Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: 1 Production Film Co.
Excerpt from Chapter 9 of Sheng-mei Ma’s Chinese Serial: Cannibalizing Classics, Colonial Slaves, Sino-Noir, and Taiwan (Bloomsbury 2026).
John Hsu’s ghost film Detention (2019) adapts a popular video game from the company Red Candle. Set in Taiwan’s oppressive White Terror era (1947-1987) under Chiang Kai-shek and his son, the film’s Chinese title Fanxiao (返校 return to school) points to the custom of designated dates during the summer vacation for students to return to school for a checkup of the progress due in their homework as well as for group cleaning of the school grounds and facilities. (Throughout my schooling K-12 and college in Taiwan, I had never figured out which came first.) Yet fan is a double entendre on return (返) and revolt (反). Indeed, Detention returns to the White Terror to denounce it, upend it. Reversing not only to the past but also the present, even the future, the film’s claustrophobic mise-en-scène of Cuihua High School (翠華中學) is to be demolished to make way for the skyscraper Cuihua Tianxia (翠華天下 Cuihua Under the Heaven), as the giant billboard outside the shuttered school gates advertises. Hua epitomises Chineseness since time immemorial; tianxia is the revered term for universal values.
From spectral rubble to grandiose real estate development, political traumas perpetrated on the school grounds are buried under modern progress, except its namesake cui as a colour bifurcates between green and blue, jostled right next to each other in the spectrum of a rainbow. Furthermore, feicui (翡翠) is jadeite, known for having “36 water, 72 beans (green), 108 blue” in terms of the diversity of jade colours. Alas, proximity breeds hostility, clamouring to own the same space called Taiwan. Green is the party emblem for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party championing Taiwan independence; Blue for the deposed Nationalist Party associated with foreign powers from mainland China. The Blue Party’s crime committed in the past ferments/foments the Green Party here and now, as both are intimated by the word cui: blue-or-green, blue-and-green, first-blue-then-green, now-green-no-blue. Did John Hsu, as Nipponophiliac as his film suggests, intend this ambivalence of no/know blue, since his film courts, intercourses with, the White Terror? To “know” in the biblical sense is to be intimately, sexually, transgressively involved. Rather than reading too much into cui, this calls for a deep dive into Nipponophilia’s subconsciousness. Since cui also puns on fragile or brittle (脆), John Hsu et al.’s “Know Thy Enemy” of the Nationalists’ White Terror aims to Say No to the enemy of Red China. However, resentment, hate, and even taboo often flip from love spurned. Saying No to thy enemy may come after having failed to know, carnally, thy frenemy. The restive morphing between green and blue points to the uncertainty of the Taiwan syndrome.
The female lead Fang, a high schooler at Cuihua, has a crush on her music and art teacher Chang, who, along with Teacher Yin, runs a covert, banned Study Group at the school storeroom accessed through the laobing-custodian Uncle Gao’s key. (Laobing means old soldiers or veterans.) Teacher Yin warns against the teacher-student intimacy, fearing in part the exposure of their Study Group to the school authority embodied in a Teacher-Officer Bai, severe and menacing in military uniform and cap. Although never stated explicitly, Yin’s suspicion arises from the fact that Teacher-Officer Bai and Fang’s father are close military colleagues, decidedly Nationalists and possibly mainlanders. Much of Taiwan’s inter- and intra-ethnic lines must be teased out; any incontrovertible, hard evidence is shunned to provide plausible deniability and to avoid antagonising a sizable segment of the domestic market. Nonetheless, a rather heavy-handed giveaway is the archvillain’s surname Bai (white) à la the decades-long political persecution. What’s more, the video game character Bai’s facial features allegedly simulate those of the former Nationalist president Ma Ying-jeou from 2008 to 2016 (81).
Fang’s family lives in a Japanese-style house that the Nationalist government inherited from the Japanese era. Such single-family housing is the envy amid postwar austerity, passed on to Nationalist government officials and military officers of a certain rank. The masses of the approximately one million mainland refugees in the 1949 exodus from China must contend with hastily built juancun, or military personnel and dependents compounds tantamount to urban housing projects in the US. Fang’s father, played by Ching-Ting Hsia of Hubei, China ancestry, is alcoholic and violent, a stereotypical patriarchal mainlander, personifying Chiang’s regime, oppressive and predatory. Her mother, played by Pen-yu Chang, goes on to star in the 20-episode Taiwanese-language TV series Hun-in kiat-giap-sik (Graduating from Marriage or The Commencement of a Marriage, 2022-23). By implication, Fang amounts to, in all likelihood, a “taro-sweet potato” child, born of a mixed family of a mainland Chinese “taro” father, a food transplanted from outside Taiwan, and a Taiwanese mother likened to the native-grown “sweet potatoes.” A complete misnomer on both sides: taros are less from northern China than the South Seas, including Taiwan itself, which is part of the Pacific archipelago chains; sweet potato is fanshu, the first word fan meaning barbarian, hence barbarian potato in lieu of Taiwanese potato.
A decisive moment occurs when the mother, with bruises on her forehead, tosses moon blocks on the wooden floor of the Japanese house (Figure 1), kneeling and praying to the shrine of Guanyin Pusa or Mazu, Goddess of Mercy (Figure 2). Mazu is a protector of seafarers and migrants with a mass following in southern China and Taiwan rather than the arid, landlocked northern China. In other words, Guanyin or Mazu appears more to be the mother’s guardian than the father’s, who hails from farther north and pooh-poohs her devotion. Moon block tossing, in particular, comes from the unique Taiwan temple culture of prognostication, where believers throw the two halves of a crescent-shaped wood block, one side flat, the other convex and round. Should the flat side and the round side appear, then the deities have approved of whatever is asked of them. One can theoretically repeat until the Gods OK it. The divination average of “success” lies between 25% and 33%, given the scenarios of two flat sides, two round sides, one-flat-one-round, and, in rare instances, one or two blocks standing on pointed ends. At the third toss in Detention, the Goddess grants what the mother wishes, which is to turn in her husband’s account book of bribery to avenge herself, “to be free of him forever.” Whereas the film echoes the American saying, “the third time’s the charm,” i.e., only at the third toss does it result in what the mother desires, how many times exactly did the film crew have to toss for the perfect close-up of what the plot wishes—both the flat and round side up? Sheer chance, if willed with enough frequency, turns into the fate of betrayal and revenge. Moon blocks are deemed so pivotal in Detention that its official trailer opens with multiple shots of the bouncing blocks, accompanied by crystalline sounds, never showing how they land.
The discrepancy inherent within the misnaming of the taro-sweet potato daughter continues in the irony of a Japanese house lorded over by a mainlander father, who is removed by a Taiwanese mother turning the police state against one of its own. Located near the alcove in the Japanese house reserved for the Shinto shrine sits the Goddess of Mercy, with whom the mother conspires a revenge mariticide. Cultural forces are indeed as fused as Fang’s putative bloodline. The mother’s betrayal foreshadows and parallels Fang’s betrayal of the Study Group to Officer Bai with the intention of getting rid of Teacher Yin, a rival for Teacher Chang’s love. Fang manipulates Wei, a member of the Study Group who adores her, and obtains a banned book, with which she both informs on the group and, in exchange, hopes to obtain her father’s release. Battling within Fang and the film is love and hate, Chineseness and Taiwaneseness, with the elusive figure of Japan slightly off-frame, as it were. But the erstwhile coloniser’s invisibility percolates into the filmic subtext. Like the Almighty, its physical absence denotes its omnipresence. Her naïve scheme eventually falls apart when the entire group are arrested, tortured, and executed. Only Wei is spared; Fang hangs herself out of guilt.
Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美) 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).