Taiwan’s Port of Lies

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.

臺灣事實官方口說語言是以北京地方之音為基礎的「國語」，但對於眾多在島上生活與工作的居民而言，遠非其母語。《八尺門的辯護人》是一部改編自同名小說且獲金鐘多項大獎肯定的劇集，透過凸顯臺灣的「中文」情結，以及自1949年中華民國政府遷臺以來形塑臺灣民主與法治的社會語言位階，即國語、臺語、原住民族語言與移工語言，解構「國語」作為統治語言的當然性。該劇原型為1986年鄒族青年殺害其僱主的「湯英伸案」，本文將劇集此一改編視為一種論述策略，藉此抵抗當代臺灣以漢人視角為論述中心的受害、賦權、族群、性別與階級關係敘事。本文選取劇中具有高度文化衝擊性的對話和場景作為分析場域，探討身分認同如何在協商中產生，並如何在抵抗中拒絕被界定。劇中女性印尼移工口譯員與男性阿美族公設辯護人作為故事中的社會行動者，更是凸顯當代社會中「正義為誰而存在」這一核心問題的兩大平行主角。在當前極端主義思潮加劇之際，種族、性別日益對立，互不認同，佔有主導地位的文化主體（東道國）愈發迫切需要與受其支配的他者（移民/工）重新協商族群關係。