How Are You, Dad (爸，你好嗎) is director Chang Tso-chi’s (張作驥) response to his late father, a veteran soldier who fled to Taiwan with Chinese Nationalist Party troops, and before his death admonished his son to make a film he could understand. Five years after he passed away, Chang, whose films are usually in Hakka and Hoklo [commonly known as Taiwanese], produced a compilation of 10 short stories in Mandarin about 10 different fathers and their relationships with their children.
The father figure, biological or symbolic, has always played an important part in Chang’s works. The sons, sometimes suffering from the Oedipus complex, are often abandoned and separated from their fathers, who are often alcoholics, gamblers or criminals. Some critics have compared Chang’s father-son relationships with Taiwan’s relationship towards Japan and China.
In How Are You, Dad, the father figures are more diverse, which allows viewers from different backgrounds to identify and emphasize with the characters that include a tough gangster played by Jack Kao (高捷), who melts before his daughter after she is paralyzed in a diving accident, a young single dad played by Gau Meng-jie (高盟傑), who is lost, drunk and sobs uncontrollably beside his infant son and a Taiwanese businessman who is too busy to spend time with his kids but is willing to sacrifice his life for them.
Many of Chang’s signature themes are revisited here. His interest in identity is touched upon in the story of a half-Japanese, half-Taiwanese transvestite, and his enthusiasm for magical realism is realized through CGI zoo animals in the tale of a Hong Konger actor and his son, who is severely brain damaged.
While many of the stories try too hard, Chang excels in capturing the subtle and nuanced emotions of everyday life. Iron Gate (鐵門) opens with a familiar scene: an extended Taiwanese family having dinner at the aged father’s home. In three long takes, Chang masterfully conveys the in-laws’ bickering and veiled bitterness and the loneliness of the old man, who sits my himself in his quiet house after his sons and daughters rush back home.
In The Sight of Father’s Back (背影), veteran actor Chen Mu-yi (陳慕義) plays a small-town worker who ferries his son to the train station on his rusty old truck after working a night shift to pay for the child’s school outing. The story paints an unforgettable image of a traditional father figure: reticent, reserved and awkward when it comes to showing his emotions and love for his offspring.
Another stand-out story is The Old Time Dream (昨日舊夢). Though nothing much takes place, the audience is quickly drawn into the witty conversation a father, son and grandson engage in at the dining table. The minutes-long dialogue is enough to paint a familial scene that tugs at the heartstrings: a widowed Mainlander lives alone in Taipei after his son and three daughters long since ago moved to Singapore and the US.
When he comes back to visit, the grown-up son looks amazedly at his father, feeling disturbed by the thought that he no longer knows the old man standing before him.
In recent weeks the Trump Administration has been demanding that Taiwan transfer half of its chip manufacturing to the US. In an interview with NewsNation, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that the US would need 50 percent of domestic chip production to protect Taiwan. He stated, discussing Taiwan’s chip production: “My argument to them was, well, if you have 95 percent, how am I gonna get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” The stench of the Trump Administration’s mafia-style notions of “protection” was strong
Late last month US authorities used allegations of forced labor at bicycle manufacturer Giant Group (巨大集團) to block imports from the firm. CNN reported: “Giant, the world’s largest bike manufacturer, on Thursday warned of delays to shipments to the United States after American customs officials announced a surprise ban on imports over unspecified forced labor accusations.” The order to stop shipments, from the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), came as a surprise to Giant, company officials said. Giant spokesman Ken Li (李書耕) said that the CPB never visited the company’s factories to conduct on-site investigations, nor to interview or
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
“Eighteen years ago, people didn’t even know the name of this ingredient,” says 58-year-old Gil Sa-hyeon, holding up a cluster of dried brownish stems. “Now it’s everywhere.” His shop, Joseon Yakcho, sits in the heart of Seoul’s Yangnyeongsi Market, South Korea’s largest traditional medicinal herb market, its streets lined with shops displaying buckets of herbs such as licorice root and cinnamon bark that spill on to the pavements, filling the air with their distinct, earthy aroma. The ingredient Gil is referring to is hovenia dulcis, known in Korean as heotgae — the oriental raisin tree that’s become the cornerstone of South Korea’s
RSS