After winning three awards at the closing ceremony of the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (
Miao died Saturday evening of lymph cancer at Taipei's Veteran's Hospital (
The actor gained fame for his role as the villain in the martial-arts classic Dragon Inn (
Before dying, Miao wrote a note to his wife saying: "I will be strong. I'm always a tough guy," his wife Liu Mei-lin (
Miao's last film was Tsai's Goodbye Dragon Inn (不散). In the film, Miao sits in the movie theater watching himself in Dragon Inn. In the last scene he holds his grandson as he walks down the hallway of the theater in one of the most classic shots of all his movies.
Miao's original name is Miao Yen-lin (
Miao retired in 1987 and rejected numerous offers until Tsai convinced him to play the father in Rebels of the Neon God (
Off-screen, Miao was affectionately called Papa Miao (苗爸) or Uncle Miao (苗叔) by Tsai, who considered him a father not only in his films, but also in real life.
"I felt that he had silently given me a blessing from heaven, helping me to win the awards," Tsai said upon his arrival yesterday at CKS International Airport from Berlin.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
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