You should watch The Abandoned (2023)
CW: Movie has mentions of depression and acts of suicide
Technically this movie was released in 2022, but it's mostly listed as a 2023 movie since that's when it became international. You can find it on Netflix!
It's a fantastic Taiwanese Crime movie that I highly recommend. The actual movie name translates as "No heart to be found", with the plot centering itself around a pair of female police officers trying to track down a serial killer targeting illegal immigrants in Taiwan with a very specific modus operandi: cutting out their hearts and ring fingers.
It's a movie that's very Taiwanese, and there's endless small details I'd love to talk about, like how everyone swaps from Mandarin to Taiwanese whenever they drop formalities or start cursing. The houses depicted with the drab plastic wall panels, the tiny 1LDK apartments, the quintessential concrete houses with the same peeling white paint, and absolutely the flat white shop signs packed altogether, flickering and begging for a mote of your attention at night; all that just screams Taiwan to me. I guess this must be what it feels like for Americans to watch movies set in America and see all the weird things Americans do? Like all the big cars and strip malls and army recruitment and suburbia stuff. Or maybe you guys expect that as the norm so it doesn't feel like anything, but I was certainly giddy with excitement to see it all, though I won't lie there is a sense of dread that I associate with all the rundown-ness. The infrastructure and the design of the houses all rose from poverty.
Two things of note in the movie (no spoilers):
- The characters say they dreamed they were in Hokkaido. It comes a bit out of left field, but the context is that given our close proximity and love for Japan as a vacation spot, that's basically Taiwan's default destination when people say they want to go overseas.
- I realize some may think the younger, plucky police officer has 'bad' acting. I'm here to tell you that's how a lot of women in Taiwan are conditioned to act from a young age. It's a stereotype this society has forced them into, and the actress perfectly encapsulates that forced energetic and submissiveness.
I'm going to talk about stuff that's NOT about the movie from here onwards:
In Taiwan, there's a lot of cheap labour from immigrants. (Doubly more now that the population is aging fast so a lot more immigrants are pulled in to keep the economy running.) Much like other SEA countries, because illegal immigrants are so cheap, most middle class families had a live-in maid (you'll find a lot of mansions built back then had a tiny room specifically made for the live-in help. It was often in the corner and designed to be out of sight, out of mind). My family never had a maid, but I knew plenty of friends at school who were picked up by the maids. Like, HALF OF THE KIDS IN MY CLASS. We all knew they were illegal immigrants, and they'd congregate in a corner of the street to talk gossip. If they spoke fast, we'd guess they were Indonesian, and if they spoke slower, then we'd often assume Thai. We never questioned why they were here. The adults (who owned the illegal help) often told us they were doing them a favour. They were providing them a place to live and paying them wages.
These adults spoke like the robber barons of old. They'd talk about how it cost more to afford an illegal immigrant that was lighter skin and 'less dirty'. I once overheard a conversation about how someone got a maid from Cambodia and that was bad, and they should've tried to get someone from the Phillipines instead.
It was only when I was older did I realize the abuse that happened behind the doors. Most notably, how often they got scammed and how often their passports were taken from them, leaving them even more vulnerable. Education did not free them from exploitation; plenty of nurses at the hospitals got scammed and there was even a department whose sole purpose was to help them get their stuff back.
Growing up, I heard constant horror stories blamed on the help. They didn't cook right. These lazy dirty immigrants didn't know how to clean. A lot of them were employed by families who had given up taking care of their own elders, and if anything happened to the grandparents, the help would get blamed.
And look, OLD PEOPLE GET HURT ALL THE TIME. It's simply not feasible to pretend they won't slip in the shower or fall on the stairs or just fall over. But whether it be at school or at an outing, I'd overhear the adults saying how their hired help was 'useless' and didn't do more. The problem was their inherent genetics. It was evident in their darker skin.
Watching this movie brought it all back. There's a scene where it shows all the illegal help working in a slaughterhouse. I wonder now. All the meat I ate in the supermarkets growing up--was that all from exploited labour too?
Probably. Probably not.
Anyway, it's a good movie. I recommend it.