At a time when the sound of teen film spells overuse and cliche, Yee Chih-yen’s (易智言) Meeting Dr. Sun (行動代號：孫中山) comes as a refreshing surprise. The comedy, about a group of teenage boys and their whimsical plans to address their poverty, casts a lyrical and vigorous look into Taiwan’s social inequality through the eyes of the young. Alternating between farcical humor and emotional acuteness, Yee’s latest work can be seen as an ode to the waves of youthful civil disobedience against the system, which climaxed in the Sunflower movement.
Lefty (Zhan Huai-yun, 詹懷雲), one of the central characters, lives with his grandmother who earns NT$15 for every plastic flower she makes at home. Lefty believes he is the poorest kid in his high school and is unable to pay the “class fee” extorted by a classmate. While hiding from the bully in the school storeroom one day, he discovers a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙). For Lefty, however, the statue doesn’t signify the ROC’s founding father, but a financial windfall in the form of scrap metal worth a big chunk of money. The slab, he thinks, will be his ticket out of poverty.
And so he immediately devises a plan to steal and sell the valuable statue, calling on his equally impecunious friends to help. However, he soon finds out that Sky (Wei Han-ting, 魏漢鼎), a boy who goes to the same school, is also plotting to turn the discard into quick cash.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
The two hold a match to decide who is poorer and thus needs the money more. Using food tastings at supermarkets as the source of his daily diet and sleeping on the streets to avoid his drunken father’s violent outburst, Sky wins. Readily accepting his defeat, Lefty offers to collaborate with Sky, whom he thinks a new comrade.
Watching the enthusiastic Lefty sharing the details of his plan, Sky has something else in mind.
When the big night comes, two groups of masked thieves appear on campus. The battle over the statute of Sun Yat-sen ends up with Sky and Lefty lying on the empty street in Ximending (西門町), exhausted. As the wailing of police sirens comes near, they recognize the problem of poverty and fight it together.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company
In Meeting Dr. Sun, director Yee does a superb job in translating the anger against the unjust, corrupt system into an expressive comedy. The most noticeable example is the use of pantomime in the sequence in which the young burglars try to carry out their operation. What’s more striking is how the story finds its most resonant strength in juxtaposing the light with the unbearable. In the sequence in which the group of teenagers bicker over who comes from the most disadvantaged family, what starts out as fun raillery ends up with an indignant cry from Sky: “the children of our children are doomed to be poor.”
More fable than drama, the film approaches the complex social problems with lucid simplicity.
Equally essential to the narrative is the soundtrack composed by Chris Hou (侯志堅). Hou’s music is playful, delicate and vivacious at the same time, almost like a waltz of the humiliated and the insulted.
Towards the end of the film, we follow the bronze statue as it’s transported on a truck through the streets of Taipei. Suddenly, the camera pans up to show the gang of teenage boys, who raise their hands in solidarity, the Taipei World Trade Center towering in the background. It is a poignant moment, filled with poetry, and like the film itself, resonates long after the closing credits.
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
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
It seems every few days one bumps into one of those “real man” comments in which Taiwan is urged to “face reality” or similar, and “make a deal,” with the speaker implying that soon it will be too late. “Deal” advocates always present themselves as having a superior grip on reality, and the manly ability to make the “hard choice.” Their testosterone-laden language often echoes that of Taiwan sellout advocates. Note that such commentary always specifies a process (“make a deal, work with, make progress”), never the end state of what occupation by a violent authoritarian colonialist state will entail. In
RSS