How Are You, Dad (爸,你好嗎) is director Chang Tso-chi’s (張作驥) response to his late father, a veteran soldier who fled to Taiwan with Chinese Nationalist Party troops, and before his death admonished his son to make a film he could understand. Five years after he passed away, Chang, whose films are usually in Hakka and Hoklo [commonly known as Taiwanese], produced a compilation of 10 short stories in Mandarin about 10 different fathers and their relationships with their children.
The father figure, biological or symbolic, has always played an important part in Chang’s works. The sons, sometimes suffering from the Oedipus complex, are often abandoned and separated from their fathers, who are often alcoholics, gamblers or criminals. Some critics have compared Chang’s father-son relationships with Taiwan’s relationship towards Japan and China.
In How Are You, Dad, the father figures are more diverse, which allows viewers from different backgrounds to identify and emphasize with the characters that include a tough gangster played by Jack Kao (高捷), who melts before his daughter after she is paralyzed in a diving accident, a young single dad played by Gau Meng-jie (高盟傑), who is lost, drunk and sobs uncontrollably beside his infant son and a Taiwanese businessman who is too busy to spend time with his kids but is willing to sacrifice his life for them.
Many of Chang’s signature themes are revisited here. His interest in identity is touched upon in the story of a half-Japanese, half-Taiwanese transvestite, and his enthusiasm for magical realism is realized through CGI zoo animals in the tale of a Hong Konger actor and his son, who is severely brain damaged.
While many of the stories try too hard, Chang excels in capturing the subtle and nuanced emotions of everyday life. Iron Gate (鐵門) opens with a familiar scene: an extended Taiwanese family having dinner at the aged father’s home. In three long takes, Chang masterfully conveys the in-laws’ bickering and veiled bitterness and the loneliness of the old man, who sits my himself in his quiet house after his sons and daughters rush back home.
In The Sight of Father’s Back (背影), veteran actor Chen Mu-yi (陳慕義) plays a small-town worker who ferries his son to the train station on his rusty old truck after working a night shift to pay for the child’s school outing. The story paints an unforgettable image of a traditional father figure: reticent, reserved and awkward when it comes to showing his emotions and love for his offspring.
Another stand-out story is The Old Time Dream (昨日舊夢). Though nothing much takes place, the audience is quickly drawn into the witty conversation a father, son and grandson engage in at the dining table. The minutes-long dialogue is enough to paint a familial scene that tugs at the heartstrings: a widowed Mainlander lives alone in Taipei after his son and three daughters long since ago moved to Singapore and the US.
When he comes back to visit, the grown-up son looks amazedly at his father, feeling disturbed by the thought that he no longer knows the old man standing before him.
The tropic of cancer bisects the city of Chiayi (嘉義). The morning heat is, predictably, intense. But the sky is blue and hued with promise. Travelers brave the heat to pose for photos outside the carriages lined up at the end of platform one. The pervasive excitement is understandable. HISTORIC RAILWAY The Alishan Forest Railway (阿里山森林鐵路) was engineered by the Japanese to carry timber from the interior to the coast. Construction began in 1906. In 1912, it opened to traffic, although the line has been lengthened several times since. As early as the 1930s, the line had developed a secondary function as
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) National Congress tomorrow will potentially be one of the most consequential in the party’s history. Since the founding of the DPP until the late 2000s or early 2010s, the party was riven with factional infighting, at times getting very ugly and very public. For readers curious to know more about the context of the factions and who they are, two previous columns explore them in depth: “The powerful political force that vanished from the English press,” April 23, 2024 and “Introducing the powerful DPP factions,” April 27, 2024. In 2008, a relatively unknown mid-level former
July 22 to July 28 The Love River’s (愛河) four-decade run as the host of Kaohsiung’s annual dragon boat races came to an abrupt end in 1971 — the once pristine waterway had become too polluted. The 1970 event was infamous for the putrid stench permeating the air, exacerbated by contestants splashing water and sludge onto the shore and even the onlookers. The relocation of the festivities officially marked the “death” of the river, whose condition had rapidly deteriorated during the previous decade. The myriad factories upstream were only partly to blame; as Kaohsiung’s population boomed in the 1960s, all household
In Taiwan there are two economies: the shiny high tech export economy epitomized by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and its outsized effect on global supply chains, and the domestic economy, driven by construction and powered by flows of gravel, sand and government contracts. The latter supports the former: we can have an economy without TSMC, but we can’t have one without construction. The labor shortage has heavily impacted public construction in Taiwan. For example, the first phase of the MRT Wanda Line in Taipei, originally slated for next year, has been pushed back to 2027. The government