Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: Thumbnail of Splendid Float trailer by GagaOOLala.
Quite a few writers and scholars have touched on Taiwan’s subculture of erotic performances, including pole-dancing, in folk festivals and funeral processions, most recently by Joshua Samuel Brown in “A Mingling of Love and Death: On accidentally attending a Taiwanese Funeral,” published online on March 26 2026. The accident of birth also made a Taiwanese out of me, despite having left my home isle for decades. That Isle, however, will forever haunt and live in, as its spelling does, this “I.” Eyeing it from afar for as long as I have been away, my discursive revenant in various chapters throughout a dozen of my scholarly monographs and multiple articles has always been tentative, repressing a subconscious homecoming—verily, albeit warily. That personal wariness arises from the fact that many Taiwanese would no longer view me as genuinely Taiwanese—not only a (de)naturalised American but also a Taiwanese born to northern Chinese parents, who fled from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949 rather than having their ancestors migrate there decades or even a century ago from southern China’s coastal provinces such as Fujian and Guangdong. Children of mainlanders in Taiwan are called waishengren (外省人 “foreign-province people”) as opposed to benshengren (本省人 “this-province people” or native Taiwanese), a demarcation making me not so much “Taiwanese” as “sojourner,” whose commitment to the island remains in doubt, tantamount to how Jews have been regarded for centuries. What is deemed real versus fake Taiwanese carries great weight in the precarious global flash point across the Taiwan Strait.
Historically known as the Orphan of Asia, the phantom Taiwan of being both a nation and not a nation culminates in Zero Chou’s Splendid Float (艷光四射歌舞團 2004). Chou’s gay-themed, low-budget and experimental film renders the proverbial pair of Death and the Maiden as one: Chou’s protagonist is Rose (Qiongwei 薔薇; see Figure 1), the drag queen at night and Ah-wei (Ah-Power 阿威; see Figure 2), the Taoist priest conducting the ritual of shouhuen (收魂, retrieving dead, wandering souls) and funerals during the day. Both names end with “wei,” a pun that straddles both femininity and masculinity; this protagonist assumes antithetical nocturnal and diurnal roles on the coast of Keelung in northern Taiwan.
Zero Chou’s Splendid Float in 2004 has earned Taiwan’s top film awards: Golden Horse Award for Best Film, Best Original Film Song, and Best Makeup and Costume Design that year, primarily on the strength of its pioneering focus on drag queens and homosexuality. The film has also garnered some critical attention, such as Mongjun Ji’s Chinese-language article. Her camera trained on a group of drag queens travelling and performing on their truck decked as a splendid float, Chou’s gay theme befits the island’s millennial celebration of alternative lifestyles and ways of thinking, after a tumultuous struggle for gay identity within the island itself, chronicled by Scott Simon in “From Hidden Kingdom to Rainbow Community.” Macrocosmically, since having been replaced by China in the United Nations in 1971, Taiwan has come to embrace alterity owing to decades of disrepute as an illegitimate pariah at the fringes of the community of nations, pickled in the briny Pacific Ocean like a food sample for all to nibble and discard.
Even the director’s self-christening in English, “Zero,” signals female genitalia and “femme” in Taiwan’s queer lingo, as opposed to “One” (“butch”) with its phallic shape. Put simply, a femme nicknamed linghao (零號 Number 0) pairs with a butch nicknamed yihao (一號 Number 1). Yet her self-designation of Zero uncannily points not only to the individual Rose/Power’s gay identity but also to the collective Taiwan’s phantom existence, an apparitional non-existence recognised by as few nations as twelve in the world, last I checked. The current number of twelve “apostles” has ebbed and flowed over the years, depending on China’s and Taiwan’s competing financial aid packages to those Pacific Island and global south nations.
As such, Taiwan amounts to a ghost state within the international community, its 23 million population rendered as lost souls being ferried somewhere. In fact, Taiwan’s citizens refer to their own island as guidao (鬼島 Ghost Island). Mirroring Taiwan’s duality, Rose shifts between a male body and a female self-image, between nightly performances as a drag queen and daytime performances as a Taoist priest. The vacuity inherent in the placeholder “Zero” encapsulates Taiwan’s self-identity, earning the film much-coveted domestic awards, but the lacklustre global reception exposes the film’s local, even provincial, nature. No major film reviewers in the US deign to review it; the handful of German bloggers who commented on the film professed disappointment after the opening sequence of glamorous drag queen shows. As the first half of the film follows Rose and Sunny falling in love, the latter half narrates Rose’s bereavement over Sunny’s death by drowning, both in the official capacity presiding over the folk tradition of the funeral and in the private role as a grieving partner. Western viewers’ response indicates that they are less taken by the journey to the yin realm, literally the summoning of Sunny’s lost soul by the sea, the viewing of Sunny’s corpse, the funeral procession, Sunny’s revenant to accentuate Rose’s sorrow, and the strange dance of four females by the grave.
This troupe of four (homophone of ‘death’ in Taiwanese and Mandarin), plus one male Taoist priest presiding over the ritual, resonates with the four-member drag queen group, plus one middle-aged “Mama.” Both leaders do not themselves participate in the performances, acting much like ceremonial figureheads. As the gravesite dance unfolds, Rose is a spectator, quietly sobbing, overlooking the sea from the hillside cemetery. The female troupe enacts qianwangzheng (牽亡陣 send-off dance), the final send-off that separates humans from ghosts, yang from yin. The female leader dressed up as a male general chants unceasingly, ringing a bell and holding a bullock horn above her shoulders, while three brightly-garbed dancers twirl and arch their bodies in a series of contortionist, acrobatic moves inspired by Taiwanese go-ah-hi (gezaixi in Mandarin), traditional folk opera of male impersonators.
The proximity of Rose, the star drag queen and the send-off singing ‘king,’ if you will, is further buttressed by a key moment in the film. When the funeral home director complains to the send-off dance leader that Rose may be unsuitable as a Taoist priest because of his effeminate and possibly gay behaviour, the leader, finishing her makeup and securing the general’s headdress, turns to the director and asks whether or not she looks like a man. Gender indeterminacy is given what amounts to a punch line, destabilising the division between masculinity and femininity as well as between the living and the dead. But her quip is far from the last word of the film, which returns to the tearful “widow” Rose and the melancholia that enshrouds the second half of the film in the wake of the erotic ecstasy of gay love and drag musical.
Zero Chou’s creativity may well have arisen from personal exigency, but the iconoclastic, anti-establishment impulse synchronises with Taiwan’s nonmainstream, foundling condition, hence the triple Golden Horse awards. The larger context of Taiwan’s, to borrow from Shu-mei Shih, “(in)significance” leads millennial filmmakers like Chou to uncover and chronicle the masses’ folk ways, much of which was secreted heretofore in the countryside or urban ghettos of the working class, and much of which involves the antithesis to life. Wang Yu-lin’s Seven Days in Heaven (2010) unearths rural Taiwan’s funereal services; Feng Kai’s Din Tao: Leader of the Parade (2012) zooms in on the ghost dance at the head of the religious procession; Doze Niu’s Monga (2010) features not only Taiwan’s bygone era and outdated gangster camaraderie but also closes with the protagonists’ demise. These films highlight the minutiae of suppressed local culture, yet what is held dear to the Taiwanese audience alienates global cinema drawn to the epic exotica of China’s fifth-generation filmmakers and the indie-style, art-house cinema of the sixth. Just as China looms above like a red hot-air balloon in the new century, Taiwan cools in the pale shadows. Chou’s ferry of “fairies” console one another, flaunting onstage their alternative identity while questioning, in the backstage, their “freak” (guai 怪), “monstrous” (yaojing 妖精) existence, given at once to narcissistic self-exhibition and abject doubt. Such performances onstage and backstage perfectly capture Taiwan the Ghost I(sle) bobbing amid existential ambiguity, searching for the other shore, a mirage perhaps, while performing the last rites for itself.
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).