Ang Lee (
Lee's relationship with the US has been as lengthy as that with Taiwan. He worked on Spike Lee's student short feature Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads in the early 1980s, before eventually finding financing for features back in Taiwan, including Eat Drink Man Woman, which remains one of modern Taiwanese film's most elegant and delightful entries.
Unlike master director Hou Hsiao-hsien (
But the subtexts of his films are no less challenging, if more subtle, than the politics of his country of birth. Lee has said that in Taiwan he felt like an outsider while growing up, a feeling that followed him to the US. Instead, film is his reality.
In his films, this subtle ache of isolation -- the tenuousness of filial piety, social estrangement and distress and the tensions that arise from competing objects of devotion -- is surely informed by his upbringing and the ethnic disjunctures that seem to have left Lee, a Mainlander, non-plussed about the role of politics in life.
Lee's significant contribution to film culture is his ability to get inside the cultures and characters he depicts and inject them with insight and maturity in a way that transcends stereotypes of Asian or Western film. It is an achievement that few who cross this "boundary" can claim; not even Hong Kong director John Woo (吳宇森), despite all of his intelligence and ferocious energy, has been able to look into the eyes of his characters and draw out such complexity.
All in all, Taiwan cannot claim credit for Lee's success, despite the memorable films he made here. Yet Lee's career is a model for all Taiwanese to follow: Embrace the world and all that it offers.
So there is a lesson in Lee's journey for those who care to consider it: Let Taiwanese shed their provincialism and self-doubt and cultivate individuality, talent and passion rather than meekly subject themselves to the agendas of government and political miscreants.
And let them also find comfort among their limitations and scars: Hulk, Lee's remarkable allegory of child abuse and healing, teaches us that there are times when people with dignity who have been horribly mistreated are allowed to become very, very angry before finding some kind of peace with themselves.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS