry that silence long after the danger has passed.