When novelist and screenwriter Hsiao Yeh (小野) was eight years old, he saw his father pick up a kitchen knife and march out of his family’s house in Taipei screaming, “I’m going to kill the guy!”
“My father was a depressed man,” Hsiao Yeh, 65, says.
Save for that one incident where he was bent on murdering a coworker he was convinced had prevented him from getting a promotion, Hsiao Yeh says his father was “never violent.”
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
His father came home minutes later and dropped the knife on the kitchen floor, unable to go through with the deed.
“His real passions were writing and art but he worked his entire life as a statistician at the same company because he had to feed his family,” Hsiao Yeh tells the Taipei Times. “Going to work every day and doing the same thing must have driven him to the brink.”
As a result, Hsiao Yeh’s father invested all of his dreams in him, his eldest son, imparting his love for literature.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
Hsiao Yeh published his first book when he was still in university and has since written over 100 works — prose and poetry — and 20 screenplays.
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE KNIFE
The prolific writer will be visiting Singapore next week to speak at two separate events at the upcoming Singapore Writers Festival: a film screening and dialogue session, “Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema,” along with documentary filmmaker Angelika Wang (王耿瑜), on Nov. 12, and a panel discussion, “Defining Literary Success,” on Nov. 13.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
Hsiao Yeh, whose real name is Li Yuan (李遠) — his father gave him the pen name because it sounds like “honor” when said in Japanese — says his parents are the inspiration behind him becoming a writer.
When I visit the author at his writing studio in Taipei, he digs up the log book his father made him keep in 1962. In it are book titles — Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea — as well as with reflective essays written by 11-year-old Hsiao Yeh on themes in the novels.
Hsiao Yeh, who dreaded the reading exercises at the time, says he preferred “drawing cartoon characters and cutting them out and enacting plays” — foreshadowing his brief stint as a screenwriter and filmmaker in the 1980s.
In retrospect, Hsiao Yeh is grateful that his father pushed him toward literature — family relations are a huge theme in many of his works.
Hsiao Yeh’s mother taught writing at the National Taiwan Normal University. She eventually quit to raise her five children, but continued to write articles for newspapers such as the Central Daily News (中央日報) and China Daily (中華日報).
He pulls out a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from the 1960s, showing me articles she wrote about a woman’s role in the family and giving beauty tips such as how to protect your skin during summer.
“She was always smiling and never angry,” Hsiao Yeh says of his mother. “She just stayed at home and wrote and told us bedtime stories.”
His parents, who came to Taiwan from China before Hsiao Yeh was born, invested all their hopes in their children.
“During that time, they didn’t have dreams,” Hsiao Yeh says of his parents’ generation. “You just existed.”
Years after he saw his father pick up the knife, Hsiao Yeh saw a psychiatrist. He was already an established writer at this time.
He recalls: “My psychiatrist told me, ‘you picked up the knife your father dropped and turned it into a pen.’”
MAKING WAVES
When I meet Angelika Wang at an indie cafe in Taipei, the documentary filmmaker and film festival organizer is reading a book by Hsiao Yeh, Yi Zhi Sa Ye (一直撒野).
The Chiayi native moved to Taipei in 1980, when she was 19, to major in German studies at Fu Jen Catholic University. After watching a few New Wave Cinema films, she decided to transfer to the Chinese Culture University to study cinema.
The New Wave cinema movement of the 1980s introduced an element of realism to film. In contrast to kungfu movies and melodramas imported from Hong Kong, films made in Taiwan depicted the dismal realities of everyday working-class life — something that most viewers could relate to.
“It was a revolution for Taiwanese cinema and a revolution for me,” Wang says. “My mother cried and cried when I told her I wanted to produce films.”
Wang remembers when Hsiao Yeh and scriptwriter/director Wu Nien-jen (吳念真) met with the Central Motion Pictures Corporation (CMPC, 中央電影公司) in the early 1980s and demanded that they give young directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Edward Yang (楊德昌) — both of whom would become synonymous with the cinematic New Wave — a chance to try something new. Thus began the CMPC’s initiative to support young Taiwanese directors to revive the industry and compete with Hong Kong cinema.
At the time, Wang lived in a house on the intersection of Renai Road (仁愛路) and Jinshan South Road (金山南路) with four other filmmakers, writers and photographers.
“We laid out tatami mats to rehearse experimental theater on,” Wang says. “We also had parties — crazy parties — Hsiao Yeh was there, Hou Hsiao-hsien was there.”
LOOKING BACK
The New Wave ebbed almost as quickly as it had started. Not seeing a future in it, Hsiao Yeh quit the film industry in the late 1980s to focus entirely on writing novels. Some cinephiles mark Hou’s 1989 film, A City of Sadness (悲情城市) as the end of the New Wave, others say it was Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (牯嶺街少年殺人事件).
Wang says the New Wave ended due to a confluence of reasons, the most important being that Hollywood movies were more widely distributed in cinemas in Taiwan and films from Hong Kong were becoming popular again. Audience demands had also changed and drawn-out scenes depicting the banalities of everyday life did not seem as appealing anymore.
Taiwanese cinema experienced a small revival in the mid-2000s with box office films such as Island Etude (練習曲) directed by Chen Hwai-en (陳懷恩) and produced by Wang in 2006. Wang says that the popularity of Taiwanese films is gaining traction again, though slowly. She cites the dark comedy Godspeed (一路順風), which earned eight nominations for this month’s Golden Horse Awards, as an example of a feature film with a compelling storyline.
When I ask her about what she thinks of the majority of films produced in Taiwan today, though, her answer is bleak.
“These are filmmakers who go to the supermarket to buy their food — they don’t buy it from the lady on the roadside stand selling vegetables,” she says.
Not only are people forgetting the past, but there is “less personal interaction and more disconnect these days.”
Wang recently gave a lecture to second-year film students at a university. When she asked if any of them had heard about the cinematic New Wave, only two students raised their hands.
“It’s sad,” Wang says. “We need to look back on the past — our own past and the broader social context — to understand all the complexities and nuances that inform our lives today.”
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