The latest addition to my website is Kaori Lai‘s 白色畫像 (Portraits in White). This consists of three novellas which focus on three different people who lived in Taiwan during the dictatorship. The book aims to show how difficult it was for people at that time before democracy took hold in Taiwan. The first book is about a man who does well at school but struggles with his life as a teacher and administrator because of the repressive system and because it is difficult to have any thoughts of your own. The second book concerns a woman who marries a man who thinks he can make a lot of money through investments but failed spectacularly and then dies leaving her with three children. She becomes a maid and we follow her career as a maid. When she retires, she is in poor health and is unable to get any satisfactory treatment. The third person is is a woman whose family have fallen on somewhat hard times after the father died.At the suggestion of her professor, she goes abroad first to France and then to Germany. She had not planned to stays there long but meets a man and stays longer and eventually after he dies, she stays there, and does not want o to return to her country which she still sees as regressive. This is an excellent portrait of what life was like in Taiwan and for the time before democracy took hold.