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The transcendence of Taiwanese identity: a study of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films

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1
THESIS

THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TAIWANESE IDENTITY:
A STUDY OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN’S FILMS

By
STEFAN B. TSAI

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the Degree of Master of Arts in
East Asian Area Studies

University of Southern California
August 2016

2
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………………….. 3

Abstract ……..………………………………………………………………………………….... 4

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 5

I. Literature Review: The History of Taiwan ………………………………………….. 7

From Literature to Cinema: The Development of Taiwan’s Multifarious Cultural Identity …... 11

I. The Impact of Hsiang-t’u Literature ……………………………….…………….… 13

II. The New Wave Movement and Taiwanese Cinema ………………………..……… 17

Cinema and the National ……………………………………………………….. 18

Taiwanese New Cinema and Hou Hsiao-Hsien ………………………...……… 23

The Transcendence of Taiwanese Identity- Historiography of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Films …...... 25

I. Male Characters, Narrative Structures, and Identity Politics ………………………. 28

II. Women’s Roles, Memory and Imagination ………………………………...……… 33

III. Languages, Soundscape, and Heteroglossia ……………………………………….. 38

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………... 43

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...………. 45

3
Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my EASC thesis advisor Prof.
Sheehan for the continuous support of my M.A. studies and related research, for his patience,
guidance, and immense knowledge, that helped steer me in the right direction in the path of my
thesis topic and research. I am also thankful for his graciousness in having me after the passing
of Prof. Cooper, who I deeply thank for giving me the motivation to pursue this topic in my
thesis.

Besides my chair advisor, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee: Prof. Katada and
Prof. Rosen, for their insightful comments and encouragements in making my thesis even more
refined.

My sincere thanks also goes to my EASC program advisor, Grace Ryu, for giving me the
opportunity and guidance in completing the EASC program and requirements successfully.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family— my mom and my dad —for providing
me the unconditional support and love throughout my years of study, in researching and writing
this thesis, and for everything else in life. This accomplishment would not have been possible
without them.

4
Abstract

After Japan ceded sovereignty over Taiwan post World War Two, the Nationalists from
China took over control of Taiwan and shaped its government and identity. The Japanese
assimilation influences that lingered among the Taiwanese elites became a backdrop to the rise
of violence, such as that seen in the 2-28 Incident and White Terror, and to a Taiwanese
nationalistic discourse such as that seen in the hsiang- t’u literature, a genre of Taiwanese
literature from the Taiwanese Literature Movement that emphasized a distinct Taiwanese culture,
sent clashing native Taiwanese and Nationalists for the struggle of power and identity. In this
thesis, the research question is how Taiwan’s unique and contested identities are represented in A
City of Sadness and Good Men Good Women of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films and how they reflect
the development of Taiwan’s multi-complex identity from hsiang-t’u literature to the Taiwanese
New Wave. In methodology, what will be examined is 1) the external historical context of the
films and subject matter of the 2-28 Incident of 1947, hsiang-t’u literature, and New Wave
Movement with 2) the internal analysis of languages, gender topics, memory, narrative
structures, and Hou’s auteur style. This thesis analyzes how these factors of cinema and identity
are interconnected with the Taiwanese social and political environment and nationhood, which
have prompted Taiwanese citizens to seek a liberalization of politics and culture after martial law
was abolished in 1987. Hou’s movies illustrate that Taiwan’s identity could no longer be
described as the binary oppositions from the nationalistic discourse in hsiang-t’u literature, but as
an ever-changing multidimensional flow of cultures and nations seen in gender and heteroglossia
across the new global order.

5
Introduction

During the 1980’s, Hou Hsiao-Hsien emerged as one of the prominent filmmakers of the
“Taiwanese New Cinema,” an era of new Taiwanese filmmaking that went against old-fashioned
ways of production and narration, such as martial arts movies or melodramatic romances, to
create topics of film in this era that touched upon the Taiwanese experience in a realistic style.
This cinematic realism is witnessed with long-take aesthetics characterized by “distant
photography, temporal ellipses and loose causality”
1
, through the eyes of Hou’s observant nature
towards life. Most of his films are strongly autobiographical, drawing upon his personal
experiences and memory of childhood and adolescence, and reflect the changing reality in
Taiwanese society. A City of Sadness (1989) deals with aspects of Taiwan’s restoration of
Chinese rule and the impact of the February 28
th
Incident (2-28 Incident), an anti-government
uprising in Taiwan (1947) that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths; Good Men Good Women
(1995) focuses on the life of a female political victim from the White Terror of the 1950s, and
depicts the life and love story of a female actress in the 1990s.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s movies have sparked a large cultural debate about Taiwan’s past
relationship with mainland China triggered by nativist literature (hsiang-t’u literature) in the
1970s and the shift towards an awareness of multidimensional cultures even greater than
themselves. Nativist literature inspired a nationalistic spirit of local cultural awareness and
identity, but it also called for “a return to the island’s Chinese cultural roots”.
2
The ambiguity of

1
Yeh, Emilia, and Davis, Darrell, “Trisecting Taiwan Cinema with Hou Hsiao-Hsien”, Film and
Culture Series, Columbia University Press, 2005

2
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural
Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg. 27

6
the Taiwanese people’s claim on Chinese cultural heritage has been the heart of Taiwan’s quest
for self- identity, since the KMT took over Taiwan in 1945 and then lost the mainland to
Communist China in 1949. Because of political constraints and the uncertainty of Taiwan’s
position in relation to China, two of the trilogy films from Hou Hsiao-Hsien that contemplate
Japanese post-colonial history of Taiwan have caused an emotional division of opinion among
the island’s population between the mainlanders and the nativists. The island’s long standing
official identification with mainland China and its cultural heritage is questioned by the
multilayered examination of the island’s complex colonial history with Japan and the violent
internal conflicts with the mainlanders that have shaped its past.
The predominant narrative structures within Hou’s films encompass male characters,
women’s roles, memory and imagination, languages and heteroglossia that reflect Taiwan’s
changing landscape of its political sphere and identity. In A City of Sadness, the male character
seen in Kong-Ming, the illegitimate son of Wen-Heung Ming’s mistress, was born amidst the
mise-en-scene of Japanese surrender over the telecast that depicted an uncertain optimism of
Taiwan’s future. All of the four Lin brothers play parts that represent important aspects of
Taiwanese political history while the youngest deaf mute brother, Wen-Ching, best describes
Hou’s character of a silent observer of the trauma and Taiwanese people’s silence in the face of
oppression. Women’s roles are represented as the anchor to Taiwanese political history in
family, endurance, and everyday existence. In Good Men Good Women, the female character of
Liang-Ching, also playing the part of Chiang Bi-Yu, runs in three temporal currents of the
present 1990’s, the past of the 1980’s, and during the anti-Japanese war and White Terror, which
transcends the three eras of women’s position in history through the same female actress. With
addition to the written stories from the diary in both Hinomi and Liang-Ching’s life, their roles

7
are further complicated with the narrative structures of memory and imagination. The many
fragmentary, non-political voices are represented in these diaries as they become hidden
memories for these female characters between Japanese and KMT rule. The use of language and
heteroglossia reflect Taiwan’s multiple and contested identities with the spoken languages of
Hokkien, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese heard in interrogations, songs, and dialogue of
Hou’s films. Thus, the complex nature of linguistic diversity and gender from Hou’s films
illustrates how far Taiwanese New Cinema has transcended the simple binaries of hsiang-t’u
literature in Taiwan’s hybrid space. With the addition of shifting political structures on the
island, these films were able to stir a widespread debate about Taiwan’s identity issues, as a sign
of cultural, political, and social democratization progress as we compare the views of identity
from nativist literature to the Taiwanese New Wave.

I. Literature Review: The History of Taiwan

It is paramount to understand the historical context of the relationship between China and
Taiwan behind the making of these two films to appreciate the complexities of Taiwan’s
postcolonial identity and the political predicaments faced by the Taiwanese people following the
2-28 Incident. For many centuries, Taiwan was inhabited by aborigines who are akin to the
Malayo-Polynesian people from Southeast Asia; however, it was not until the 13
th
century that
Chinese people began to settle on the island. Taiwan was a geographic marginality that showed
enabling and inhibiting progress in the formation of Taiwan’s modernity and identity. Separated
by the Taiwan Strait and physically detached from the mainland, Taiwan maintained its own
cultural autonomy, while modernization started late as a response to Japanese and European
imperialisms notwithstanding several other colonial stages—the Dutch conquest (1622-1661)

8
and Chinese settlement (1661-1895). The various ethnic groups that came to Taiwan at different
times brought diverse cultural and racial heritages. The Portuguese who discovered Taiwan
named it Ilha Formosa, or the beautiful island. They were later superseded by the Spanish and
then the Dutch, who by 1662, were defeated by a Chinese imperialist, Zheng Chenggong. Zheng
was loyal to the Ming dynasty and fought against the Manchu armies, which eventually became
the Qing. He and his son established Taiwan as a power base in hopes of ousting the Qing and
restoring the Ming. However, by 1683, the Manchus overpowered Zheng and the island became
part of the Qing. Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 after the Qing lost in the first Sino-Japanese
War. As a Japanese colony, Taiwan was arguably distinct from its other counterparts in many
ways. During the Japanese occupation (1895-1945), Taiwan’s infrastructure developed, and
political stability and economic growth fueled the modernization processes. From the Qing to the
Japanese to the Republic of China’s rule, Taiwan’s unique colonial history is difficult to view
from the standard lens of contemporary colonial and post-colonial studies. Taiwan Under
Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945, by Liao Ping-Hui and David Der-Wei Wang, provides
writings from various authors to show how Japanese modes of assimilation in colonial times
have shaped Taiwan’s complex identity we have today.
Taiwanese identity was shaped by Japanese influences during the colonial period. The use
of censuses and land surveys laid the basis for the three major control mechanisms administered
by the Japanese on colonial Taiwan: 1) exchange and mediation of the elites to ensure
collaboration; 2) disciplining and training of school children and students to create a disciplined
imperial subject body; and 3) punishment and threat of all people, through use of military and
police forces, to maintain public order. In exchange and mediation, the Japanese gave elites more
local administrative authority so they could control the population. Proxy rule was established to

9
control local chiefs who created their sense of identity. Disciplining and training could be seen
with the majority of school children, which created future elites for Japanese government
positions. In the context of the education policy, the government’s establishment of the Common
Schools— as distinct from Chinese language private schools— was to instruct Taiwanese
students in the proper Japanese conduct. Japanese language instruction was enforced, but it also
respected Chinese elements such as study of the Classic of Filial Piety, until the Japanese called
forth the ban to all Chinese language in newspapers and schools in 1937. Punishment and threat
were used as the basic implementation for public order. Many people from the lower class
population experienced brutality and discrimination at the hands of the Japanese. It thus
promoted their unwillingness to forgo their traditional Chinese culture in Taiwan. The control
mechanisms for Japan allowed the Taiwanese to experience colonial rule in a self-governing
manner that prompted individuals such as elites and children to strive for preservation and
liberation from a foreign other, which eventually becomes the backdrop to the development of
the classical binary nationalism against Chinese homogeneity and coherence.
3

During the Japanese colonial period, Taiwan had limited contact with mainland China.
Thus, when the control of Taiwan was given to the Republic of China (ROC) after the Japanese
defeat in World War Two (WWII), the people in Taiwan faced major political, social, cultural,
and economic adjustments. Many Taiwanese elites were looking for political autonomy after 51
years of colonial occupation but were disappointed when the Nationalist government appointed
officials from the mainland to most administrative and managerial posts in the government.
Many of the newly appointed officials were seen as corrupt and lacking local knowledge, while

3
Liao & Wang, eds., Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, and
Memory, pg. 33

10
the islanders were viewed as Japanese collaborators by the officials. Moreover, language and
cultural differences made it difficult for the local Taiwanese to communicate with the new
mainland immigrants. Cultural and social tension built up following the years immediately after
WWII and eventually led to the culmination of the February 28 Incident of 1947. Two KMT
police officers had beaten up a woman trying to sell contraband cigarettes on the streets; a
passerby intervened and was shot. The news triggered a protest which led to the killing of more
civilians and then to a large-scale riot. Governor Chen Yi issued a martial law order and
requested Nationalist troops to be sent over from the mainland to suppress the riots. The incident
marked the beginning of the KMT White Terror and it was estimated that more than 10,000
people died as a result of the 2-28 Incident, and the trauma haunted Taiwanese politics and
society between the mainlanders and Taiwanese for several decades. The Incident became
forbidden for discussion until Chiang Ching-Kuo lifted martial law in 1987 and decided to
launch democratization in Taiwan.
4

The search for a unique political identity against an imperialist culture continues from
Japanese colonialism to KMT rule in this democratization phase, which promoted political
reform in Taiwan under Chiang Ching-Kuo. During the 1970s, Taiwan experienced several
external shocks, including Taiwan’s withdrawal from the U.N. in 1971 and the normalization of
relations between the US and the PRC in 1979. As Taiwan’s economy doubled in the 1960’s, it
became an international economic powerhouse in the 1970’s and brought with it a variety of
social implications associated with urbanization, modernization, and globalization. Social
movements became common even before Chiang Ching-Kuo believed it would be in the political

4
Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh T. "Cinema, historiography, and identities in Taiwan: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s
A City of Sadness". Asian cinema (1059-440X), (2), pg 198

11
self-interest of the ROC and the KMT to establish democratic reform. Chiang’s greatest
achievement was the “Taiwanization of the ROC,” which recruited many local elites into the
KMT and government. Chiang approved the organization of oppositional political parties and
chose Lee Tung-Hui (a Taiwanese elite who was born under Japanese colonial processes of self-
government) to run as his deputy who eventually became the president after the passing of
Chiang. Lee continued the push for constitutional reform during Taiwan’s first four free
elections, for the National Assembly; the Legislative Yuan; a direct election of the provincial
governor; and the direct election for president. Each election marked a stepping stone for
Taiwan’s political democratization. During this period of political, economic, and social
progression, the Taiwanese people began to have more freedom to expand their horizons in
portraying and understanding their contested identities in literature and films.
5

From Literature to Cinema: The Development of Taiwan’s Multifarious Cultural Identity

From Japanese colonialism to Nationalist Chinese rule, the evolution of Taiwanese identity
coincided with the eventual change of politics and culture from returning to the island’s Chinese
cultural roots (the Nativist Movement) to the exploration of Taiwan’s multi-complex identity
(the New Wave Movement). Hsiang-t’u literature has been around since the 1920’s and
reemerged in the 1970’s from the wake of political crisis that promoted the polar binarism of
classical nationalism and a Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”. However, with martial
law lifted in 1987, filmmakers and pundits have emerged to represent a Taiwanese history that
had previously been suppressed. Hou Hsiao-Hsien was one of the forefathers of the New Wave

5
Ibid, pg. 199

12
Cinema Movement, from 1982-1990, which depicts honest and realistic portrayals of Taiwanese
life. Hou’s films are well known for their realistic, down to earth sense, contrary to having
conventional narrative structures that build upon on the drama to a climax. The New Wave films
examine Taiwan’s social political issues by progressing at a pace simulating real life. The
important issues surrounding this time period include urbanization, the struggle against poverty,
and the conflicts against authority. A City of Sadness portrays the social-political struggle
between the local Taiwanese and the Chinese Nationalist government after the end of the
Japanese occupation. Good Men Good Women shows the aftermath of the political turmoil from
the White Terror. The contest of social and political power is linked with cultural production
(such as films) and the manipulation of nationhood. Taiwan as an island struggles to define itself
and its place in a new world order at a time when the nation and cultural identity are being
undermined by the KMT. As relations between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan have
become more tense, the idea of a unified Chinese nation with the existence of Taiwan became
more improbable. There is a myriad of linguistic, ideological, and experiential differences that
have shaped modern Chinese societies. The island’s political democratization over the last two
decades and its integration into new networks of global exchange have led to new sociocultural
diversity that “returning to Chinese cultural roots”
6
and the conventional conceptions of
“Chineseness”
7
can no longer encompass. The city of Taipei itself is a hybrid space with
unpredictable juxtapositions of tradition and modernity, and a mix of Asian and Western cultural
influences, just like Hong Kong. The complex cultural heterogeneity of many Asian cities along

6
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural
Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg. 27
7
Ibid, pg. 25

13
with the diverse scope of the Chinese diaspora proves to be important to discussions of culture
and globalization. Hou’s films would illustrate how far Taiwanese New Cinema has moved from
the simple binaries of hsiang-t’u (nativist) nationalism and identity. The changing global
dynamics of Taiwan have ultimately undermined the existing conventional models of the nation.

I. The Impact of Hsiang- t’u Literature
Hsiang-t’u literature has provided many Taiwanese people the nationalist discourse to not
only preserve their cultural identity, but also depict the political predicaments faced by Taiwan.
Taiwan’s hsiang-t’u literature translated from Chinese literally means “country soil” or 鄉土 and
refers to works written by Taiwanese authors during the 1920s and in the late 1960s and 1970s. It
has its origins in the period of Japanese occupation (1895-1945), but was put down by the
strengthening of Japanese colonial policies during the Kominka period from 1936-45. Taiwanese
intellectuals used this literature to resist forced assimilation by the Japanese and preserve their
natural roots or traditions. Hsiang-t’u literature sought to depict the realistic social and economic
conflicts precipitated by the clash between traditional Chinese feudalism with Japanese capitalist
modes of productions. The Taiwanese people valued their village as a source of indigenous
culture which was threatened by industrialization under Japanese colonizers. The Taiwanese
resisted Japanese imperialism by speaking in Taiwanese dialect as the language of literary
creativity, as opposed to the Japanese official language. The fifty years of Japanese colonization
fostered the growth of Taiwanese nationalism as it had put forth the necessary cultural, social,
economic, and political preconditions for the emergence of a common Taiwanese identity. The
discourse that developed during this time was characterized by the narrative structures of
exclusion versus inclusion, Taiwanese dialect versus Japanese language, or authentic indigenous

14
cultures from rural village versus foreign influences from the metropolitan city. These are critical
binary structures that would continue into Taiwan under the KMT.
8

By the time the Nationalist Chinese government assumed power over Taiwan in 1945, the
people in Taiwan already had a distinct Taiwanese consciousness after fifty years of Japanese
rule— isolated and free from the mainland’s political and cultural history. The assimilation
policies and modernization programs put into place by the Japanese helped foster feelings of
solidarity and combined with the repression and violence by the KMT after assuming power
paved the way for the Taiwanese perception of the Chinese mainlanders as one more hegemonic
other. The February 28
th
Incident is an example of how much solidarity the local Taiwanese had
over its identity against an imposing government. The hsiang-t’u literary movement reemerged
under the KMT regime during the 1960s and 1970s as it drew on the heritage of anti-Japanese
origins. Taiwanese writers sought to preserve their native experiences and culture against a
foreign other in the face of domination. Taiwan entered a social cultural phase during the 1970s
when it was complicated with multiple phenomena of political, economic, social, and cultural
change. Rather than just having a solitary KMT influence, Taiwanese culture was now
bombarded with multiple foreign presences overshadowing indigenous culture. On one hand, the
KMT government had introduced official Mandarin language culture, which continued to
dominate in the Taiwanese society. On the other hand, there were lingering Japanese influences
on Taiwanese culture from the influx of Japanese capital and consumer products into Taiwan.
More importantly, the postwar US presence in Taiwan—through military and economic

8
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural
Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg. 74

15
cooperation—helped modernize and spur rapid industrial growth on the island which resulted in
the “economic miracle” and Taiwan representing one of Asia’s “Four Dragons”.
9

Taiwan’s economic boom did not come without a cost. As Taiwan evolved from an agrarian
nation to a predominantly urban and industrial one, Taiwanese traditional structures began to be
shaken. “Social inequities, conflicts between capitalists and laborers, conspicuous consumption,
and cultural alienation”
10
developed under economic prosperity and industrialization. As foreign
investments grew under the Japanese and American consumer cultures, people began to question
the island’s social and cultural costs with continuing dependency on military and economic ties.
Many intellectuals believed that Taiwan was becoming enslaved once again by foreign powers,
economically and culturally, by Japan and the West.
The transition in Taiwanese politics correlated directly to its change in identity and culture.
Nativist literature spurred in response to diplomatic setbacks, along with rapid industrialization
and economic growth. The first politically mobilizing incident was the dispute regarding the
Diaoyu Islands with Japan during the 1970s. The unilateral decision by the United States was to
turn over Okinawa and the Diaoyu Islands to Japan, which sparked angry protests among the
Taiwanese. Nationalistic pride was rekindled as a reminder of China’s past humiliations by the
West, starting from the May 4
th
Incident (1919) in response to the Treaty of Versailles.
Additionally, Richard Nixon’s visit to Peking paved the way to the Carter administration
breaking formal diplomatic ties with the KMT to normalize relations with the People’s Republic
of China. The political blows Taiwan suffered continued— additional nations severed ties with

9
Ibid, pg. 78-79
10
Ibid

16
Taiwan, including Japan, and Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations and excluded from
the Olympic Games. Confronted with the “two China” problem, the people on the island began
to question themselves: “Love of Country? Which country?”
11
Taiwanese began to look
retrospectively at themselves, entering a period of self-reflection and a search for national
identity. The political setbacks resulted in the awakening of anti-imperialist nationalistic
sentiments, a renewed interest in indigenous cultural traditions, and a heightening of social
consciousness. In the arts, it rekindled the passion of humanitarianism. It gave rise to the revival
of hsiang-t’u literature, which sought to examine the social and historical realities of life in
modern Taiwan and the changes that occurred in Taiwan as a result of its industrial growth and
modernization.
With the forces of indigenization, the use of the Mandarin Chinese language in Taiwanese
nativist literature has sparked the connection to an “imagined community”,
12
according to
Benedict Anderson, that unites people together through print capitalism and further enhances
nationalist discourse. Taiwanese nativist literature used not only literary realism as a narrative to
depict people, events, and subjects in everyday Taiwan, as a portrayal of the locality of
Taiwanese society, but also drew upon the May Fourth Literature model that engaged in
language reform by synchronizing speaking and writing of modern Chinese instead of classical
Chinese. The use of modern Chinese increases general literacy and helps connect with mainland
China, and is a way of forming an imagined community through the growth of print capitalism
and the creation of a literary public sphere of authors and readers, maintained by cultural

11
Ch’en Ying-chen , “A Tenth Anniversary Retrospective Look at the Hsiang-t’u Literary
Debates” , in The Poverty of Ideology, vol. 6 of his Collected Works (Taipei: Jen-chien,
1988), 99”
12
Anderson, Benedict R. O. G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print.

17
implements such as newspapers and journals, that made nationalism possible. In contemporary
Taiwan, many forms of public media such as television, cinema, and the Internet have greatly
dismantled barriers for a collective discussion of discourse and identity. A sense of identity
originates from common experiences and communal sentiments that bring a nation together. The
KMT resinicized Taiwan under its policies and established a common goal to defeat communism
and recover the mainland. Chiang-Kai Shek continued the nation building process by promoting
civic education on Chinese history, geography, and Confucian values. Political nationalism was
used to construct a spatial and temporal continuity between the island and the continent to bring
forth a “national culture” that emphasized returning to Chinese narrative and roots. The use of
the same vernacular language of modern Mandarin Chinese promoted the fluidity of and
functionality of written and spoken work. In the face of Japanese colonialism and Western
influences, Taiwanese nativist literature made its way to hold onto its Chinese roots and
indigenous cultures to promote writing that sought to liberate Taiwan from its colonial
oppressors and imperialism. The rise of a Taiwanese identity distinct from the mainland Chinese
resulted after the political repression during the White Terror and the 2-28 Incident. The works
of literature in Taiwanese vernacular were used to unite people together and can be tied directly
to a nation’s social and political situations, and the discussion of Taiwanese identity continues to
change as the New Wave Movement of Hou Hsiao Hsien’s era draws upon and supplants the
Taiwanese New Literature Movement.

II. The New Wave Movement and Taiwanese Cinema
Taiwanese cinema prior to 1982 was marked with propaganda and censorship from the KMT
government. Even though martial law was not lifted until 1987, many first generation movie

18
directors such as Edward Yang, Te-Chen Tao, I-Chen Ko, and Yi Chang began to make their
mark in Taiwanese New Cinema (1982-1990), partly in response to competing Hong Kong films
but more importantly to portray realistic, down to earth, and sympathetic portrayals of Taiwanese
life. Hou Hsiao-Hsien was one of the most prominent directors for discussion here in his films of
A City of Sadness and Good Men Good Women that represented Taiwanese history through the
lens of narrative realism. His films have made an impact on Taiwanese identity and nationalism.
This new wave of Taiwanese directors did not employ conventional narrative structures, which
builds the drama to a climax and then resolution; rather, these New Wave directors utilized
innovate narrative techniques that emphasized narrative realism on the people living in urban and
rural Taiwan, drawing upon, but also transcending, ideas from hsiang-t’u literature. The story
would progress at the pace it would in real life and the films examined the important issues the
Taiwanese society faced at the time, such as urbanization, political clashes with government, and
so forth. The portrayal of these narrative structures in New Wave Cinema begins the
development of a multi-complex identity of Taiwan that goes beyond the country itself.

Cinema and the National
While hsiang-t’u literature transformed literature, painting, and performing arts, Taiwanese
cinema drew aspects from this literature model and emerged at a later date to promote native
cultural awareness that represented a more complex and volatile relationship with the idea of
nationhood. Marshal Kinder points out how cinema becomes a vehicle for a unified national
consciousness that coincides with Benedict Anderson’s view of an “imagined community”:
“[National cinema] must be read against the local/global interface, which has become
increasingly important in the new world order of the 1980s and 1990s. This interface

19
operates in every national cinema, primarily because the film medium has always been an
important vehicle for constructing images of a unified national identity out of regional and
ethnic diversity and for transmitting them both within and beyond its national borders and
also because, from its inception, the history of cinema has always involved a fierce
international competition for world markets.”
13

On the intricate level between the nation and cinema, the nature of cinema is intertwined
with the institutions of the nation state. Cinema is considered an art but it also is an industrial
one—it relies and is subject to financial imperatives and economic considerations— in hopes of
reaching out to a greater global community and achieving respectable returns on investment.
Films take a lot of money to make and they require adequate financing from institutions and
individuals at home and abroad. Cinema is therefore inextricably tied to a wide array of domestic
and global commercial networks-- “arrangements between financial institutions; elaborate
systems of production, distribution, and exhibition; complex international trade agreements;
questions of import/export quotas”
14
— all of which are tied to the political activities of the state.
The history of filmmaking in Taiwan has been correlated to not only the industries and financial
institutions, but also with active government involvement, far more than literature, that links
films and the state.
Government control had been an aspect of Taiwanese filmmaking since Japanese colonial
times. The colonial government founded the Taiwan Motion Picture Association and the Taipei
Newspaper Association, and after 1945, the two merged to form the Taiwan Film Studio, which

13
Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 7–8.
14
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural
Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg. 184

20
was under the direct control of the Taiwan Provincial Department of Information.
15
A few years
later, filmmakers and other movie industries began to migrate to Taiwan from China and more
studios were established, such as the Taiwan Film Studio, China Movie Studio, China
Educational Film Studio, and the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC). All were owned
by the government and they were devoted to making films that “concentrated on the crimes of
communism and the development of Taiwan as the Republic of China.”
16
The CMPC was well
known for making propaganda documentary films for the Kuomintang. During the 1960s, the
government took an active role in building up the island’s film industry. For instance, the
Government Information Office (GIO) made money available for loans to allow filmmakers and
civilian studios to make higher quality films. And to foster a healthier sense of competition and
acknowledge the movies’ artistic achievements, the GIO inaugurated the Golden Horse Awards (
金馬獎). The government had also turned its attention to foreign markets, such as having
coproduction agreements with Japan, allowing some Taiwanese feature films to be showcased at
international festivals. However, the GIO has made it clear that its monitoring of film
productions is to present the films in a “positive way” educationally and culturally so that films
could be approved by the government censorship board. Indeed, Taiwanese films are governed
by very intricate laws that affected many aspects of motion picture processes, from scripting and
fundraising to distribution and exhibition. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, filmmaking became
bigger and more profitable—many actors/actresses became stars and veteran directors were
signed to long term contracts. Taiwanese studios have produced more than two hundred films
annually, but many of the films have lacked artistic value because they were split between

15
John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 61–91.
16
Ibid, 63.

21
anticommunism and anti-Japanese propaganda films on one hand and films of pure escapism that
avoided politics and contemporary sociocultural problems altogether on the other.
17
In those
years, many of the films were dominated by fantasy entertainment films such as Chinese
swordsmen and martial arts films set in the distant past, along with romantic melodramas and
teen films. The limit in creativity and genres in this period was driven by economic imperatives
and the tight control exercised by the government in its major film studios and the censorship
board.
The awakening of Taiwanese films happened during the 1980s when moviemaking policies
changed and government cultural control loosened. The most critical change occurred under a
new director at the GIO, James Soong (Sung Chu’yu), who offered many innovative ideas for
building the film industry. The following are the changes that he helped implement: 1) He
reorganized the Golden Horse Awards to honor artistic achievement rather than thematic content.
Rather than continuing to have government representatives judge the films, Soong insisted that
the jury be composed of film professionals. 2) The Golden Horse Awards International Film
Festival was established. By bringing in award-winning foreign films, Soong hoped to increase
cinematic literacy in filmmakers and audiences alike, which would in turn raise the standards of
local cinematic production. 3) He encouraged Taiwanese film entries in high-profile international
competitions. 4) The infrastructure of film law was updated in order to lift the medium to a
higher cultural level.
18

The inclusion of the Golden Horse Awards and the International Film Festival indicated a
positive change for the government that reflected Taiwanese identity from film as serious art

17
Huang Chien-Yeh, “A Retrospective Look at the Taiwanese Cinema of 1983” , in Chiao,
Taiwanese New Cinema, 49.
18
Lent, The Asian Film Industry, 62.

22
work and cultural expression. According to K’o Yi Cheng, it was necessary to educate and
nurture a knowledgeable audience who could appreciate art.
19
Thus, many foundations sponsored
the Film Library as a research and exhibition center for film and the Golden Horse International
Film Festival, attracting entries from around the world, as an outlet to educate filmmakers and
local audiences about quality filmmaking.
A number of other factors awakened local film industries of Taiwan during the 1970s to
become more competitive, sophisticated and multicomplex, including pirated tapes from
America, Japan, and Europe. The rapidly growing availability of smuggled or imported
videotapes of foreign films were becoming so readily available to Taiwanese citizens that it
became a threat to the Taiwanese film industry. Many were pirated and illegal, inexpensive, and
usually uncensored. The other source of competition came from Hong Kong films, produced by
powerhouse studios, that had better financial backing and were more diverse and sophisticated
films. The Hong Kong New Wave, consisting of many up-and-coming new directors who were
vibrant and innovative, was attracting a great deal of attention from the East and the West. The
popularity of Hong Kong films and foreign films crushed domestic films at the box office, and,
more seriously, undermined national confidence in the domestic film industry. By the early
1980s, in wanting to win back commercial success and respect for Taiwanese cinema, the
Taiwanese government prompted less rigid modes of filmmaking. The innovations initiated by
the GIO called for important thematic, stylistic, and methodological changes in the movie
industry that eventually led to a new trend—the Taiwanese New Cinema.

19
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg 211.

23
Taiwanese New Cinema and Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Taiwanese cultural liberalization and also the lifting of martial law in 1987 set new hopes
for directors in this era in which Hou Hsiao-Hsien became one of the prominent icons of the
Taiwanese New Cinema. The other famous beneficiaries include but are not limited to directors
Tseng Chuang-hsiang, K’o Yi-cheng, Yang Tech’ang (known as Edward Yang), Chang Yi, Li
You-ning, T’ao Te-ch’en, Wan Jen, and Ch’en K’un-hou; screenwriters Hsiao Yeh, Wu
Nienchen, Chu T’ien-wen and Ting Ya-min; cinematographers Li P’ing-pin and Yang Wei-han;
editor Liao Ch’ing-sung; and producer Chang Hua-k’un.
20
One important factor that set these
filmmakers apart from their predecessors is their path to success. Those who came earlier relied
on climbing the apprenticeship ladder, unlike these new arrivals who were able work on their
own terms.
For instance, Hou Hsiao-Hsien started work for major studios but quickly freed himself
from the rigid constraints of the institutional status quo and made his debut in 1980 with three
commercial genre films—Cute Girl (1980), Cheerful Wind (1982), and Green Green Grass of
Home (1982). There were two feature films that heralded the birth of Taiwanese New Cinema.
The first was an anthology film, In Our Time (1982), by T’ao Tech’en, Edward Yang, K’o Yi-
cheng, and Chang Yi, and the second was, His Son’s Big Doll (1983), directed by Hou Hsiao-
Hsien. The two films present critical views of contemporary social conditions and various
aspects of government policy. The fact that the films were produced under the auspices of the
CMPC, a studio long recognized as the propaganda arm of the KMT, meant that there were rapid
changes in political attitudes at that time. The CMPC offered new opportunities to young

20
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural
Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg. 184

24
filmmakers to work with many other soul-searching artists who were striving to promote social
change.
The two watershed films directed by Hou were considered breakthroughs because the low
budget films used non-established directors and non-professional actors. Rather than following
conventional wisdom on hiring bankable stars, these young directors wanted to cast actors who
they felt best captured the essence of the character’s personality. The advantages of using non-
professional actors also gives the director more freedom to develop his individual style within
each segment and allows the actors to act naturally in a realistic sense. The new directors used
different styles of camera work, lighting, color, and editing and also improved equipment
standards. Hou, for instance, uses long camera shots to show the whole progression of the
segment in a realistic sense and employs natural lighting on characters. Hou also values
improvisation as he avoids rehearsals because they tend to deaden the dialogue and undermine
the naturalism of the film. His screenplay, images, and ideas are never set in stone, and anything
can change the shape and direction of the film.
More importantly, the films diverged from the escapist fantasy of commercial films to
address social, political, and economic issues, bringing to the screen the fresh and realistic
images of contemporary Taiwan. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness and Good Men Good
Women depict Taiwan’s social and political conditions under KMT rule and many of these
phenomena, such as the 2-28 Incident and the White Terror, were forbidden areas for discussion
or cinematic representation. The film, His Son’s Big Doll, depicted the poverty and humiliations
suffered by the lower class and had an explicit anti-Japanese and anti-American tone, which
alarmed the conservative forces in the government and the studios to such a degree that they
wanted the film to be reedited. It immediately garnered support from a large number of writers,

25
artists, and critics who rallied around the film and spoke out against film censorship and in favor
of freedom of expression. Cinema played a huge role in developing the sociocultural aspect of
the nation by not only mirroring the contemporary and the past, but also shaping a nation’s self-
image and cultural sensibility. The Taiwanese New Cinema raised new standards for cinema
viewership as an art.

The Transcendence of Taiwanese Identity- Historiography of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Films

As we have already delved upon, Taiwanese New Cinema has its roots in hsiang-t’u
literature. Many of Hou’s generation of Taiwanese youth grew up under the peak of the Nativist
Movement, and hsiang-t’u literature writers have been very influential for directors like Hou
Hsiao-Hsien. Many of his films derived from the literature depicting the complex and realistic
sociocultural issues of contemporary life in Taiwan. Good Men Good Women revolves around
the true story of Chiang Bi-Yu’s life during the White Terror and A City of Sadness draws upon
the Lin family during the 2-28 Incident and its turmoil. While many of the directors have
families that come from mainland China, Hou and the New Wave directors all belong to a
generation for which Taiwan was their real home. Born in the late 1940s and 1950s, their
childhoods and adulthoods coincided with the island’s growth and hsiang-t’u literature. Hou’s
films transcend a personal coming of age story to become an examination of the origins of
modern Taiwanese life, from tracing Taiwanese history of the KMT government’s exile and
influence on Taiwan after 1949 to the relinquishment of the dream of returning to the mainland.
Literature and the cinematic world have close ties in Taiwan and many of the screenwriters who
began as writers of fiction began to work in film. Chu T’ien Wen was such an author who

26
collaborated with Hou Hsiao-Hsien in writing many scripts for his movies such as A City of
Sadness and Puppetmaster. Chu’s early work was based on short stories of romantic, sentimental
nostalgia for China, but her later fiction works reflect Hou’s neonativist spirit on offering
realistic portrayals of contemporary life in Taiwan. Clearly, hsiang-t’u literature has had its
significant influence on the films of the New Wave directors and screenwriters. Another example
of hsiang-t’u influence comes from Ch’en Ying-chen’s The Mountain Path and The Country
Teacher, which can be seen reflected in Hou’s A City of Sadness.
21
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s emotional
attachment to rural landscapes of Taiwan constitutes the bond linking New Cinema to the
heritage of hsiang-t’u literature. He has a connection with village life, more specifically rural
locations, and would seek out this geographical location before filming. Hou believes in the
organic unity of the land, inhabitants, and the native roots which the Nativist Movement calls
forth. However, New Wave cinema does not just call forth rural life, it also brings up issues of
urban life. What they do share is the strong sense of place and the changing landscape of
contemporary Taiwan. Additionally, they both examine the sociocultural contradictions that
accompanied the island’s transformation from predominantly rural, agrarian society to one of an
increasingly urbanized nation. New Wave Cinema has its nativist roots, but is different in that it
has already transcended the ordinary outlook of Taiwan’s identity from its binary contradictions
characteristic of the discourse on colonial nationalism.
22

Taiwanese New Cinema began with the binary oppositions inherited from anti-imperialist
nationalistic rhetoric of hsiang-t’u literature about returning to the island’s Chinese roots against
the Japanese and the West. However, Taiwanese New Cinema was different than its literary

21
Ch’en Ying-chen, “The Mountain Path” (Taipei: Yuan-ching, 1984), 1–42, 101–16.
22
Yip, June. 2004. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural
Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pg. 155

27
predecessors— it showed a significant shift away from the binaries of classical nationalism
toward a more postcolonial/postmodern understanding of a nation, that is “neither essentialist nor
caught up in notions of cultural authenticity”
23
. It has moved beyond an anti-colonial strategy of
defining a native self against a foreign other, towards a more radical analysis of an intricate and
convoluted whole. Its neo-nativism has recognized the intricacy of the ties between social and
cultural, which are no longer confined to the territorial nation-state, but multiple, proliferating,
contested, and overlapping. It has transcended the binaries between China and Taiwan in which
the New Cinema movements have sought to undermine those unities of a nation state. As one
cultural theorist has put it, the New Cinema movement has opened up “fissures and fault lines in
the nationalistic discourse” and is “setting in motion a de-totalizing dialectic.”
24
Hou Hsiao-
Hsien’s films exemplify this transition from a homogenizing conception of a nation from
Benedict Anderson to one that acknowledges divisions, fragmentations, and stratifications that
redefine both societies and individuals. His filmic representations and narrative structures would
further prove these claims of his overall understanding of the modern global system of mass
migration and intersecting cultures because nations have now been reshaped by the many
cultures into complicated and multifarious elements. Hou Hsiao-Hsien himself is a second
generation mainlander and a hybrid product of mainland heritage, Taiwanese upbringing, and
Japanese and Western influences. His identity directly reflects that of his politics in films. In no
way can he be labeled a pro-Taiwanese or anti-Mandarin, because in A City of Sadness, Hou
does not adopt a singular, oppositional strategy in constructing the counter-narrative to challenge

23
Ibid, pg. 235.
24
Wimal Dissanayake, “Nationhood, History, and Cinema: Reflections on the Asian Scene,” in
Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), xvi.

28
the KMT government’s history. Instead, his politics consist of ambivalence and heterogeneity to
these events that includes multiple voices, narratives, and forces that coexist and are in constant
contention. Hou seems interested in the dynamic forces that shape Taiwan today and how
individuals identify themselves from these various, multifaceted cultures and influences.

I. Male Characters, Narrative Structures, and Identity Politics

With the democratization and liberalization of Taiwan, Hou was able to incorporate many
narratives that depicted the multi-complex nature of Taiwanese identity. As the winner of the
Golden Lion Award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival, A City of Sadness is filmed with the
historical backdrop of the 2-28 Incident and chronicles the lives of a Taiwanese family between
the Japanese withdrawal from Taiwan in 1945 and the Nationalist government’s move to Taipei
in 1949. The film was controversial because of its profound use of language to tell history along
with Hou’s ambivalence of political perspective to represent Taiwanese history in the late
1940s— a taboo subject for the public until martial law was lifted in 1987. Hou’s strategy of
expressing major political developments during this period works through language, both spoken
and written, instead of visual representations. We can see this through the use of intertitles,
sound track, voice over, music, and diaries in which the public and private spheres are
interconnected.

29

Showa emperor’s announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender is juxtaposed with the birth
of a child in the Lin family.

One of the narrative structures used by Hou was the portrayal of the male characters in his
films interwoven with the political spheres of Taiwan. The mise-en-scene of Lin Wen-Heung’s
mistress giving birth to a son whom they call Kong-Ming ( 光明), meaning “light” or brilliance
was a personal event that represented the fate of Taiwan as a nation. The opening scene with the
credit sequence shot begins with total darkness with the sound of the Japanese emperor’s voice
in announcing Japan’s unconditional surrender over the radio: “On August 15, 1945, the Showa
Emperor declared Japan’s unconditional surrender, bringing an end to Japan’s fifty-one-year
occupation of Taiwan. Lin Wen-Heung’s woman in Ba-douah gave birth to a son, who was given
the name Lim Kong-ming.”
25
The setting is then illuminated with a lighting of candles, and we

25
The City of Sadness (Dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)

30
witness the family preparing for the imminent birth of the child in a middle of a power cut. When
the electricity is restored, the father fixes the lights and leaves the room; the shaking light
becomes the focus of attention for the scene as we hear the baby crying over the painful screams
of the expectant mother. This scene parallels Taiwan’s liberation from Japan’s colonial rule
which gave the Taiwanese people a sense of optimism as well as uncertainty. The legal status of
the son was also questioned because of Lin Wen-Heung’s mistress, which ties Kong-Ming to the
identity crisis of Taiwan since 1945, when Taiwan’s collective identity becomes more
questionable for the international community since the Nationalists were defeated by the Chinese
Communists in 1949. The Taiwanese roots from the mainland had been intertwined with the past
ties of the Japanese, and the birth of Kong-Ming becomes a symbolic representation of Taiwan’s
contested identity that plays on into the life of the family.
Although the four brothers of the Lin family were not directly involved in politics, they
were persecuted for different reasons following those turbulent years and represented certain
aspects of Taiwanese political history. The oldest son, Wen Heung, was a local business owner
of a nightclub called Little Shanghai and was affiliated with the Shanghai gangsters. He finds his
life being constantly interfered with from ambiguous government policies and the politically
connected Shanghai gangsters. In the end, his business closes down, he becomes an alcoholic,
and gets killed by the Shanghai gangsters. We do not see anything of the second brother, Wen-
Sun, because he was a physician who was missing in action in the Philippines during the Pacific
War. We are only reminded of him when his wife cleans his clinic everyday in hopes of him
returning one day. The third brother, Wen Leung, was a shell-shocked victim from the Japanese
campaign in Shanghai during World War Two. When he recovers from his injuries, he joins the
family business but gets involved with the Shanghai gangsters because of Wen Heung’s

31
concubine. The gang members use their connections with the Nationalist government’s
representative in Taiwan to falsely accuse Wen Leung of being a Communist spy. Although he
was released from jail in the end, he has been so traumatized that he loses his sanity and never
recovers. The youngest brother, Wen Ching, the deaf-mute photographer, characterizes Hou’s
auteur style of being an observer to political history. Wen Ching communicates through
photographs, pens, and paper and throughout the film, he is mostly an innocent observer. The
audience also witnesses through the eyes of the narrator, Hinomi, the nurse from a Japanese
family who later becomes Wen Ching’s wife.
Hou uses the auto/biographical approach to characterize his movie characters in a
cinematically realistic manner to authenticate the life of these people into his films. For example,
Wen Ching is based on two actual people from Hou Hsiao Hsien’s life. One is Hou’s friend,
Cheng Tin Shi, “who had become deaf after falling from a tree at the age of eight and
communicated with people through written notes”
26
. The other person is Hou Cong- Hui, with
whom Hou Hsiao-Hsien had discussed the events of 1947 and “whose recollections form a key
strand in the narrative of clan, city, and nation”
27
. Wen Ching the photographer is like Hou the
filmmaker—they both see through a camera and observe the situations without speaking.
Hou’s second auteur style incorporates observers into the film as protagonists by which

26
Reynaud, Berenice. 2002. A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute, pg. 34

27
Yeh, Emilie Yueh-Yu and Darrell William Davis. 2005. Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure
Island. New York: Columbia University Press, pg. 147

32
Wen-Ching’s “inability to speak symbolizes the Taiwanese as silenced by their oppression.”
28

By being a witness, he was able conduct his rites of passages and perceive his surroundings
without judging but rather developing empathy and sensitivity. The deaf-mute photographer
becomes such a great vehicle in developing not only a more rounded and reflective impression of
the past, but also represents the intricacy and problematic process in history writing. We can also
see this through his transplanting of detached long takes into his film aesthetics to represent the
observer’s viewpoints and allowing the scenes to naturally unfold themselves without too much
scripting. Most of his actors and actresses are non-professional and many scenes are filmed
impromptu. It allows the observers to see without offsetting the equilibrium and the “law of
nature”.
Nevertheless, Wen Ching does become involved and gets arrested by the police for
befriending Hinoe, Hinomi’s brother, and his intellectual and socialist associates. Wen Ching is
eventually released and conveys the last message from one of his executed inmates: “In life,
away from the motherland. In death, back to the motherland. Both life and death are decreed by
fate”. Wen Ching tells Hinoe he is determined to live in the mountains to fulfill his dead inmates
dreams. Hinoe also asks Wen Ching to tell his family, “Imagine me dead. My life belongs to the
motherland.” The term “motherland” was mentioned several times but its meaning was left
undefined. The imagery associated with the long takes of the rural communities in the mountains
connotes the nativist sensibility. However, it addresses Taiwan’s ethnoscape as being mixed and
culturally ambivalent because we cannot clearly define Taiwanese identity without mentioning
Aborigines, Taiwanese, and mainland Chinese roots.

28
Harrison, Mark. 2004-2005. “Cinema and National Memory.” CSD Bulletin. Winter: pg. 14

33
II. Women’s Roles, Memories and Imagination

Women’s roles are mostly played out as the real anchor of the film, although they are
sometimes the background characters, that reflect the changing nature of Taiwanese political
identity from the many women who survive the political ordeals from the White Terror. Several
women in A City of Sadness, who do not have names in the film, are the first brother’s wife and
their daughter Ah-Shue, the first brother’s mistress, the second brother’s wife, and the third
brother’s wife. These women stand for family, endurance, and everyday existence. Their
collectivity stands for stability and symbolizes the civilization of Taiwan. For example, when the
second brother was missing in action, the wife makes sure to clean his clinic and prepare for his
eventual return. Although the clinic accentuates a sense of loss (the loss of husband, father,
brother, and son because of Japanese colonialism), life has to move on and normality ensues. In
A City of Sadness, women are always busy cooking or doing their household chores, and
appearing to be resilient to loss and inner sadness. The act of normality was a form of resistance
to being beaten by grief and trauma. As Hou Hsiao-Hsien states, “a woman accepts what is
happening outside silently. Yet, this is how woman becomes the really strong persistent force in
the Chinese family”
29
.
In Good Men Good Women, there are three temporal currents running through the film
presented by the female actress playing the character of Liang Ching in the present of the 1990’s,
in the past of the 1980’s, and also playing Chiang Bi-Yu during the anti- Japanese war and the
White Terror. The present reality, the actress’s memory of the past, and the film within the film
all intertwine together through the same female actress. The history of the White Terror is

29
Quoted in Reynaud, Berenice. 2002. A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute, pg. 70

34
represented by Chiang Bi-Yu’s personal experience and her past from Liang Ching’s readings.
The female characters in Good Men Good Women take center stage as the narrator and also the
main subject of the film and history. Liang was able to access Chiang’s life and explain the
historical background for us when reading Chiang’s history and vision. Hou tries to indicate that
women’s positions in history transcend the differences in era. Near the end of the film, when
Liang receives a silent phone call, thinking it was Ah-Wei, she expresses her deep love and
weeps for him. In the following shots, Chiang receives Chung Hao Tung’s last letter from prison
and his dead body. The film then shifts from black and white to color, from the past to the
present, as women cry for the death of their men. In the 1950’s, Chung died for his ideal Marxist
cause while, in the 1990’s, Ah Wei died for the underground cause. Both men died for their
struggles and women survive to witness history and assuage the wounds. What complicates the
narrative even further between the past and present, imagination and memories, was her stolen
diary. An unknown caller with her stolen diary harasses her over the phone by sending faxes of
the pages one by one. The faxes unnerve her not only from the invasion of privacy but also by
reminding her of her recent past, when she was a drug addicted bar girl in a stormy relationship
with the gangster, Ah-Wei. She was in a similar situation as her past with Chiang Bi-Yu
suffering from the death of Chung Hao-tong. It might have seemed she had become delusional to
the point where she was hallucinating and dreaming about this harasser who does not even
exist—just like Chiang’s disillusionment with the KMT government and involvement in
underground journals. The film blurred the lines between reality and illusion, and past and
present, fusing everything together everything in a fragmentary and discontinuous way, from
multiple moments in time which portray Taiwanese history in a non-black and white lens, albeit
one with many layers, to better understand the complexities of the current cultural moment.

35

Hinomi’s writing of her diary symbolizes one of the many fragmentary, nonpolitical “voices”
that serves as a hidden memory to the period of transition from Japanese to KMT rule.

The meeting and writing between Hinomi and Wen Ching in A City of Sadness proves to
be an ingenious idea for constructing memory and narrating the stories before and after the 2-28
Incident. Her written diaries and exchanges with Wen Ching give the audience an intimate,
independent female viewpoint that has long been ignored in Taiwanese history and cinema. Her
diary records a private account of the historical events that took place, which differs from the
official version, including the fighting in Taipei between the Taiwanese and mainlanders, and her
concern over Wen-Ching and Hinoe’s trip to Taipei. Her written work goes on to convey dreams,
thoughts, passion, and memories that relay a distant perspective which breaks down the barriers
of verbal exchanges in films. The characterization of Hinomi and her interactions allow Hou
Hsiao-Hsien to add ambiguity to the narrative structure while telling the story “from the point of
view of a woman, who reports the events while expressing her emotions as a point of view that is

36
both objective and subjective.”
30
An interesting scene occurs when Hinoe discusses politics with
his friends, and both Hinomi and Wen-Ching remain silent as they sit across from each other
during a meal. Hinomi then suggests Wen-Ching put on a music record and the conversation in
the background slowly fades away into the music. Hinomi tells Wen-Ching that the music was
from a folk tune, Lorelei, and was based on a German legend. Wen-Ching becomes intrigued by
Hinomi’s story of the music, and there is a flashback of Wen-Ching imitating Peking opera
gestures in school when he was eight. The music of Lorelei fades out and is replaced by the
singing of Peking opera. This offers the contrast between Japan (German folk tune) and China
(Peking opera), the past (little boys in school) and the present (Wen Ching and Hinomi listening
to music), and memory and imagination (whether it was Hinomi imagining Wen-Ching’s
childhood or it was Wen Ching’s own memories of the past). The multifarious elements in
narrative structures eventually merge into one as they break the limitation in verbal
communications.
The final scenes of the film are told through a series of silent images accompanied by
non-diegetic background music and the voiceover of Hinomi’s narration in two pieces of writing:
one diary entry and one letter to Ah-Shue, the first brother’s daughter. Despite the traumatic
events occurring after 2-28, Hinomi’s presence on screen and her voiceover remains poignant
and calm. Since their wedding, Hinomi writes in her diary that she has given birth to a boy, Ah-
Chieh. She feels that as long as she has Wen-Ching and Ah-Chieh around her, she would feel
content amidst the oppressive political and economic atmosphere. They continue to give
financial support to Hinoe, Hinomi’s brother, who lives in the mountains, and they feel reassured

30
Reynaud, Berenice. 2002. A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute.

37
whenever someone from Hinoe’s community can come and collect money from them since it
means that Hinoe and his friends are safe and well. Hinomi’s diary entry ends here, but what
happens afterwards was that Hinoe has been arrested in the mountains. Wen-Ching and Hinomi
become devastated, and it shows the both of them and Ah-Chieh standing on the train platform
carrying two small suitcases and watching the train leave. We hear a camera click and the frame
freezes to form a photograph. Afterwards, we hear Hinomi’s voiceover again in a narrated letter
to Ah-Shue—we learn that Wen-Ching has been arrested as well. The letter reads:
“We thought of running away, but there was nowhere to go. I’m writing so long
afterwards because only now do I feel calmer. The photograph was taken three days
before Wen-Ching’s arrest. When they came he was taking someone’s portrait. He
insisted on finishing the job before they led him away. I’ve searched and enquired
everywhere in Taipei but I’ve no news. Ah-Chieh is teething. He has a lovely smile and
he has your uncle’s eyes. Please come and see us soon. It’s getting colder in Chiu-Fen.
The autumn blossom is out. The hills are all white. It’s like snow.”
31

This letter written by Hinomi speaks to her strong character and self-control. Her strength is
displayed through her courage to live a normal life despite Wen-Ching’s arrest and other external
factors. Her letter was a form of silent resistance against oppression through her resilience. Her
writing has invited the audience into her memory and “cinematic space, not to understand,
connecting cause and effect, but to experience.”
32
The many fragmentary experiences and voices
that are recorded in this diary represent the many voices of Taiwanese citizens that have been
subverted under the oppression of 2-28.

31
Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh T. "Cinema, historiography, and identities in Taiwan: Hou Hsiao-
Hsien’s A City of Sadness". Asian cinema (1059-440X), (2), p. 207
32
Yeh, Emilie Yueh-Yu and Darrell William Davis. 2005. Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure
Island. New York: Columbia University Press, pg. 134.

38
III. Languages, Soundscape, and Heteroglossia

On top of the intricate designs of structures, characterizations, and visual images, Hou
brings in the other layer of languages and sound to further reflect Taiwan’s identities as multiple,
fluid, and politically problematic. The defining moment with the use of language was with the
sequence depicting the events of 2-28. In A City of Sadness, Hou allows the confusion, tension,
and events to unfold before us rather than directly telling us through one linear viewpoint or
timeline. We first hear Chen Yi’s Mandarin announcement of the accident that occurred on the
night of 2-28. When Hinomi appears, the broadcast on the radio fades out as she begins to
narrate in Taiwanese as she writes her diary. She notes the fighting in Taipei between the
mainlanders and the Taiwanese and their fear about Wen-Ching and Hinoe’s trip to Taipei. In the
next scene, we hear Chen Yi announce the reinstatement of martial law. There is then the
flashback of what happened to Wen-Ching and his trip to Taipei. A group of hoodlums get onto
the train and start terrorizing people and ask Wen-Ching in Taiwanese, “Where are you from?”
Wen-Ching then proceeds to stand up slowly, takes off his hat and says in broken
Taiwanese, “I am Taiwanese.”
Unconvinced, the hoodlums ask the same question in Japanese, “Where are you from?”
Since Wen-Ching can neither hear nor answer their question, the hoodlums were about to
beat him up before Hinoe arrives to tell them he was a deaf- mute.

39

In A City of Sadness, Taiwanese rebels used the test of language to question Wen-Ching and
identify their mainland Chinese enemies

We can see how Hou utilizes the differences in languages to instill a sense of fear,
confusion, and danger spreading throughout the island after 2-28. Many mainlanders became
victims of street violence during the riots, but the Taiwanese took the brunt in the aftermath.
Chen Yi’s accented Mandarin was identified as the oppressor’s language and many locals who
speak Taiwanese can be the aggressor as well. The shouting of Taiwanese in the hospital and on
the train articulates one’s cultural identity as well as their political convictions. The Japanese
language heard in the film is more cultural than political, other than the Japanese emperor’s
announcement in the beginning, that shows a shared life experience for the Taiwanese. The
Japanese song “Song of the Carriage Sapporo,” which was popular in Taiwan during the 1940’s,
relates the mood of someone who watches friends leave by carriage, knowing they might not
meet again. We hear this song as two Taiwanese intellectuals come out of their jail cell to face

40
their death penalties. It was a contrast to the playful Mandarin song playing before and it
signified the poignancy of the Japanese song that the oppressor cannot understand or make a
claim with, thus presenting how the disillusioned elites display their ultimate defiance and
resistance. After Wen-Ching was released, a Taiwanese song, “Drifting,” was played in reference
to the sorrow of the Taiwanese wives. When their husbands were drafted for the war by the
Japanese, they were never to return. In this case, it was an accusation towards KMT brutality that
has left women to continue grieving over their lost husbands, when the new regime kills innocent
men to consolidate its power.

The interrogation scene in Good Men Good Women shows the misunderstanding between the
Taiwanese and the mainlanders arising from the linguistic gap

In Good Men Good Women, the trisection of Hokkien, Chinese, and Japanese languages
during the student’s interrogation in China for anti-Japanese resistance was also a sign of a loss
of homogenous identity in a confusing present. There exists a mistrust and suspicion with which
the Taiwanese and the mainlanders began this association, which inevitably leads to the

41
historical tragedies of the 2-28 Incident and the White Terror, and have impacted their
relationships to this very day. Every question was repeated in three languages and the answers
were also done that way for those main characters. The students were even suspected as spies for
the Japanese who tried to infiltrate into China since Taiwan had been colonized by Japan. There
was a historical awareness presented by Hou that underlies the narrative. The tainted interactions
between the two correlated directly to the White Terror and the KMT’s lingering doubts about
Taiwanese loyalty. The KMT were paranoid about communist spies, which led them to arrest
Taiwanese people indiscriminately, determined to spare no communists if that meant killing
hundreds of innocent people. The use of multiple languages can represent a lack of a
homogenous identity in which Taiwanese identity was continually evolving and being
reconstructed from the past to the present.
If silence were a language, then it would be one that transpires through almost every film
from Hou Hsiao-Hsien. He has mastered the language of silence to demonstrate reality and
multidimensional and detached viewpoints from the camera’s long shot to the silence in
landscape facilities, such as the silent skylines and Taiwanese countryside, to evoke a sense of
place. We can understand how Harrison once quoted, “it is this sense of place which functions as
a witness to violence and suffering. In a sense of place is the remembrance of history, and with it
the capacity to judge and forgive.”
33
Hou’s detached views and his play on characters’
observations ties together the narrative structures, characterizations, and his auteur style on the 2-
28 Incident and its aftermath that cannot be described merely with words.

33
Harrison, Mark. 2004-2005. “Cinema and National Memory.” CSD Bulletin. Winter: 14.

42
Hou’s films avoid the limitations of conventional historiography, and we can tell from his
auteur style that he mediates our historical knowledge through narrations, intertitles, written
texts, and voiceover commentaries. The effect of having Hou filter all public historical events
through language is that history, after all, is storytelling. There are many Taiwanese film critics
and pundits who view A City of Sadness as semi-documentary and debate the accuracy of the
historical representations. Co-scriptwriter Chu T’ien-Wen reminds her critics that “representation
of an historical era can never be more than what an author chooses to see in that era. It is always
circumscribed by the author’s own attitudes and motivations. A completely objective and
comprehensive account of an era—whether in historical writing or fictional writing—simply
does not exist.”
34
Like the novel of Mikhail Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel”, A City of
Sadness is opened up by the forces of heteroglossia to accommodate the dissonant multitude of
voices that make up Taiwanese society. History itself is open to a process of continual interplay
of heterogeneous forces—the 2-28 Incident, for instance, as a pure political struggle is
undermined by what Bakhtin refers to as the centrifugal forces of heteroglossia. It is the
coexistence of a variety of languages and perspectives that Bakhtin brings to novelization and
dialogism; the conventional genres become “free and flexible… by incorporating extraliterary
heteroglossia.”
35
Hou refers to these discourses as having non-political elements such as
economic and sociological discourses, personal letters and diaries, and so on that is used to
complicate and challenge the monolithic view of Taiwanese history offered by the KMT
government. As with having hsiang-t’u literature influences, the incorporation of the Taiwanese

34
Chu T’ien-wen , “Thirteen Questions on City of Sadness”, Tzu-li Morning Post, July 11–13,
1989
35
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Michael Holquist ed., ed. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Austin: University of Texas Press, Epic 7.

43
dialect and other native tongues into the New Cinema films adds both an aural soundtrack and
visual elements such as Chinese subtitles. It not only promotes the indigenous oral cultures of
Taiwan, but also networks to a more linguistic diverse background. The Taiwanese New Cinema
adopted techniques from hsiang-t’u literature but it adopts a less binary, exclusionary view of
language and challenges the essentialist idea of a linguistically defined nation. In A City of
Sadness, one scene shows Taiwanese schoolchildren joining their Japanese teacher in singing
“Akatonbo,” a traditional Japanese folk song that expresses a yearning for returning to their
homeland. The irony of this scene is that the homeland to which the song refers to is Japan. The
post-liberalization influences of Japanese colonial education still linger throughout the film. Hou
states that the objective of incorporating so many languages and dialects—Mandarin, Taiwanese,
Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Japanese—into film is to realistically capture the linguistic
confusion of those post-war years.
36
As mainlanders came into Taiwan, this confusion is most
perceived in A City of Sadness where the linguistic difference becomes a mark for political
antagonism and a way for Taiwanese rebels to distinguish and identify their mainland Chinese
enemies. Hou’s interest in oral traditions from hsiang-t’u cannot be disputed, but it was not a
matter between the foreign other and nativity or between tradition and modernity; rather, it was
about striving towards a more critical understanding of the complex dynamics of these linguistic
relationships today.
Conclusion
The historiography of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films ultimately departed from the
conventional binaries of nationalism—an island that was colonized by the Japanese Empire from

36
Interview in Chiao, “The Camera-Swept Back Alleys of History.”

44
1895-1945 and from the KMT Chinese government post-1945 that both attempted to integrate
Taiwan into the larger Japanese and Mainland Chinese nations. The political liberalization and
democratization in Taiwan has allowed self-reconceptualization to take shape, and the discussion
and portrayal of Taiwan’s national trauma of the 2-28 Incident and the White Terror is no longer
taboo. It has integrated values of Taiwanese social and political realism from hsiang-t’u literature
from the colonial and modern period into something that has transcended the stable, unified
cultural parameters of Taiwanese identity. The island is now an increasingly complex and hybrid
social space that is being reshaped by multiple languages, cultures, gender topics, and narrative
structures that are depicted in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men Good Women and A City of
Sadness. Unlike his hsiang-t’u predecessors, Hou’s construction of an imagined community
goes beyond the nativist narrative to counterbalance the KMT’s rhetoric of homogeneity and
coherence. Taiwan has realigned itself into an arena of global culture, through its flexible
positions, that comes into contact with multidimensional and multicultural cultural flows which
demands the acknowledgment of the myriad of differences found in all societies. Taiwan’s
transcendence from indigenization to a multi-complex identity has become a testimony for the
world that we are all interconnected in the new global order.

45
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Creator Tsai, Stefan B. (author)

Core Title The transcendence of Taiwanese identity: a study of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films

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Defense Date 06/30/2016

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