Throughout their three-decade collaboration, writer-director duo Mabel Cheung (張婉婷) and Alex Law (羅啟銳) have earned a reputation for making intimate dramas — An Autumn’s Tale (秋天的童話, 1987) and Echoes of the Rainbow (歲月神偷, 2010) — about people who are geographically or psychologically dislocated.
A Tale of Three Cities (三城記), starring arthouse favorites Sean Lau (劉青雲) and Tang Wei (湯唯), is the kind of movie one has high expectations of. It tells a romanticized real-life story of the parents of martial-arts hero Jackie Chan (成龍). Unfortunately, the film lacks the ambition and execution it needs to carry this off. As the period drama unfolds, genuine human emotion and empathy are left out, making the story more affected than affecting.
Set in the war-torn China of the 1930s and 1940s, the film looks to a time when death and survival were the order of the day. It opens in 1950s Hong Kong, where Daolong (Chan’s future father), played by Lau, works as a cook in the American embassy. Flashbacks return viewers to the Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War, a time when the younger Daolong is a customs officer with two sons. Yuerong (Chan’s future mother), played by Tang, is a strong-willed mother of two daughters, forced into illegal activity to support her family.
Photo courtesy of Hualien Media
Fate brings Daolong and Yuerong together and they become lovers, their spouses already having passed away. But their romance is ill-fated. The couple, uprooted by war, travel to Shanghai and eventually Hong Kong. They are separated and reunited again and again, and that is what mostly happens throughout the story. While exceeding two hours in length, the film at times feels like a repetitive and protracted courtship, revolving around the two lovers kissing and embracing after separations across different historical events.
The story moves rather hastily from location to location, trying to cover a lot of ground, but leaving little time for motive and character development. While the film’s top-notch cast hand in good performances, even China’s fine thespian Qin Hailu (秦海璐) and Hong Kong’s Kam Yin-Ling (金燕玲) cannot rescue their characters from being flat and insipid. It is certainly not one of Lau and Wei’s best work.
In A Tale of Three Cities, Cheung and Law tumble under the weight of history, delivering a lackluster and vacant historical piece, rather than a touching human story.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
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