There are around 740,000 blue-collar migrant workers currently in Taiwan, mostly working in manufacturing or caregiving. There are also said to be around 83,000 “uncaptured missing foreign workers,” (產業及社福移工－行蹤不明失聯人數) living outside of the circumstances stipulated by their visas. As the government seeks to address projections that Taiwan’s total number of dependents will be greater than its working-age population by 2060, the treatment of these people is much discussed. Now, a new Taiwanese film has offered its own contribution — comparing Taiwan’s approach to a serial killer. (Spoilers below.)
Making its Taiwan premier on Sunday at the Taipei Film Festival, The Abandoned centers around a serial killer who’s murdering female migrant workers on their birthdays and handing the corpses back to their illegal employers. The killer knows the bodies won’t be turned over to the police, because the employers are acting illegally, too — and don’t care what happens to the people working for them. It’s an apt use of genre to spell out an ugly truth. In Taiwan, migrant care workers are still not subject to minimum wage laws, vacations are still being made difficult by border regulations specific to blue-collar migrants, and horrific workplace accidents are still regular occurrences. Cared for, these people are not. And the film is almost entirely unrelenting in pointing this out.
The story is told primarily through two lenses: A broker, Lin You-Sheng (林佑生), helps migrants from Southeast Asia find employers in Taiwan and mediates between the two groups. The police, through officer Wu Jie (吳潔), set about finding the killer after Jie happens to be at the scene of the discovery of the first body. If this was a Hollywood movie, the choice not to give significant agency to any of the migrant characters in the story may be controversial. The only migrant the audience knows anything about who doesn’t end up dead is gassed until she’s unconscious. But again, accepting some artistic license, this is actually a useful reflection of reality. Work-study programs have seen migrants coming to be students forced into manual labor. Special quarantine restrictions persisted for migrant workers far longer than for other kinds of workers entering Taiwan. Health problems have regularly been shown to result in terminated contracts. Buffeted by both the changing tides of visa restrictions and financial and health precarity, it’s not ignorant to say that these people’s agency is severely restricted. It’s obvious.
Moving to why these arrangements exist, the film is blunter still. It turns out the purpose of gassing the victims is so that the killer can drain their blood and then remove their hearts and ring fingers. This is not a subtle metaphor for the extraction of value that motivates the employers and unfair legal arrangements in the real world. But why should it be? Taiwan began opening up to migrant workers in the early 1990s in response to labor shortages. Its economic growth trended up, while the minimum wage lagged behind and — once again — many migrant workers were denied even that. At the same time, these people are also legally separated from their families through difficulties in securing visas for holiday visits. None of that extraction is particularly subtle.
When the police eventually catch up with the killer in the film and his motive is revealed, it’s a chance for one more round of home truths. The killer is out for revenge, having been spurned by a female migrant whom he had married and effectively kept captive, holding onto her ID in a locked box. Beyond the fact that Taiwan’s relationship with migrant workers has itself been compared to a bittersweet marriage, this refers to the large number of commercially arranged marriages between Taiwanese men and Southeast Asian women, organized through brokers. It also mirrors the fact that during the pandemic the government was forced to introduce specific guidelines saying employers could not forbid migrant workers from going out — and the fact that in 2019, 38% of migrant caregivers responding to a survey said they had been subjected to verbal abuse, physical injury, sexual harassment or sexual assault by employers.
The film only really breaks off from allegory when it seeks to offer a more optimistic view to end on. The broker and the police officer eventually work to save the final victim, but reality struggles to justify those redemption arcs. Brokers have been linked to human trafficking. Human rights groups accused a Taiwanese police officer of police brutality and racial profiling in the shooting of a Vietnamese migrant in 2017. And other less high-profile incidents are available for those interested in looking. These are not obvious heroes.
To be fair to director Tseng Ying-ting (曾英庭) and his writing team, it’s hard to construct a popular thriller that’s entirely pessimistic. And the heroes of The Abandoned are not fully spared from criticism earlier on in the film. Notably, during one chaotic chase scene, the police accidentally handcuff the broker, rather than a migrant who they believe holds the key to the case. They then apologetically remove the handcuffs and set their sights back on the migrant. At all times, they focus on the person at the end of a chain of law-breaking, rather than the guardians and beneficiaries of a system of exploitation. Elsewhere, perhaps most damningly, it is the broker who tells migrant slaughterhouse workers they have no choice but to ignore the murder of one of their colleagues. They are all in debt and cannot afford to be caught working illegally by police, he says, a reference to the fact that many migrants in Taiwan pay fees between $60,000 to $200,000 New Taiwan dollars (around $1900 to $6400 USD) to agencies that facilitate the recruitment process for Taiwanese firms. His brutal message: “Just get back to work.”
For the last 30 years, there’s a decent amount of evidence to suggest that’s not been far off Taiwan’s approach to migrants. The Abandoned has just pointed out that it happens to transpose onto a story about a serial killer repeatedly getting away with murder.
Image: The Abandoned
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