Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: Left-Handed Girl, courtesy of Netflix.
“The left hand is the devil’s hand,” Grandpa warns the leftie (great-)granddaughter, waving his left hand.
Unwittingly gesticulating with his left hand in Figure 1 and condemning the use of it in the same breath, Grandpa is the devil, as most males turn out to be in the repressive, patriarchal hierarchy of Taiwan’s (sub)culture in Left-Handed Girl (2025). Subculture, by definition, denotes subpar, substandard, and subordinate cultural practices at the fringes of mainstream culture. Yet the postcolonial talking back in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) lends “sub” a subversive sheen that flips “b” upside down, turning it “p,” as in “super,” “superior,” and “supreme.”
The down-and-out thus arises from the detritus and chaos of the film’s two specific sets: Taiwan’s night markets and betel nut stands, both forms of subculture having fallen through the cracks of the island’s economy and social fabric. In the midst of an existential crisis under the long shadow cast from the other side of the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan has engaged in valorising its unique identity by way of local venues, which have alchemised into tropes for Taiwanisation. Night Markets set the stage for Seven Days in Heaven (2010) and Night Market Hero (2011). Betel nut stands hail from Betelnut Beauty (2001) and The Taste of Betel Nut (2017), among other films.
Left-Handed Girl speaks to the gig economy of night market vendors and betel nut girls called xishi, an endearment of scantily clad young women peddling betel nuts with stimulating properties to long-distance truck drivers and other working-class males. The lifestyle of consuming betel nuts parallels that of the Andean people chewing coca leaves. Xishi (西施) was one of the renowned Four Beauties of ancient China during the Spring and Autumn period, having now crossed the Taiwan Strait and multiplied into near-nudes dotting the highways and city streets. Driving through Taiwan, perhaps feeling depleted and dried up, stop at the flashing neon lights over any tiny stand to replenish your juice. Munch on the betel nut for the 2-in-1 package: a quick fix and a quick Trumpian grab. Then spit out a mouthful of blood-red saliva from the areca nut, just as patriarchy chews up women, its own flesh and blood—daughters and (great-)granddaughters alike. Here, the tagline’s frustrating parenthetical monikers tease in terms of either three or four generations. That moment of reader-viewer confusion has already succeeded in sabotaging social hierarchy, destabilising patriarchal order.
Filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou, in Left-Handed Girl, partnering with Sean Baker, zooms in on the woes of a single mother, Shu-Fen, raising two daughters, a rebellious young woman, I-Ann and a nine-year-old leftie, I-Jing, after her husband abandoned the family, leaving behind heavy debts Shu-Fen must shoulder. To make ends meet, the mother takes up food vending at the night market, next to a kind-hearted Johnny, his hair dyed blond, his wearable microphone ever ready, hawking electronic gadgets and sundry bric-a-brac. Johnny appears to be the only good man, outnumbered by Shu-Fen’s father who demands I-Jing switch to her right hand, by Shu-Fen’s deadbeat husband whose debts and even funeral expenses continue to burden her, by Shu-Fen’s brother who complacently inherits the family fortune and apartment, and even by such women as Shu-Fen’s mother and sisters, who not only acquiesce to but actively abet, perpetuate male dominance.
Unable to attend college despite her excellent grades, the elder daughter, I-Ann, sells betel nuts instead, while carrying on a sordid affair with her married boss, in the backroom, bent over in the doggie fashion, while customers clamour at the storefront for betel nuts. That particular shot at the waist level, from behind I-Ann, hunched forward, hurrying her boss to finish his business so that she can attend to hers, is the film’s preferred camera height, one that privileges I-Jing, who reaches only about the adult characters’ waist. A jarring juxtaposition: one sister’s sexual deviance associated with the other sister’s eyes, which means far more than meets the eye, as the story unfolds. Slightly higher than Yasujirō Ozu’s “pillow shot” from the eye level of a person sitting cross-legged on the traditional Japanese tatami, Tsou’s “waist shot” lays out the wasteland of two “left-over” women (shengnü 剩女) from the innocent perspective of a nine-year-old.
Intuiting the family crisis, apprised of her demonic left hand, I-Jing helps the finances by shoplifting, always with the devilish left. Learning of her sister’s “crime spree,” I-Ann, quite out of character for the transgressive, cynical young woman that she is, confronts the grandfather regarding his outdated prejudice. Although he insists with certain righteous wrath, I-Ann has managed to model, for I-Jing’s sake, a defiant stance against an authority figure. Even more out of character, I-Ann corrals I-Jing to revisit all the night market vendors from whom she stole to return the trinket and to apologise. I-Ann plays the role not so much of a big sister as an absent mother.
The finale stages the generational clash that accounts for this essay’s refrain over the parenthetical puzzlement. At the grandmother’s sixtieth birthday party, with a roomful of guests from the extended family, a drunken I-Ann reveals on stage that I-Jing is her daughter rather than her sister. This makes I-Jing the great-granddaughter of I-Ann’s grandparents. To shield I-Ann from a scandal that would ruin any chance of a marriage almost a decade ago, Shu-Fen passes I-Jing as her own daughter from another man in her husband’s absence. I-Ann nearly repeats her past mistake; had she not suffered a miscarriage (self-induced?) of the child with her betel nut boss. Just as the man who fathered I-Jing is missing, her boss is yet another non-entity. It is the boss’s furious wife who crashes the birthday party, demanding the unborn child in exchange for monetary compensation, provided it be a boy since she has only given birth to girls. Patriarchy-supporting female accomplices would include this wife as well.
The birthday party girl, aka the grandmother, slaps Shu-Fen for making her lose face in front of the whole family. But that social embarrassment signifies Shu-Fen’s motherly love to protect I-Ann. That face slapping conjures up Jack Nicholson’s repeated slaps of Faye Dunaway in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), forcing her to reveal that the mysterious girl is “my sister and my daughter,” sired from the incestuous relationship with her “f-f-f-father” with a biblical-sounding name of Noah Cross. The stuttering “F” implies the “f-cker.” Despite the similar revelation of sister-daughter, the horror of incest in no way soils the Taiwanese moment of love and bonding, a dose of shame notwithstanding. Contrary to the displacing of Christian sin onto “Forget it, Jake! It’s Chinatown,” Left-Handed Girl closes with the denouement of a broken yet reforged matrilineage, a new family and sisterhood surpassing, substituting patriarchy. Dancing to the surrogate father Johnny’s disco ball strobe light, I-Jing calls out in Figure 2: “Mom, look!” Both Shu-Fen and I-Ann, getting the food stand ready for another long night of business, turn simultaneously. The subtitle’s singular ni (你 you) may as well be the plural nimen (你們 you two), both the adoptive grandmother and the biological mother.
Yet the subversion of the right hand by the left, of righteousness by transgression, of patriarchy by matriarchy may, in turn, be subverted, if we reread Figure 1’s subtitle. The subtitle’s bracket [台語] indicates the subtitler’s editorial note on the Taiwanese dialect, for the elderly grandfather speaks almost exclusively in Taiwanese, the linguistic expression of Taiwan’s unique identity separate from Putonghua– or Mandarin-centred Chinese identity, not just in China but also among Taiwan’s ruling elite. In the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang or Nationalist rule, the language of the oppressed, Taiwanese, has ascended to become, in this particular case, the language of the oppressor. Control, masculine or feminine, takes myriad forms, even adopting, on occasion, the language of the long-suffering Taiwanese.
The grandfather embodies the calcified male supremacy in Taiwan’s folk and popular culture. He rarely bothers to code-switch between Mandarin and Taiwanese, as most multilingual Taiwanese are wont to do. Conceivably, he could have switched to Mandarin for an added air of authority in his demonising of the left hand, since bureaucratic officialese in Taiwan always comes in Mandarin. What the elderly man fails to do animates two college students at the class reunion at the bar. Evidently knowing I-Ann’s job, they make advances by trashing betel nut girls in the perverse Taiwanese lingo in Figure 3: “Two hundred for two nuts, one hundred for stroking the thigh” (兩粒兩百，一百摸大腿). The subtitle’s bracket in Figure 3, once again, denotes that the men switch to Taiwanese halfway through a Mandarin conversation, as though only by means of the Taiwanese slang can they properly enunciate their designs on I-Ann’s body. Despite the translation of liangli (兩粒) as “two nuts,” it actually means two grains, two pellets, two units of things—a pun on the two nipples, or the tits, the vulgarity of which matches the Taiwanese original. The transaction of money and goods enfolds female body parts like a word puzzle and a food menu. Such humiliation drives I-Ann out of the bar, with the parting shot: “College students think they’re big shots!” I-Ann flings these words in Mandarin as she smashes the wine glass. At variance with the linguistic hierarchy in theory, the Taiwanese language denigrates the weak in practice, to be resisted in Mandarin. Curiouser and curiouser: women oppress women; the tongue of victims victimises.
Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specialising in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Chinese Serial (2026); Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, including Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016), he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).