Filmmaker Valerie Soe’s Taiwanese camera crew had never heard of the “Love Boat,” even though it has been taking place since 1967. Officials Soe interviewed were not happy with the moniker, whose preferred name is “Overseas Compatriot Youth Summer Formosa Study Tour,” — but that probably wouldn’t have registered either.
“The government officials’ idea of what the program is about is quite different from what it actually was,” Soe says. “They said it’s not about romance; it′s about learning your culture, your language and so forth.”
It wasn’t a small program. In its heyday from the 1980s to the early 2000s, the six-week cultural and language tour lured more than 1,000 overseas Taiwanese and Chinese to Taiwan every summer — including Soe, a Chinese-American who participated in 1982. The tour earned its moniker as it became a hotbed for romance and hookups, and parents would pay for the trip in the hope that their children would find a fellow Chinese or Taiwanese spouse.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
“It worked for a lot of people, apparently,” Soe says.
The “Love Boat” experience stuck with Soe, who is now a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, so much so that she made a documentary about it. It turns out, many alumni — including several couples who met through the Love Boat — could not forget about it either, contacting Soe and eager to share their memories.
Love Boat: Taiwan made its world premiere on Saturday at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and will be debuting in Asia on May 26 as the closing film for the Urban Nomad Film Festival. Now in its 18th year, the festival kicks on Saturday and ends on May 27. The festival will show 25 feature films, 22 shorts and eight indie band music videos as well as a number of talks, concerts and special events. Many of the films are music focused because one festival theme explores the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, while others look at the latest developments in technology, art, culture and human behavior.
Photo courtesy of Valerie Soe
LOVE AFTER THE BOAT
Launched as Taiwan’s international status plummeted in the late 1960s, Soe says it was one of the first instances of the government using soft power to gain support — something it is still doing today. The political climate has greatly changed, and while both Chinese and Taiwanese-Americans identified as Chinese back then, that’s no longer the case. Soe’s mother’s family was active with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) before they migrated to the US, enabling Soe to visit that summer despite having no ties to the country. Plus, there was no such program in China anyway.
“Did I go on the trip because I was already interested in Asian culture, or was it the other way around?” Soe muses. “It’s hard to say, but for a lot of people it was the first time they thought about Asia and have since been continuously interested in it.”
Photo courtesy of Valerie Soe
Due to the complicated nuances of this political background — some in the documentary will say they’re learning Chinese culture, others will say Taiwanese — and the political undertones of the Love Boat, Soe is a bit nervous to show the film in Taiwan.
“We touch on the history a little bit to acknowledge that there’s some complexity there,” she says. “I hope [the audience] cuts me some slack. With a film this length [at 65 minutes], you can’t go into too much detail as you have to keep the audience interested.”
By the time Soe returned to Taiwan in 2016, the Love Boat as she knew it was no more. Similar programs were much smaller and divided into areas of concentration — language learning, for example — instead of putting everyone together in one big steamy party. But the “love” part lives on, and Soe followed a Love Boat couple as they registered their marriage in Colorado and had their wedding in Hsinchu last November.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad Film Festival
THE REST OF THE GOODIES
Urban Nomad co-founder David Frazier was drawn to Soe’s film because it puts Taiwan in a transnational context.
“The Golden Horse Awards focus on Greater China, while the Taipei Film Festival is for Taiwanese filmmakers. We’re a little broader in who we allow in our competition,” Frazier says.
Photo courtesy of Urban Nomad
Including Love Boat, all but four of Urban Nomad’s offerings are Taiwan or Asia premieres. The opening film, People’s Republic of Desire (虛你人生), delves into China’s often bizarre live streaming industry, which is purportedly worth US$4.4 billion in revenues last year. Nine international filmmakers will be traveling to Taiwan to participate in talks and other events, such as Fermin Muguruza, a legendary Spanish ska-punk-reggae singer who will be throwing a party at nightclub Triangle after the screening of his film, Black is Betlza.
More Taiwanese work can be seen in the short film category, and one of the most unique features of the festival is its music video category, featuring visuals created for indie bands such as Deca Joins, Elephant Gym (大象體操) and Murky Crows (昏鴉). Frazier says the only other music video competition in Taiwan is the Golden Melody Awards, which mostly focuses on pop music.
Urban Nomad has featured this category for the past five years as YouTube becomes an ever-important venue for a musician to make it big. But is this reliance on visuals helping the music itself? Local music video producers will be discussing the question during one of the festival’s four panel discussions titled “When Video Kills Music.”
“One of the jurors proposed that question as a direction for discussion,” Frazier says. “That’s not a statement I’m advocating as festival director.”
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
The race for New Taipei City mayor is being keenly watched, and now with the nomination of former deputy mayor of Taipei Hammer Lee (李四川) as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, the battle lines are drawn. All polling data on the tight race mentioned in this column is from the March 12 Formosa poll. On Christmas Day 2010, Taipei County merged into one mega-metropolis of four million people, making it the nation’s largest city. The same day, the winner of the mayoral race, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), took office and insisted on the current
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS