As athletes from around the world prepare for the Deaflympics, scheduled to open in Taipei on Sept. 5, a group of pop idols and film professionals have assembled a feature film to coincide with the event. Helmed by up-and-coming director Cheng Fen-fen (鄭芬芬), Hear Me (聽說) tells an enjoyable boy-meets-girl story, but adds a twist to the classic tale by introducing hearing-impaired characters and making extensive use of sign language.
The film opens with a swim team training for the upcoming Deaflympics. Hearing-impaired Hsiao Peng (Michelle Chen, 陳妍希) is one of the team’s best swimmers. Her younger sister Yang Yang (Ivy Chen, 陳意涵) drops by the pool every day to support her, all the while working odd jobs so that Hsiao Peng can concentrate on her training.
Also a pool regular, Tian Kuo (Eddie Peng, 彭于晏), a happy young man, delivers lunchboxes to the athletes and is soon attracted to the equally cheerful Yang Yang. The pair communicate through sign language and develop deep feelings for one another.
Things take a turn for the worse, however, when, after a late night date with Kuo, Yang Yang comes home to discover that Hsiao Peng has been hospitalized for smoke inhalation caused by a fire next door. Blaming herself for the accident, Yang Yang decides to stop seeing Kuo.
Despite Yang Yang’s resistance, the lovelorn Kuo does not give up on their budding romance. While his patience and determination eventually win the girl’s heart, Hear Me’s ending is anything but predictable.
As demonstrated in her feature film debut, 2007’s Keeping Watch (沉睡的青春), award-winning scriptwriter and director Cheng possesses the skill to tell a story gracefully, a talent young Taiwanese filmmakers often lack. Though many audience members may not be familiar with sign language, the main form of communication between the two protagonists, Hear Me’s carefully scripted narrative, comic relief and genuine emotional resonance quickly render this language barrier unimportant.
The film also earns extra points for its well-cast group of actors. Though Peng risks being typecast as a happy-go-lucky, good-natured guy, he stands out with his lovable antics and impressive comedic timing. Theater veteran Luo Bei-an (羅北安) and Golden Horse-winning actress Lin Mei-hsiu (林美秀) make adorable sidekicks as Kuo’s parents.
Supported by Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (台北市文化局) and the Taipei Organizing Committee of the 21st Summer Deaflympics, Hear Me is less a movie about sportsmanship and the world of the hearing-impaired than a lighthearted romance featuring young pop idols. The promotional motivations behind the movie become all too obvious at certain points, a prime example being the director’s portrayal of Taipei as a city filled with extreme cyclists, skateboarders, street musicians and flamenco and hip-hop dancers, all of whom congregate in the outdoor squares of the upscale Xinyi District.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS