Tang Fu-jui’s Port of Lies is a Taiwanese crime fiction that critiques the complex network of political and corporate interests undergirding Taiwan’s fishing industry and the industry’s historical exploitation of Indigenous and migrant fishers. Using Philip Hayward’s concept of the aquapelago, this essay reads industrial fishing represented in the novel not simply as a mode of production, but as a more-than-human aquapelago that sustains itself by creating and maintaining specific social and human-nature relations. The essay first reviews Tang’s representation of the major forms of violence in industrial fishing under the conceptual framework of hydrocolonialism to provide a historical context. With an aquapelagic reading, it then highlights the moments in the novel in which industrial fishing sustains itself by reproducing specific subjectivity, social relation, and human-nature relation. The essay concludes with a reflection on ways to decolonise human’s fishing activities.

AquapelagoTaiwanindustrial fishingIsland StudiesPort of Lies