Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: 1 Production Film Co.
This is the second part of the article, and an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Sheng-mei Ma’s Chinese Serial: Cannibalizing Classics, Colonial Slaves, Sino-Noir, and Taiwan (Bloomsbury 2026).
Detention is thus the repetition compulsion of the ghost Fang, whose curse is lifted only when Wei, entrusted by Teacher Chang on the eve of execution, retrieves Chang’s letter to Fang in the ruins of the school. To accentuate horror and love, the filmmaker crosscuts a bloodied Chang’s last words to Wei from the abyss of the White Terror with the belated confession in the voiceover of a dead man to a haunted ghost. The words of love have been folded and secreted throughout the White Terror, in Lu Xun’s 1924 translation of The Symbol of Angst (苦悶的象徵) by Japanese art critic Kuriyagawa Hakuson (廚川白村). Doubly banned by the Nationalists not only because of the Japanese provenance but also because of the leftist Lu Xun, the book with the letter has been in a school cupboard behind a painting of, ominously, a single bloom of narcissus, the flower that seals the lovers’ bond. A figure from Greek mythology, Narcissus is so handsome that he falls in love with his reflection in a pool of water. Teacher Chang and Fang have cemented their love in late-night trysts, weaving together a constellation of symbols: Chang’s drawing and sharing of narcissus and of the piano’s white and black keys. On that sketch of the keyboard, their fingers touch and intertwine when Fang teaches the teacher to play the colonial-era Taiwanese-language song “Flower in the Rainy Night,” a 1934 tune of a woman’s woes in the image of petals felled by “heartless rain” (read: heartless man). “Flower in the Rainy Night” was so popular that it was translated into one Japanese military song and one popular song in 1938.
Given the irreconcilable differences of Greek Narcissus, a Japanese art critic, a Chinese leftist translator, and the Japanese-inflected Taiwanese tune, Detention manages to suture the self-love of two like-minded mirror images unto themselves, but the fragility of this union is palpable. The tune is played throughout the film as much for the romantic mood as for escapist flights. Fang turns up the volume of the radio playing that very song to tune out the squabble and wife-beating whacks from her parents through the thin shoji screen doors of the Japanese house. Unbeknownst to the viewer, yoked into one by subliminal association are pure, romantic love and Japanese-era culture, all dashed by the meddling of the Nationalist Father(s) and, in particular, Officer Bai.
As the elderly Wei limps into the dusty and dilapidated classroom to hand over The Symbol of Angst containing Chang’s last words to the school-age Fang, let us judge a book by its cover, since viewers are not privileged with any excerpt or discussion of Kuriyagawa. At first blush, the 1924 translation’s book cover features a female nude, bare-breasted, either relaxing in a hot tub or tormented in boiling oil. The natural assumption of the former, given the Japanese ritual of bathing, is soon replaced by the latter because her right leg is extended beyond the tub to clench a trident-shaped three-pronged pitchfork between the big toe and second toe, similar to geta wearing. The trident is anchored at her own neck, held in place by the left hand. The head angles itself toward the sharp edge, the red spot between the trident and her lips either her blood or her tongue licking, kissing the instrument of her demise. If it were her tongue that flashes red, then it echoes the sensuous date-like red nipples. The five red smears in the pool suggest blood seeping out of her cut. Be it the aesthetics of death or death porn, Fang the ghost relives her sin masochistically, to be released by Chang’s letter. To read against the grain, though, it is conceivable that the bather desperately pushes away the knife edge with her hand and foot, her head veering backwards. Love and hate, attraction and repulsion, reside in the same male gaze. Cinematically “citing” this cover illustration in an extreme close-up (Figure 3), John Hsu’s film outsources, intuitively, Taiwan the Orphan of Asia’s self-image onto a collage of alterity by means of splicing a Greek male god’s self-love, self-absorption with a Japanese/Chinese female nude’s self-hurt, self-splitting, or by having a Japanese bather fall on the sword associated with Greek Poseidon and Christian devils.
The book cover encapsulates the tip of discursive mélange in Detention, manifesting a psychological syndrome of affect overwhelming reason. Narcissistically, the swell of emotions takes control from a cool head or decapitates it altogether. Its nativist sentiment notwithstanding, Detention inherits this Sinophone legacy of beheading. Facelessness and headlessness undergird the horror of the White Terror, recurring like a broken record, metaphorically. As a matter of course, victims of political persecution in Detention have their heads hooded in burlap sacks commonly used to transport foodstuffs. As such, human heads are to be consumed. The female ghost dogging Fang has long hair covering her face in the vein of J-Horror Ringu (1998) and Cantonese jiangshi (stiff, hopping zombie) films. In a nightmarish scene, Fang is commanded by Officer Bai to slit, in macabre graphic detail, Wei’s throat to extract the banned book. Derivative of the Ent Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), a towering Lantern Ghost in Officer Bai’s cap and uniform hunts down the school janitor Uncle Gao and chokes him to death. The killer and the killed look alike in their facelessness. The Lantern Ghost has a mirror for its face, whereas Uncle Gao’s eye is gouged out, leaving a hollow eye socket and gap-toothed (Figure 4). Even the light, humorous sharing between Chang and Fang in disfiguring, discreetly, the faces of school authorities in a yearbook resonates with the forthcoming horror of defacing, dehumanising.
Most essential to the theme of headlessness stems from a marginal character. A fellow Study Group member, Ah Sheng, carries around his favourite hand puppet Dragon Warrior in Taiwanese folk art. This Warrior used to prevail over his rivals by wielding the sword deftly, only to lose its carved and painted wooden head in the chaos leading to the arrest. A beaten-up Ah Sheng then finds time to play his hand puppets one last time. The last show witnesses one puppet in the likeness of Officer Bai, adorned with the military uniform and the cap sporting the Nationalist logo of a radiant sun, as he points a pistol at the Dragon Warrior’s forehead (Figure 5). The traditional heroic swordsman’s finale foreshadows the ensuing executions of Teacher Chang and others. Akin to throwing moon blocks, a coin toss ends in heads or tails. These tales of headlessness tell of tails that are the inverse of what is presentable, the dark underside of history and collective memory. Human ancestors once had tails, which have since receded into tailbones or coccyxes, part of the posterior, the “behind” to be hidden, clothed, forgotten. However, these tales of tails persist in haunting, shadowing humanity, since any head may be offed by the command of the Red Queen of Lewis Carroll or the Sun King of Chiang Kai-shek, who is a mere stand-in for the Red King from Beijing. As terrifying as he may seem, Teacher-Officer Bai (white) is but a placeholder for Comrade Red: the White Terror of yesteryear whitewashes the Red Flood to come.
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).