Sun, Jan 25, 2026 page8

• ‘A Foggy Tale’ grounded and human

  • By Chen Hsueh-chiang 陳學獎
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  Last year’s film A Foggy Tale (大濛) is an ode to years past, capturing the anguish of 1950s Taiwan. It does not roar, it carries the blood and tears of the era around every corner and with every sigh. The narrative stays human and grounded, capturing not the heights of the raging political storm, but the texture of life of those who are caught in its floods.

  At the center of the film are two siblings, A-yueh (阿月) and A-yun (阿雲), struggling to hold together a little order in their lives. Under a creeping dread, they live day to day as if on a knife’s edge. In each character, we see the excruciating tension between a compulsion to step in and help those around them and the fear of the consequences of becoming embroiled in further trouble. A simple and universal humanity of neighbors covering for one another shines through nonetheless. For the audience, this warmth and simultaneous atmosphere of weighty repression are palpable. It captures the weight of the fog that engulfed Taiwan after the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) government first took hold and the White Terror began.

  For me, it brought back memories of serving as a police officer in 1989 and the “yellow books.” Back then, the Taiwan Garrison Command would issue classified yellow-covered folders containing the records of suspected rebels to police patrol areas. After completing their prison sentences, these people were placed under police surveillance, supervision and assessment.

  Not every beat had them; not every officer came across the books. Perhaps, in a perverse sense, I was “fortunate” to have the insight. There were two such cases within my jurisdiction. As I reviewed the records and conducted visits with the people in question and their families, it became clear that most of the evidence on offer was simply accusations fabricated by the authorities to suppress intellectuals.

  A Foggy Tale captures not just the form and feeling of Taiwan under martial law, but, through the subtleties of language and accent, brings out the diversity of society and cultural identities under latent power structures. In that era of generational change and political upheaval, language was linked to boundary lines of power. The film’s characters sounded out these differences, from the stiff intonation of standard Mandarin to the particular blend of its Taiwanese variation and through switching into Taiwanese for private conversations. These nuances were able to convey the era’s complexity more convincingly than set design alone ever could. “Taiwanese Mandarin” is a kind of functional linguistic bridge, but is also a product of compromise and struggle by which a new language is learned while retaining the traces of one’s mother tongue. The mixed accent itself is an expression of the struggles and fears of Taiwanese trying to survive under their new system.

  The interplaying elements of cloud and fog throughout the film deserve a closer interpretation. A-yun’s fate seems to be shrouded in a thick fog: No matter how hard he struggles, he remains unable to see where he should go. This sense of disorientation is evocative of that feeling of helplessness of the White Terror. When the world feels inherently unstable and new rules are continually emerging, people are forced to keep adapting, morphing and concealing themselves to survive. Ultimately, one’s own sense of self can become hazy and as hard to pin down as the clouds.

  The plot did not concern itself with raising political banners. Its focus traveled closer to the soil, following ordinary people who had been washed upon the Taiwan’s shores. Each stood burdened with trepidation and fueled by simple goodness, doing their best to withstand the storm. This feeling of the pursuit of survival captured the essence of Taiwan during that era. It restrained each person’s words and actions and lay behind every moment of warmth, hiding a fear of the unknown and anxiety over enforced silence.

  These themes are equally relevant to the question of Taiwanese identity. The obscuring nature of fog hints at how we still struggle to clearly define the boundaries of our self-identity. Clouds, meanwhile, are ever-changing in form and shape — not unlike how the soul of Taiwan is pushed, pulled and remolded at the behest of shifting regimes and cultural tides.

  There is a sense that we want to become something, but, under the heavy hand of history, are not quite able to materialize as we would like. By the end of the film, A-yue’s daughter is no longer speaking Taiwanese. She speaks freely and happily, but the change nonetheless feels like something has ruptured. Much more than a generational shift, it is the image of a stifled culture.

  The significance of losing our mother tongue, after all, is less about words and more about the cultural memory and connection to the land held within them.

  Perhaps the most painful thing about A Foggy Tale is that it captures a piece of how the Taiwanese have been forced to face a recurring displacement of identity and spiritual uprooting. Even today, after Taiwan has finally begun to reach a place of international recognition, the blue and white camps seem to be hell-bent on plunging our hard-won stability back into the fog.

  Chen Hsueh-chiang is a police squad leader.

  Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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