Despite hours of press interviews , director Tom Shu-Yu Lin (林書宇) looked upbeat and cheery when we meet at a coffee shop near 228 Memorial Park (二 二 八紀念公園). After a few minutes of chatting, Lin’s slight accent reveals his upbringing in the US.
Once a young man troubled by a “split identity,” Lin returns to his teenage years with Winds of September (九降風), which hits the big screen Friday. An autobiographical story about the lives of nine high school students in Hsinchu (新竹), the coming-of-age film, Lin’s debut feature, is the first part of a trilogy produced by Hong Kong luminary Eric Tsang (曾志偉). After reading Lin’s script, Tsang expanded the project and invited two other directors in Hong Kong and China to tell stories about adolescent lives in the three Chinese-speaking lands.
Taipei Times: What was it like as a kid and teenager living in a bilingual/bicultural environment?
Lin Shu-yu: I spent my elementary school years in Twin Cities, Minnesota, where my dad went for his doctoral study in American literature. When we came back to Hsinchu, I could neither read nor write Mandarin. I went to the bilingual high school at Hsinchu Science Park. It was quite an embarrassing period for a teenager because when it was time for Chinese and history classes [taught in Chinese], I had to go to study with elementary first-graders. It was weird with the mini-sized table and all. I didn’t pick up all the basics from those crash courses so I had to peep at those kids’ examination papers to pass tests. Yeah, I had my first-grader friends covering my back (laughing).
TT: I read that though your father is a professor at National Tsing Hua Universtiy (國立清華大學), you weren’t a "good" student in high school and liked to hang out with delinquents.
LSY: I am a people person. Before we went to the US, I studied for one semester in Taiwan. The only thing I remember is that the teacher kept moving me around because I couldn’t stop chatting with my ... neighbor. She thought sitting me with strangers could keep me quiet. Well, it didn’t work. I can have conversations with pretty much all types of people.
TT: What was it like working with teenage illegal aliens for your graduation film project Parachute Kids?
LSY: I used to have an accent when speaking Mandarin. I still sound a bit different. Even in college, I felt quite out of place and would say to myself, “everything will be OK after I go back to the US.” But when I did go back, it was one episode of culture shock after another … . Interestingly, the Chinese communities were where I felt most at home when I was in the US. It is also where I met those teens. They are the minority of the minority because they are Chinese aliens without identities. They have their own world, organizations and leaders to take care of each other. Taiwan’s organized crime groups like the Four Seas (四海幫) and Bamboo Union (竹聯幫) gangs are big in California and would recruit those kids.
Fascinated by the illegal aliens’ culture, I started making a documentary about their lives and gave them DV recorders to shoot their own films. The material they gave back was both amazing and shocking. But a moral question quickly emerged as I worried that once my film was out, they might face the risk of being deported. The project was later changed to a short fiction starring those teenagers.
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