Taiwan-based Shan Puppet Theater has presented a rare Hakka interpretation of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin (水滸傳) at the Taiwan Center in Los Angeles.
The troupe’s interpretation of Wu Song Kills a Tiger (武松打虎), one of the best-known parts of Water Margin, tells the tale of a wayward protagonist who wins over a town by single-handedly slaying a tiger.
Unusually for a traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry show, the troupe performed the play mainly in Hakka, with a smattering of Mandarin, English and Hoklo, commonly known as Taiwanese.
Photo: CNA
Troupe cofounder Huang Wu-shan (黃武山) told the Central News Agency that despite first learning the art of glove puppetry in Taiwanese, his mentor Li Tien-lu (李天祿), a widely known puppet master in Taiwan, encouraged him to perform in Hakka, his mother tongue.
“The master told me: ‘You’re a Hakka. You can perform puppet plays in your native language,’” Huang said.
Given Hakka’s minority status in Taiwan, he felt compelled to pass the culture on to a new generation by contributing to its revival, Huang said.
To achieve his goals, he learned folk songs from Hakka diva Lai Pi-hsia (賴碧霞) and blended Hakka music and stage art with a contemporary sensibility for his own puppet show.
Shan Puppet Theater, founded by Huang in 2002, is one of only a few Taiwanese troupes to perform puppet plays in Hakka.
The troupe was invited by the Ministry of Culture to stage a tour of six US shows, with additional stops in Texas (Houston, San Antonio and Austin) and Michigan (Detroit and Ann Arbor).
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching