Taiwanese film director Ang Lee’s (李安) award of best director at the Oscars on Sunday night for Life of Pi was a source of tremendous pride for Taiwan, especially after he thanked Taiwanese for their help in making the movie.
The Oscar is a new benchmark in Lee’s illustrious career and one that he made little secret he coveted. However, the evidence of his greatness as a filmmaker manifested itself well before the 58-year-old native of Pingtung County stepped onto the podium to receive his Oscar.
Over the years, Lee has transcended his identity as an Asian and tackled with great precision a surprisingly versatile list of genres, from Victorian Britain in Sense and Sensibility — a feat of civilizational displacement perhaps only equaled by Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro in his book The Remains of the Day — to the American West and male homosexuality in Brokeback Mountain.
From less ambitious and more local efforts like his Father Knows Best trilogy (家庭三部曲) to the martial arts extravaganza Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍), Lee has constantly pushed the envelope of storytelling and proven himself as one of the greatest filmmakers of our time.
However, there was nothing preordained in Lee’s rise to the top. In fact, his success occurred against all odds, with constant reminders from family and the society he grew up in that filmmaking — especially filmmaking by an Asian in the West — was not a realistic or respectable job. Among those who opposed his artistic ambitions was his father, who for years refused to speak to the young Lee as he struggled to make it in Hollywood. Relatives offered him money so he would open a Chinese restaurant, and in his struggling years, Lee even began studying informatics, thinking he might find a job working with computers.
That we are able to enjoy Lee’s artistic vision today is largely thanks to his wife, Jane Lin (林惠嘉), who never stopped believing in her husband’s dreams and, when the fledgling filmmaker was on the brink of giving up, gave him that extra push (it was she who returned the money given Lee to open the restaurant).
There is a lesson in this. While Taiwanese on Monday were eager to celebrate the “pride of Taiwan” for his achievement, the great majority of them, along with their government, looked the other way when Lee was struggling as an assistant on movie sets, on the brink of giving up and taking up a “real job.”
Far too often, Taiwanese denigrate the arts and sports, discouraging their children from pursuing their dreams and forcing them to choose career paths that are unsuited to them. As with basketball player Jeremy Lin (林書豪), Taiwan is happy to claim successes, but rarely provides the support necessary to achieve such goals.
Lee, like many others who have shone on the international scene, succeeded not because of Taiwan, but despite it.
As Taiwan struggles to break through the wall of silence that surrounds its existence, it is high time that dreamers be cultivated and encouraged to press ahead, even if, in the short term, such endeavors do not translate into dollar figures. A nation is not built on lawyers, doctors and businesspeople alone. It needs thinkers, writers, philosophers, filmmakers, painters, architects and professional athletes.
Only through proper support, both financial and moral, will tomorrow’s “prides of Taiwan” emerge to help put the nation on the map. They are out there today, and they need all the encouragement they can get.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS