A film about 1953, when the Taiwanese press turned a soldier named Xie Jianshun into the “Chinese Christine” — and about the ordinary people who read it at the kitchen table. Reality stays black and white. Colour only appears where someone is interpreting.
In August 1953 the United Daily News in Taiwan reported the discovery of an intersex soldier, Xie Jianshun. Within a week the press had stopped describing a Republican soldier whose ambiguous sex provoked official anxiety, and started describing the “first” Chinese transsexual — the Chinese Christine, after the American ex-G.I. celebrity Christine Jorgensen. Xie was subsequently reassigned as a woman.
Chiang’s work is about what the coverage did. The comparison between the two Christines — one Sinophone, one Anglophone — became an arena for arguing over whether Xie qualified as a woman, whether medicine could transform sex, and what distinguished Taiwan from the West. The term bianxingren entered ordinary speech. An identity was being manufactured in newsprint, and it was doing political work.
Almost no usable photograph of Xie survives. What survives in quantity is the press — considerably more of it than Chiang expected to find. So the film is not a portrait of her. It is about the newspaper, and about the anonymous readers in Taiwan who met her there.
A 1950s press, photographic and grey, with a worker at the rollers. The only colour in the frame is what the paper is carrying out. The film begins and ends with it.
Two registers, which merge only once. Reality is photographic and black and white — the real Taiwan of 1953, tiled roofs, laundry, alleys, market stalls. Colour only appears when interpretation enters. Every drawn figure, every wash of colour, is something a person is imagining, aspiring to, or being told.
That design rule carries the whole argument: reality, and the representation of what the press made of Xie, each have a separate visual existence: ink line, Risograph colour, mis-registration, the printed quality of a magazine passed from hand to hand. And at the end the film lets the two layers touch, through one more woman.
The newspaper carries the shift in consciousness. The camera is never on the paper itself; we only see the trace it leaves on people. A vendor hands a folded paper to a man, he carries it down an alley, and the colour blooms on the walls behind him. The idea is already moving through the city before anyone voices it.
Left: “Xie,” in a black-and-white “photograph,” black and white, a window grid running vertically across her body. Right: the Western Christine the press drew, in coral and teal, standing free on the wall. The bars are Xie’s alone. They never reach the illustrated Christine, because she has already been named, celebrated and released from the structure Xie is still being seen through.
There was nothing to build Xie’s portrait from: no portrait of usable quality, and no photographic record of the rooms where all that coverage was read. This is where animation comes in. The Taiwan of this film — the market stalls, the tiled roofs, the alley walls, the newsprint pasted over an interior wall, the bare bulb over a family table — was reconstructed from period reference and built shot by shot.
That reconstruction is the reason the film can hold two registers at once. The photographic world had to be convincing enough to read as documentary, so that the illustrated figures entering it would read as something else: not people, but what people were being told.
The centre of the film is one family at one table under a bare bulb, and the newspaper passing from hand to hand. Beside each person stands their own Xie/Christine — four interpretations standing simultaneously in a single room. The room itself stays black and white.
She does not see a celebrity in Xie, but a body drawn as a question mark. Anatomical, careful, anxious. She is looking at something she has no category for, and no words for.
The press’s approved version, at full confidence: the soldier, the uniform, the flag. The soldier and the woman in the qipao elsewhere in the film are the same person — Xie served as a Republican soldier before the examination, and was reassigned as a woman after it. What might that say about masculinity?
Two figures rather than one, faceless, side by side — one in qipao, one Western. The question drawn as a diagram: what does it mean that there is a Chinese version and an American one?
She stands for the younger generation, who can understand, and perhaps join the change. The colour leaves her hands and runs across the table, the chairs, the walls. The Xie the discourse created gains a substance and a presence that had been waiting for her without knowing it.
The figure steps out of the folds of the newspaper that made her, and the daughter goes with her — the pair in full colour above a city that is still black and white. The press built this identity partly in the service of something else: a sense of distinctness, and Taiwan’s own claim to autonomy and sovereignty. The film ends by letting what it invented outgrow it.
The figure the coverage produced walks out of the paper that produced her. The press does not stop; it prints the next one. The identity was manufactured for a purpose — a sense of Sinophone difference, and Taiwan’s own claim to autonomy and sovereignty — and the film ends by letting what was manufactured outgrow the machine.
Howard Chiang is a historian of gender, sexuality and science in modern China and the Sinophone world, and holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021). The Dan David Prize selection committee lauded him “for his groundbreaking approach to the histories of gender and sexuality in East Asia, and noted the way he builds new institutional and conceptual frameworks—most notably ‘transtopia’—to capture the diverse cultural complexities of the Sinophone world.”