Hsien-Yung, Pai: Taipei People

‘The night was deepening; steps grew more urgent, one by one the shadows went searching, exploring, yearning.‘ This is Taipei: a city of echoes, of lost souls, of fading faces, not yet forgotten. On the eve of her retirement, a taxi-dancer recalls the gentle boy she met in her youth and never saw again; the short nights they spent together would stay with her forever after. A man identifies the body of a servant, found caught at the rocky shoreline; he had never even made it out to sea. As the stars dim in the night sky, a group of lost men gather around a lotus pond in the darkening park, waiting for life to begin. A masterwork of Chinese modernism, Taipei People is a series of portraits, each one dark and wistful, revealing the lives and losses of those who fled to Taipei after the 1949 Communist takeover of China. These are stories for anyone who has left home, for anyone who has grown up and grown away, for anyone who has ever said goodbye, and for all those who were not able to.