Taiwan Stories

My father—he worked in a bank in Shanghai before coming to Taiwan but came from a village—went to the movies once a week, taking me along, at a time when that wasn’t so common. So I breathed in films from a very early age. My other love was comic-books—Japanese-style manga, with complicated narratives. I was good at drawing, and liked making up stories, so I would draw cartoon scenes for my classmates which made me popular in school. At home I read a fantasy version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms secretly, at the age of nine, and later devoured classical Chinese novels, and foreign ones if I’d seen film versions of them, like Doctor Zhivago. Story-telling was always central to my life.

Anything that was shown—American, Japanese, Hong Kong: whatever. By my teens there was a terrific range of films you could see in Taipei, because the Nationalist government set up a number of movie-theatres that specialized in the cinema of particular countries, to bring the movies of the world to Taiwan. This was part of its policy to project the KMT regime as the legitimate country of the whole of China, a world power with close cultural relations to other powers. So it funded these theatres for diplomatic reasons. That meant you could watch French, Italian, Japanese, American films every day of the week. It was a wonderful system for us. You could see virtually anything. Of course, it didn’t last. When the Nationalist regime lost its seat in the UN, and most countries recognized the PRC, the policy lost its rationale, and the KMT shut down all these theatres. There were some comic episodes—when Japan set up an embassy in Beijing, but South Korea didn’t, the ‘Japanese’ theatre changed to showing just Korean movies. But we benefited a lot from the original set-up. The next generation weren’t so lucky.

I’m not sure. Maybe Italian neo-realism affected us, because its methods looked so inexpensive, and we had no money. If we wanted to make films ourselves, it was obvious everything would have to be done with pennies.