Female Characters in Taiwan Cinema (1982-1990) - A Practice of Research Paper Writing

Research Paper 習作: 臺灣電影中的女性角色

As a result of political and economic factors, 1980s is a turning point of society in Taiwan. Before the lifting of Martial Law took place in July 1987, there had already been voices called for democracy and human rights (including women’s rights). In the 1974, former vice president, Hsiu-lien Lu, had published her writing, New Feminism, in which she devoted in legalizing abortion, refining Civil Code Part IV Family, advocated the idea of “talents have no gender” and the abandoning of traditional gender role distribution. Aside from her political standpoint, Lu can be seen as a pioneer of feminism in Taiwan. Later, in the year of 1982, feminist publication, the Awakening magazine, was established by Yuan-Jhen Lee and other fellow female. The magazine was said to be encouraging women “to take personal responsibility for their economic and emotional independence” (Chang 109) but due to the political social context, Lee and her publisher Yuan-Jhen could not really do more than publishing magazines. However, on 10th January, 1987, the sensational parade took place on Huaxi Street, with 31 non-governmental organizations marching, protesting against human trafficking, and calling for the government to face up to and resolve the problem of teenage prostitutes. Six months later, the sitting president, Ching-kuo Chiang, ended the Martial Law, and since then, non-governmental organizations sprang up, including many female protecting and supporting organizations, which have been dedicated in gender equality in family and workplace and the refinements of law and regulations on terms of female rights.

In such a time of change, “the short-lived New Taiwan Cinema movement” (Chen 55) began from 1982 and ended in 1986. The embarkation of the movement is said to be “In Our Time,” a film co-produced by four directors including the substantially important figure of the movement, Edward Yang. The New Waves and the following Post New Waves were periods of time when filmmakers (mostly male) started to speak up for women, giving women a voice broadcasted to the society that has long been ignoring women and dominated by men. By compare and contrast films from these two periods of time and films from earlier decades, one can easily observe the transformation of ideology in terms of gender roles and gender stereotypes. In the following paragraphs, I use Beautiful Duckling (1965), directed by Hsing Lee and Terrorizers (1986), directed by Edward Yang, and other related films as examples to have further elaboration.

Beautiful Duckling is one of the “Healthy Realist Film Movement (jiankang xieshi dianying)” (Chiang) in the 1960s. The film describes an abandoned daughter, named Hsiao-yue, who was adopted by a duck farmer, Tsai-Tien Lin, their poverty and tribulations. Hsiao-yue had a brother, Chao-fu, who was a Chinese opera actor but was actually more a rogue who always ask Tsai-tien for money. Hsiao-yue was very much different from her brother, she was diligent and resentless, without studying, taking any forms of education, engaging in social activities, all she did everyday was farming and keeping the house. Similar selfless, sacrificing, family-ethics-oriented qualities can be found in female leading characters in other “health realistic” films directed by Hsing Lee such as Oyster Girl (1964,) Execution in Autumn (1972).

In films from New Taiwan Cinema, we have female protagonists who were successful in career and financially independent. For instance, in Terrorizers, we have the award-winning writer, Yu-fen; in Taipei Story (1985, dir. Edward Yang,) we have Chin, a special assistant to her female supervisor; in That Day, on the Beach (1984, dir., Edward Yang,) we have a world-known pianist, Wei-ching Tan.

In Terrorizers, Yu-fen was a modern, independent woman; however, after married to Li-zhong Lee, she quit her job to have a baby, which is something women in Taiwan frequently did or were suggest to do at that time. Yu-fen and Li-zhong failed to have a baby; therefore, Yu-fen stayed home as a full-time housewife. Whereas, this was not enough for her, Yu-fen started to write novel and send it to newspaper. At the end, we would learn that everything narrated before was actually the plot of that award-winning novel written by Yu-fen, but still, the film illustrated women’s urge to step out of family and the discontent of being confined under the rooftop. In the scene where Yu-fen and Li-zhong confronted each other at the dining table, Yu-fen’s three-minute-monologue is a powerful speech from women to men in general, in which her lines convey the idea that women is more than something men feed and keep, women’s mind is as intelligent as men’s, and that women too need their own life instead of being attached to men’s life. What’s worth noted is that during this monologue, Yu-fen looks directly into the camera for five times, which is unusual in a more realistic film like this. What are even more worth noted are the lines Yu-fen says each time she looks into the camera, which are very similar. For each time, she respectively says: “You still don’t understand! You will never understand!” “Why am I telling you these? Will you understand?” “All you know are those routines, repetitions, day in, day out.” “Do you understand? You don’t!” “This is why . . .” (Yang, Terrorizers, 1986) The effect of such arrangement is a sense of grilling or interrogating male audience, as if forcing them to reflect on or answer the questions in mind.

Taipei Story “offers an extraordinarily comprehensive panorama of recent social changes in the city of Taipei,” (Rayns 39) and presents the dilemma that women on the intersection of modern ideology and traditional family ethics in the 1980s had to cope with. In the film, Chin was a personal assistant to Miss. Mei, her unmarried supervisor and company’s executive whom she apparently took as a role model of successful “new women.” Chin herself recently did something unconventional too, that is, to move away from her parent’s despite she was not married to anyone. Her childhood sweetheart and also long-term boyfriend, Lung, on the other hand, was an abortive businessman who soaked himself in those glorious days when he played the Little League Baseball. The two lovers are headed to opposite directions on the river of time; Chin was down the wind and longed for being a “new woman,” while Lon kept looking back, he wanted turn around but the wind of change in the whole society would not let him. At this point, the two decided to be married to each other, this means that the two now were on the same boat and one of them would have to compromise. In the past, this would be easy because women simply followed their male family or partner (in this case, husband). But now, things had changed, women got a chance to make choices, and this was also the dilemma Chin had, which, at the end, was solved with the death of Lung.

That Day, on the Beach was, like Terrorizers, with intriguing narrative technique. The film starts with the voice-over of a radio show host, introducing the world-prestigious pianist, Wei-ching Tan and her coming back to Taiwan. This very scene briefly wrapped up almost everything the audience had to know about her. The film focus more on Jia-li, whose older brother was in a serious relationship with Wei-ching, but the two’s marriage was opposed by Jia-li’s doctor father, a typically traditional Chinese man. In the film, the two characters of Wei-ching and Jia-li function as foils to each other. Unlike the pianist, Jia-li, who had graduated from Taipei First Girls’ High School and National Taiwan University, married his college sweetheart and became a full-time housewife. The how men succeed in career feel the dominance they ought to have on women and film precisely illustrated how they believe women should be satisfied with the life they provide and gratefully stay home and keep the house for them. The monotonous, humdrum, repetitious housewife’s daily-life of Jia-li and Wei-ching’s colourful life of world tours strongly juxtapose each other, and divide all women into two categories. A minor part, Hsin-hsin, function as a foreshadowing device in the film. She was a friend of Jia-li in college, and had had an affair with a professor without knowing the later was already married, and then married a businessman who had escape from a huge debt and left her an infant. The misfortune of Hsin-hsin along with the worsening relationship between Jia-li and her husband forms an aphoristic atmosphere for Jia-li and also for female audience that women cannot, should not, depend on men, and that Wei-ching is paragon of independent woman (similar to Miss Mei in Taipei Story) other women look up to and follow.

New Taiwan Cinema reached its peak in 1985 and then gradually lost its popularity to Hong Kong movies, it is said that;

“One factor was perhaps the dearth of topics for the new directors. The day finally came when audiences simply felt tired of watching the director’s childhood stories, for there was no longer any need to remind people of Taiwan’s past. Taiwan’s investors, too, were put off by the uneven box-office records of the new directors. Most of their films lost money, although their mediocre financial performance had to do with Taiwan’s limited market, which simply could not support so many directors at the same time. (Chen 59)

Chen, the Associate Dean of the College of Communication of National ChengChi University also wrote; “Just when some film critics were about to moan the death of Taiwan cinema, Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s A City of Sadness brought home a Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice FF, an unprecedented honour in the history of Taiwan cinema.” (Chen 59)

A City of Sadness is the resurrection of New Taiwan Cinema, or the beginning of the “Post New Taiwan Cinema.” From a feminist point of view, it is also ground-breaking, for Hou dealt with a macro-historical event, the 228 Incident, through the perspective of a female character. The film is centred on the life of the Lin’s family, the narrative is told by Kuan-mei, the wife of the muted youngest son of the Lin’s, Wen-ching. “Women are never considered in macro-history, for their role in society is dominated by stereotypes of weakness and passivity, and the family is seen as women’s preferred or only complete world.” (Huang 53) For example, in Victory (1976, dir. Chia-Chang Liu,) male characters are supposed to be tough, patriotic, ready to sacrifice their lives over their country while female character were to wordship these men. Female characters are subordinated to male characters, either as their lover, or their mother and sister. In A City of Sadness, historical event is viewed with the eyes of a woman, and for once in a long time, films that deal with history or ethnicity are not necessary have to feature violence, blood-shed, passionate yelling and slaughtering; instead, a women’s silent, meticulous observation and the plain, undecorated narration of a woman can reflect the deepest and most precise ethnical pain and historical tragedy.

(Post) New Taiwan Cinema loyally presented the unjust women had encountered in this patriarchal society. Though the content were filled with male-chauvinism, gender stereotype, and oppression and limitation put upon female characters, one must not mistake these films to be sexist, since what these films have contribute is putting the inequality women in reality have been through under the magnifier of cinema, so the public would notice, and care, and then make improvement.

Works Cited:

A City of Sadness. Directed by Hsiou-Hsien Hou, 21 Oct 1989.

Beautiful Duckling. Directed by Hsing Lee, Central Pictures Corporation, 1965.

Chang, Doris T. “Women's movements in twentieth-century Taiwan.” University of Illinois, 2009, pp. 109.

Chen, Ru-Shou Robert. "Taiwan Cinema." Encyclopaedia of Chinese Film, Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books, 17 Dec. 1998, pp. 47-62.

Chiang, Mei-Hsuan. “Healthy Realism: Paradoxical Aesthetics, Ideology, and Nation- Building in Taiwan Cinema 1964-1982.” Urbana, Illinois, 2013.

Execution in Autumn. Directed by Hsing Lee, Central Pictures Cooperation, 1972.

Hung, Christine Yu-Ting. ″Are women included in history? The debate of micro-history and macro-history in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film, A City of Sadness″ Asian Cinema 25: 1, pp. 49–70, doi: 10.1386/ac.25.1.49_1

Oyster Girl. Directed by Hsing Lee, Central Pictures Cooperation, 1964.

Rayns, Tony. ″The Position of Women in New Chinese Cinema.″ East-West Film Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, 1987, pp. 36-49.

Taipei Story. Directed by Edward Yang, 1985.

That Day, on the Beach, Directed by Edward Yang, Central Pictures Cooperation, 1983.

Terrorizers. Directed by Edward Yang, Golden Harvest, 19 Dec. 1986.

Victory. Directed by Chia-Chang Liu, Central Pictures Cooperation 28 May 1976.