In this paper, I examine Hou's film A City of Sadness, with concentration on the scene in which the muted protagonist, Wen-ching, confronts the mob on the train and suddenly voices his Taiwanese identity. In such a traumatic and cinematic moment in the film, Wen-ching (played by Tony Leung from Hong Kong), who has up to then remained passive and reticent in assuming the role of an outsider to the ethnic conflicts, is forced to abandon the project of passing and to articulate a few words in barely recognizable Taiwanese dialect. This gesture of passing and re-articulation is what the film tries to do in a sort of postcolonial mimicry: in deliberately evading the ambivalent subject of colonial and postcolonial histories, it actually re-narrates what gets repressed or sidetracked. Indeed, with a great number of testimonial literatures emerging, the theme of disguise and narrative survival has increasingly become an emergent feature in contemporary public culture. Most recently, the life and work of Edith Stein, who was just canonized by the Vatican to the dismay of the Israelis, has gained quite a bit of attention. The controversial Carmelite nun was a perfect example of hybrid culture and discursive performativity. In spite of her Jewish origin, she proclaimed herself to be German and tried very hard to pass as one, though to no avail. In August of 1942, as her efforts to transfer to a Swiss cloister failed, she was arrested and was last seen on a train from Westerbork to Auschwitz. The philosophical work and private historical sketches she left behind, however, provide us with most unsettling, moving accounts of gender and identity as unstably mixed categories, of difficult and dangerous gestures of passing and border-crossing. Though hardly commensurable to the Holocaust in scale, the February 28 Incident in 1947 Taiwan also forced a great number of women and men to undergo the complex process of disguise and identity re-formation. After a long period of silence and passing, victims of the tragedy are beginning to re-articulate the past. Here I use Yang Tsao-ti's oral narrative as a test case to discuss the impact of colonialism and modernity in Taiwan. At the other pole, Liu Chin-tang's picture of three women, entitled Taiwan-yi-min-tu (1934), offers another empathic portraiture of a life-situation surrounding a Taiwanese artist who attempted to pass as Chinese, in order to culturally belong to the grand tradition. These successful or unsuccessful discursive struggles to re-negotiate the notion of oneself as another, or of the other as radically foreign who can or cannot be allowed to "pass," should shed new light on the comparative study of ethnicity and identity in cinematic and traumatic cities.