Light the Night, and Holding Someone Without Hiding Them

In Chinese, the phrase that gives this series its title names an hour: the early evening, when the lamps are first lit. In the lanes off Linsen North Road in Taipei, in 1988, it is the hour a Japanese-style club called Light begins its night. Its owner is Su Ching-yi, whom everyone calls Mama Su. The mama-san who runs its room is Lo Yu-nung, whom everyone calls Rose. They are old friends, and between them they employ a handful of women whose work is attention: company at a table, conversation, and the performance of intimacy that makes a customer’s evening.

Then a woman’s body is found buried in a restricted area in the mountains, and two detectives follow it back to Light. The dead woman is Su.

That is how Light the Night begins, and for three seasons it asks who killed her. It is a good mystery, and it was not the first thing its makers set out to make. Its screenwriter has said that the series began as a period drama about women’s lives in that district, and that the murder was added later. The mystery is how you are brought in. What you are shown, once you are inside, is a workplace, and the women who keep it running.

This essay reads the series as a study of protection: who gives it, who pays for it, and what kinds there are. The women of Light are paid to make men feel looked after. What the series watches is how they look after one another off the clock, and what that costs the women who do it. By the end it has drawn a distinction worth carrying out of it. There is protection that hides a person, and there is protection that holds one. Only the second asks for nothing to be hidden.

A note before going further. This essay discusses all three seasons to the end, including who killed Su, which is the series’ last reveal. The next section says where in the essay the answer comes, so that a reader who would rather meet it on screen can stop in time.

Light the Night is a Taiwanese series made for Netflix: twenty-four episodes, released in three parts of eight, the first on 26 November 2021, the second on 30 December 2021 and the last on 18 March 2022. It was directed by Lien Yi-chi and written by Tu Cheng-che with Hong Li-yen and Lin Shao-chien. Ruby Lin, who plays Rose, was also one of its producers. Cheryl Yang plays Su, Yo Yang the detective Pan Wen-cheng, Rhydian Vaughan the screenwriter Chiang Han and Esther Liu the hostess Hana; Cherry Hsieh and Puff Kuo play A-Chi and Aiko, two of the other women who work the tables.

It was an expensive, careful production. The budget was about 250 million New Taiwan dollars, and Netflix’s announcement counted more than a thousand costumes. Days before the launch, the first two episodes were shown at the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei, and in 2022 the series received eleven nominations at the Golden Bell Awards, Taiwan’s television prizes. In Japan it streams on Netflix under its Chinese title, with a Japanese subtitle added that means women who live the night.

The series was not screened for this essay. Its story is described as the published synopses, recaps and reviews describe it, and what the characters say is paraphrased, never quoted as exact. The makers’ words come from interviews read at their source, most of them in Chinese; they are given in this essay’s translation, and mostly in paraphrase.

And the essay goes to the end. The killer is named in the section headed “The night Su died”, which says so in its first line. A reader who wants to keep the answer for the screen can read as far as that heading and stop there.

What the women of Light sell is attention. A customer is given company, conversation that goes wherever he wants to take it, and, for an evening, the feeling of mattering to someone who is good at making people feel that. The series shows it as a craft: work of talk and presence, done by women who know exactly what they are doing.

In Japan, the law that governs hostess clubs defines what is done at their tables in a single phrase, which might be translated as entertaining customers by creating an atmosphere of pleasure. The phrase describes what the customer receives. It leaves out the women.

Cheryl Yang, who plays Su, described the craft from the inside. In a magazine interview reported before the series came out, she said that Su has a different self for customers, for her women friends, for the hostesses and for her lover, and that playing her meant changing voice, expression and body from scene to scene, according to whom Su was facing. That is an actor talking about a character. It is also a precise description of the job: to be, for each person in front of you, the one they need.

There is a name for work like this. The American sociologist Arlie Hochschild, in The Managed Heart, her 1983 study of airline flight attendants and bill collectors, called it emotional labour: managing one’s own feelings in order to show the ones a job requires. The name matters because it lets the work be counted as work. And the women who do it at Light bring whole lives to the tables, which the series lets us see: debts, children, prison records, men who have hurt them. Drugs pass through the club. One of them hopes that a customer will become more than a customer. None of it is shown as a lesson, and this essay will not turn it into one.

Is the warmth at those tables false, then, because it is paid for? This Library asked that question directly in “Does Paying for Companionship Make Intimacy Fake?”, and answered that the word real usually carries two different things at once: continuity, whether something will last, and presence, whether the other person was actually there. Paid attention can have the second without the first. Not lasting and not happening, that essay argued, are different claims, and the feeling that money makes closeness impure often comes from not counting the work at all. The series seems to understand this. It takes the women’s skill seriously, and it saves its sorrow for the moments when someone at a table starts hoping for continuity.

Even the names are part of the work. The hostesses answer to names given for the job, Japanese names that echo their own: Li Shu-hua is Hana, Wang Ai-lien is Aiko, Huang Pai-he is Yuri. A name like that is a small protection. It lets a woman be warm at a table without handing over the name she lives under. Not every kind of keeping-back in this series is a harm. Some of it is a woman keeping something for herself, and that is hers to keep.

The district is real, and the series leans on its history. The lanes off Linsen North Road are known as Tiaotong, and Netflix’s own announcement describes the neighbourhood as a place that housed Taipei’s Japanese elite in the early twentieth century, kept its Japanese character after the Second World War, and from the 1960s became the favourite haunt of Japanese businessmen as it grew into a nightlife district. Its bars, restaurants, karaoke lounges and clubs, the announcement says, still have a Japanese flavour.

The series is set there in 1988, the year after the lifting of martial law, which had been in force in Taiwan since 1949. Martial law is not the series’ subject, and this essay does not make it one. What the makers found when they went looking for 1988 is more to the point. Shortly before the series launched, Lien Yi-chi told a Taipei newspaper that recreating the Japanese-style clubs of thirty years before had been harder than he had imagined. Very few old photographs or written records exist, he said, perhaps to protect the customers. So he and the screenwriter went looking for the women. They found retired mama-sans and hostesses and interviewed them, and he put what they learned into a sentence. Some had become landladies in the district. Some had followed customers back to Japan. Some seemed simply to have vanished.

That sentence is worth keeping in mind, because much of the series is inside it. If the customers were protected by being kept out of the record, the makers had to go to the women instead, and they built the series in part from what those women remembered. Inside the story, a woman is buried in the mountains, and it takes three seasons to find out what else was buried with her. Keeping things out of sight may have been how that world protected people. The series asks whom it protects, and who pays.

At the centre are two women. Su, the owner, is gentle and accomplished, and composed in the way the work rewards: nothing shows that she does not mean to show. Rose, the mama-san, is impulsive and fiercely loyal, and her feelings tend to reach her face before she has decided to let them. She is raising a son, Tzu-wei. They are old friends, and they run Light together.

Their friendship is also a rivalry, and the series does not pretend otherwise. On her birthday, Rose discovers that Su is seeing Chiang Han, a screenwriter who used to be Rose’s lover. It is a betrayal delivered on the one day of the year that is supposed to be hers, and it is only the first thing that will come between them.

This Library read Elena Ferrante’s quartet, in “My Brilliant Friend, and Ambition Between Two Women Who Cannot Both Have It”, as a story that will not separate the love between two women from their competition, because in the conditions it describes the two were never separate. Light the Night has something of the same honesty. In a trade where a woman’s standing depends on being chosen, at the table and after it, two women who love each other may come to want the same things: a man, a future, a boy. The series lets the love and the rivalry share a room, and asks neither woman to be only one of them.

Cheryl Yang’s remark about Su’s many selves matters here. A woman with a different self for each person she faces is very good at her job, and very hard to know, even for the friend who has known her longest. Rose is easier to read, and easier to hurt. The series gives us two ways of surviving the same trade and does not rank them. It shows, slowly, what each of them had been carrying.

The second season goes back, and what it finds is the secret the two women have kept between them. Su’s mother lived as a man’s mistress. Years before the club, Su was raped by her mother’s partner, and her mother threw her out. She was pregnant, and she went to Rose.

Rose took her in, persuaded her to have the baby, and raised him as her own son. That is who Tzu-wei is. Through all the years the story does not show, Rose has been his mother in every way a day asks of a mother, and where he came from has stayed between the two women.

It is worth stopping here, because the mystery moves quickly past it. Rose, who had once walked out of an abusive father’s house herself, made a family around her friend’s child, with no promise that Su would stay and no say in what Su might one day want. The raising was done in the open, every day, for years; only the origin was kept. Whatever else happens between the two women, Rose did that, and the series honours it. So should anyone who writes about it.

It is worth being fair to Su about the same years. Whatever she decided then, she decided as someone who had been thrown out of her own home, with one door still open to her. Rose’s was that door. A decision made with so little room is still a decision, and it can still be grieved for the rest of a life.

“NANA, and the Need That Was Never Only Hachi’s” found, in another story about two women, that the home they made together was the one relationship with nothing behind it when a child was on the way, so that everything the adult world had to offer pointed away from it. Light the Night runs the same situation the other way round. Here a friendship between two women was the only thing standing behind a pregnant woman who had been thrown out, and it did the whole work, for years, with nothing behind it but itself. What the series goes on to ask is what happens to a family built like that when the woman it protected wants her child back.

The third season reaches into Rose’s past and finds the same shape again. Rose came to Light from prison, after serving a sentence she took for her husband. Inside, she protected Hana, who followed her to Light when she got out, lived with her, and is devoted to her above everyone.

The pattern is worth seeing whole. Rose protects by taking things on: a friend’s child, a husband’s guilt, a woman in a cell who needed someone. Some of it is holding, and some of it is hiding, and she pays for both. When the secret about Tzu-wei comes out, it lands on her. Su’s mother works out whose child he is. A tabloid campaign makes Rose the prime suspect in her oldest friend’s murder. Chiang Han, who has got hold of a tape recorded on the night Su died, sets off to meet Rose with it, and is killed before he reaches her.

The screenwriter, Tu Cheng-che, said after the last season came out that Rose was the character he felt for most. She was caught up in the whole affair, he said, and had no choice but to shoulder it; before the truth came out she was even suspected of being the killer; there was the matter of the child; of everyone, she had it worst. The Chinese verb he used is the one for carrying a heavy load on the shoulder. It is the right word. In this story, Rose is the one who carries.

Hana is a popular hostess at Light, and her past, which the third season tells, should be stated as plainly as it deserves. A boyfriend deceived her, and then forced her, into prostitution, and spent what she earned on another woman. That was coercion. It was not work she chose.

When he called her a dog, she attacked him, and she went to prison for it. There, Rose protected her. When she came out she went to Rose, and to Light, and she became the lover of A-Ta, Pan’s junior partner on the force.

In the months before her death, Su is preparing to leave. She ends things with Chiang Han and turns to Nakamura, a Japanese customer, the one the hostess A-Chi had set her heart on. She means to marry him and go to Japan. On her last night at the club she signs her share of it over to the hostesses, and tells Rose, smiling, that she will find someone to protect her. And she means to take Tzu-wei back.

Set that night beside the director’s sentence about the women he interviewed: some followed customers back to Japan. Su’s plan is one of the three fates the makers heard about, and the series gives it to its most accomplished woman. A-Chi’s hope becomes Su’s plan. A table’s attention becomes a way out.

Consider what Su offers Rose on the way out. Not money, not the club, but a man to protect her. It may be the saddest gift in the series, and it is offered to the one woman in the story who has spent her life doing the protecting. “Tomorrow, I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend, and the Price of Being Chosen” followed a young woman to the end of a series in which she turns down a kind man’s offer to protect her, because to accept it she would have to agree that her life was something to be rescued from. Su makes the opposite choice, for herself and on her friend’s behalf. The series does not say she is wrong. It lets us notice that the only protection Su seems able to imagine for Rose runs through a man, which may be the only kind her mother’s life had ever shown her.

And the plan for Tzu-wei? It can be read as a theft, and the series gives reasons to read it so: Rose raised him. It can be read as a mother’s grief, and a Taiwanese popular-science site read it exactly that way, as the lifelong weight of a child she had had no real choice but to give up. The series lets it be both. It does not tell us which of Su’s selves made the plan.

From here, this essay names who killed Su.

On the night Su died, Hana went to confront her over the plan to take Tzu-wei from Rose. Su called her a dog, the word used by the man who had forced Hana into prostitution. Hana struck her, and killed her.

A-Ta, Hana’s lover, disposed of Su’s body. Later, when Chiang Han telephoned the police to say that he had evidence, it was A-Ta who took the call, and A-Ta who killed him before he could reach Rose.

Those are the facts, and they belong here as plainly as that, neither softened nor made larger than they are. Two people were killed. One was the woman whose death the series set out to explain. The other was a man carrying the truth about it.

The word had a history. From the man who had taken Hana’s earnings and her freedom, it was not only an insult. It was, in effect, a description of what she was to him: something owned, something that obeys. She had answered it once with violence, and been punished for it. Years later she heard it again, from Su.

The series makes a serious point with this ending: that violence can grow from the wounds a person carries, rather than from greed. The mystery had pointed everywhere else: at the drugs passing through the club, at lovers, at the motives Su had given the people around her, at the friend a tabloid had made the prime suspect. The answer came from inside the women’s own loyalties: a boy one woman had borne and another had raised, and a word one woman had carried out of the worst years of her life.

An explanation is not an excuse, and the series does not offer it as one: Hana confesses. Nor is a word a cause. Su did not bring about her own death by saying something cruel. She was killed. What the series shows is a harm done by one man, years before, coming due on a woman who had nothing to do with it, at the hands of a woman he had badly hurt. That Su did not deserve this, and that Hana had been badly hurt, are both true, and neither cancels the other.

Look at what A-Ta did, because the series sets it beside something else. He protected Hana by keeping things out of sight, which is how, on the director’s account, that world may have protected its customers. He hid a body. When a man appeared who could undo the hiding, he killed him. That is protection, of a kind, and it doubled the dead.

What breaks it open is an irony. A-Ta is arrested over drug dealing, and Pan, a detective who rose through rough interrogations, bluffs with a tape whose recording has been erased until the truth comes out. In a world short of records, the truth is drawn out by a tape with nothing on it.

Then Hana does the thing the series sets against hiding. She tells Rose the truth, and goes home to her parents in the country. Rose follows her there, finds her, and holds her.

This is the image the essay has been walking towards. Rose has lost her oldest friend, and the woman in her arms is the one who killed her. She does not hide Hana. She holds her, and lets her go. Hana works one last night at the club, and then she gives herself up. The series does not say that Rose forgives her, and this essay will not say it either. Holding is not absolving. It is staying beside a person without taking the truth away from them.

That is the distinction the series leaves behind. There is protection that hides someone, and it can look exactly like love; it is one of the ways love is done, in families, in marriages and in trades like this one. In this story it had a wife serve her husband’s sentence, and for a while it kept a killer out of reach. It costs someone, and in this story it is mostly the women who pay. And there is protection that holds a person without hiding anything for them. It is rarer and harder, and in this series it belongs to the woman who had carried the most.

The last things the series does are small, and they matter. Rose, who has lost one closest friend to the other, goes to Su’s grave and makes her peace there. Whatever passes between them is said to someone who can no longer answer, which may be the only way it could have been said at all.

The club holds a party on Su’s birthday, and it is also Hana’s last night at work. It is one of the series’ last pictures of the work, and perhaps its truest: a working night kept in memory of a woman who is gone, by women who are about to lose another of their own. Whatever they are carrying, the night still has to be worked. That, too, is the job.

And the others decide things for themselves. Aiko decides not to reconcile with her mother. A-Chi, whose hope Su took, decides to have her baby. Mothers run all through this story: Su’s, who threw her out; Rose, who became a mother to another woman’s son; Su, who wanted her son back; A-Chi, who will be one; Aiko, who will not go back to hers. The series ends by letting two women decide about their mothers and their children with no one deciding for them.

The series has three titles, and they say three different things. The Chinese names an hour, the early evening when the lamps are first lit. The English names an act, and the club: Light. The title it streams under in Japan keeps the Chinese and adds a Japanese subtitle, women who live the night. Of the three, only the Japanese title names the women.

For a viewer in Japan, much of the club’s form is familiar: the mama-san, the hostesses, the Japanese names, the Japanese customers, some of the talk at the tables in Japanese. The series shows that form from the other side of the table and from another country, as something that grew out of a Japanese history in Taipei and became Taipei’s own. Ruby Lin, introducing the series, called it a Taiwanese subculture, and said she hoped audiences all over the world would come to know it. Nothing in the series makes it a portrait of Japanese men or of Taiwanese women, and nothing here should be read as one. Nakamura is one customer.

For a woman who has come to Japan from somewhere else and works in Japanese, one thing in the series may land with particular force. The women of Light do their work of warmth partly in a language that is not their own, under names given for the work. Being warm in a language you did not grow up in is a second labour on top of the first, and it is rarely counted as either.

And for a woman in Japan whose own work is warmth, at a counter, in a clinic, on a sales floor, in a classroom, the series may be recognisable in ways that have nothing to do with nightlife. Hochschild’s term has a Japanese form, kanjō rōdō. What the series adds is the part the term leaves out: what the women who do such work carry home, and who, if anyone, carries it with them.

For a reader to whom Hana’s past, or Su’s, is not only a story, there is a route in Japan: #8891 connects, free of charge, to the nearest one-stop support centre for victims of sexual crime and sexual violence.

There are at least five ways this reading could be wrong, and the first two come from the people who made the series.

First, the murder was added, and its meaning may have been added with it. The screenwriter has said that the series began, some four years before it came out, as a period drama about women’s lives in the district, and that the murder that runs through all three seasons came later, to give audiences something they like to watch. He has also said that during planning the killer changed many times, and was settled only when he began writing the first episode. An essay that reads the ending as the series’ argument about protection may be crediting a plot’s solution with a thesis. The best available answer is that, whatever its origin, the ending is what the series shows. It is not a strong answer.

Second, the series is beautiful, and beauty persuades. A production that spent some 250 million New Taiwan dollars, dressed its cast in more than a thousand costumes, and persuaded shopkeepers on the real street to put up signboards in the style of 1988 makes this trade look like the most glamorous place in the city. The director’s own research found women who became landladies, women who went to Japan, and women who seem to have vanished. The lamps in the series are brighter than the lives he heard about, and an essay that dwells on loyalty and on holding may be helping them shine.

Third, the explanation of Hana’s act can go wrong in two directions. It can make her a mechanism, a woman set off by a man’s word, as if she had no part in what she did. Or it can make Su’s cruelty the cause of Su’s death, which blames the dead. This essay has tried to refuse both: Hana killed Su, Hana had been badly hurt, and neither fact cancels the other. But the series’ serious point carries a further risk. Most people who carry a word like that never harm anyone. A story in which a coerced woman kills can feed a picture of hurt women as dangerous, and this essay does not want to lend that picture any strength. The series tells one woman’s story. It is not a law about anyone who has been hurt.

Fourth, the line between hiding and holding flatters Rose, and may be unfair to Su. Su hid because hiding was how she survived being thrown out for what had been done to her; her many selves were her craft and her shelter. And Rose hid too: a husband’s guilt, served as her own sentence, and the origin of a son. The line between the two kinds of protection does not run between the two women. It runs through each of them. A reader who sides with Su’s longing for her son, rather than with Rose’s claim to him, is not misreading the series. The series leaves room for her.

Fifth, and plainest: this essay has not watched the series. It has read synopses, recaps, reviews and interviews, and where they differ it has kept to what could be confirmed, or said nothing. Everything it says about what a character feels is a reading, not a report.

Three things, none of them a rule.

Warmth that is paid for can still be real presence, and being good at it is a skill, not a lie. It is also not a promise. The women of Light know the difference better than their customers do, and to hope for more than the table offers is not foolish.

Protection that hides has a cost, and in this series the women who keep other people’s secrets pay most of it. It can keep a household standing for years. It can also keep a harm alive. Protection that holds asks for nothing to be hidden, and it is not the same as approving, excusing or forgiving. It is possible to hold someone and let the truth be told.

And a word used to own someone can outlast the person who used it. That is a reason for care with words. It is never a licence to harm, and it never makes the next person who says it responsible for what is done to her.

So, once, to you, if you are the one in your circle who keeps things for other people: a husband’s trouble, a mother’s secret, a friend’s worst year. You may have been told, or have told yourself, that this is what love looks like, and sometimes it is. But the keeping has a cost, and the cost is allowed to be counted. You can hold someone without hiding anything for them. You can stay beside a person and leave the truth theirs to tell.

This is a reading of a series. It diagnoses no one, fictional or real, and it is not advice about any friendship, family or workplace. Its only figures describe the production itself.

Who in your life keeps things for other people, and who keeps things for her?

When you have protected someone, did it hold them or hide them? What did it cost you, and who knew?

Is there a warmth you are paid for, in money or in approval? What would you want someone to understand about the work it takes?

If a word someone once used to diminish you still has weight, who could you tell about it?

And if a friend you had protected for years wanted something back from you, what would you want your answer to be?