Nat Baimel from California is one half of The Manchild, a duo that does standup comedy in Taipei this week. The other Manchild is Ed Hill, a Taiwanese Canadian whose sweet-and-sour experience as an ethnic minority fuels his stand-up act.
“I will be talking about being a Taiwanese Canadian growing up in a North American culture,” Hill told the Taipei Times. “Some [cultural] stereotypes will definitely be discussed in my act in a subtle, personal way.”
Born in Taiwan, Hill moved to Canada at age 10 under the notion that he was on vacation. He is among a new generation of Asian stand-up comedians who have turned their experiences as a minority and their identity confusion into routines. Asian-American pop icon Margaret Cho does it bawdily and with trenchant wit. Hill is gentler but just as witty, poking fun at his status as an Taiwanese Canadian and including acerbic observations about how his parents have made peace with living in the western world.
Photo courtesy of Ed Hill
“The show ties in some societal, political and familial views,” Hill said. “Everything I talk about eventually hails back to my life story.”
Hill, a rising comedian, has performed on BiteTV, Comedy Time as well as various comedy festivals in North America. He and Baimel met in Seattle three years ago, clicked right away and decided to tour together.
At a performance in Singapore last year, Hill noticed the interest in stand-up comedy and decided to embark on an Asia tour that includes Taipei, where Hill and Baimel will take turns onstage during a 90-minute show.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless