Lin Yiru, sentenced to death on charges of killing relatives. She is currently the only female death-row inmate in Taiwan whose sentence has not been carried out. Courtesy of Geulhangari

The narrator of this compressed ‘autobiography’ is Lin Yiru, who was indicted for killing her birth mother, her mother-in-law, and her husband, and whose death sentence was finalized. To date, four women have been sentenced to death for murder in Taiwan, and Lin is the only one whose sentence has not yet been carried out. At the time, Taiwanese media splashed the case with labels such as ‘immoral daughter-in-law,’ ‘black widow spider,’ and ‘murder for insurance money.’

Journalist Hu Muqing met Lin Yiru, still incarcerated, for the first time in 2022, fourteen years after the case, and said, “I still want to know. Why did you choose the path of killing your husband?” Lin, who had rejected countless interview requests, agreed to be interviewed through visits and letters, seemingly moved by Hu’s dedication. <Portrait of a Female Murderer> is a work of nonfiction composed of Hu’s more-than-three-year investigation of Lin, Lin’s autobiography, and reflections on the reporting process.

As much of the media did at the time, it is easy to read Lin Yiru as a ‘vicious woman who poisoned relatives to cash in on insurance.’ Conversely, it is just as easy to see her as a pitiable victim who resisted a husband who committed domestic violence. <Portrait of a Female Murderer> records the author’s ‘hesitation.’ It conveys the perpetrator’s voice while relentlessly doubting her statements. Without denying the police and prosecutors’ investigation or the court’s verdict, it tests the gaps. It reveals that Lin’s crimes were not merely an individual’s aberration but intertwined with a host of social issues of the timeson preference, domestic violence, sexual violence, gambling, poverty, and industrial accidents.

The autobiography Lin later sent to Hu was riddled with contradictions. In it, Lin said she had told her eldest sister about their brother’s sexual violence, yet the eldest sisterwhom Hu managed to meet with difficultysaid she had known nothing about it. The veracity of what Lin called her most horrific memory thus grew murky. In the autobiography, Lin claimed she had mobilized dozens of gangsters to settle a grievance, but there was no way she had that kind of clout at the time. A shopkeeper near the tofu store called Lin a ‘violent shrew,’ while an insurance agent spoke favorably, saying she had a ‘forthright personality.’

Her husband, Liu Yuhangdepicted in Lin’s autobiography as a domestic abuser and gambling addictwas not a one-dimensional villain either. People around him testified that he had been a diligent badminton player in his school days. When his athletic ability hit a ceiling and his family fell apart, Liu turned to gambling. In the high-growth 1980s, idle funds flooded Taiwan’s markets. As uncertainty and anxiety spread through society, workers and small business owners with little job stability, like Liu, fixated on making money or on gambling.

There may be no pure, unalloyed truth. Even if falsehood is mixed in, part of it is true. So it is with Lin’s autobiography. Hu believes that “Lin’s story condenses phenomena commonly experienced by many women in Taiwanfantasies about romantic love, the pressure exerted by family, repeated abortions, domestic violence, and marital rape.”

At the same time, Hu reveals her own ethical quandaries about reporting. She is taken aback when Lin repeatedly asks for money and even proposes a same-sex marriage to secure stable visiting hours. Rather than posing as a completely objective observer, she discloses her own ‘position.’ She also writes about her maternal grandfather, who became violent when drunk, and about her mother, who ran away from home at a young age to escape him. Hu tells readers what efforts she made and what she saw in order to know Lin’s truth, yet withholds judgment. To those who cannot bear uncertainty and keep demanding to know ‘criminal or not?’ ‘perpetrator or victim?’ Hu answers that “understanding is impossible to begin with,” and that “understanding is in fact nothing more than the process of ceselessly drawing closer.” As film director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whom Hu quotes, says, there are no “people who exist for the sake of a story or a theme,” and “we simply go on living as we are.”

At the end of the book is a dialogue between Hu and writer Zhang Juanfen, who has long reported on people on death row. In Taiwan, where abolitionists and retentionists of capital punishment face off, there may also be legal avenues to contest the legitimacy of Lin’s finalized verdict.