Iglesia de Santa María del Castillo de Medellín

It is difficult to underestim ate the rapidity and extent o f the increase in w ealth and hom ogeneity o f Taipei since the m id-1980s. T aipei has n o t only becom e an urban sprawl, but has done so much more quickly that other sim ilar m ain lan d C hinese cities like K uangchou or S h an g h ai. T h is eco n o m ic developm ent has been reflected in Taiwanese cinema, as Fredric Jam eson has pointed out:

The Taiwan new wave has tended to m ark its im ages as specific to the island, in ways quite distinct from the m ainland evocation o f landscape. The city is also focused differently here. . . , for the obvious reasons that T aip ei does not possess the profile or the h isto ric a l reso n an ce and associations o f the great traditional mainland cities. . . . Still, its dominance has effectively transform ed the natural countryside into a kind o f extended suburban space, one in which the survival o f more traditional agricultural villages is nonetheless sublimated and som ehow m odified by their linked association in an intricate web o f electric trains that lead into the capital.52

52. Fredric Jameson, "Remapping Taipei," in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed, Nick Browne and others. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994), p. 122.

D uring this tim e, in the late 1980s, the N ativ istic ap p ro ach o f the Taiwanese New Cinema began to shift from the depiction o f the old Taiwan, to that o f a new high-speed life in Taipei. For instance, Yang Te-ch'ang's Terroriser (K'ung-pu fen-tzu, 1986), which tells the story o f a young wom an who achieves independence when her husband leaves her, stands out starkly as shar ing none o f the sentim entalism o f the early Nativist Films, which in evoking the crisis o f fam ily relationships in modem Taipei.

Chu h erself dealt with this developm ent in her story "D aughter o f the Nile" (1989), which is about young people who have lost all contact w ith both the T aiw an countryside and m ainlander traditions. T hey have becom e city people having more in common with W estern city dwellers than other Taiwanese.

The story shows the rapidly increasing pace o f city life and illustrates the disordered state o f fam ily relationships by focusing on the life o f a tw enty year old woman, Lin Hsiao-yang. She lives in a dysfunctional fam ily, consisting o f herself, her sick mother, her father, who is a secret policem an and is often out at work, and two brothers, who are members o f a teenage gang.

The spacious and relaxed atm osphere o f the countryside has no place in this story in w hich Chu describes the extreme lim itation on living space in the city. The school where Hsiao-yang studies part-tim e is closely surrounded by blocks o f flats, and students are distracted easily by w hat the residents are doing in their homes. There is one episode in which the w hole class w atches, while only a few yards away, a girl comes out on to her b alcony to try to light the water boiler. She can not light it, so the whole class shouts out o f the classroom windows "Press and turn" — the instruction on the ignition button. Contrariwise, w hen the principal addresses the school over the loud speaker, he can be heard clearly in eveiy home in the vicinity.

Those fam iliar with Chu's work will not be surprised that the education system o f the protagonist's school is questioned by C hu as n o t fostering a fruitful teacher/student relationship. The school system and au th o rities are depicted as m echanistic and ineffective in providing both form al and m oral education. H er teacher is unconventional in style, and su sp ec ted by the authorities o f being a political activist. If there is any hint o f politics in his teaching he is reprimanded. But, paradoxically, the 'advanced' politics that the school authorities think are so dangerous, and are determ ined to suppress, have no meaning for his pupils the new generation, for whom politics have nothing to do with their life in the city. Hsiao-yang says:

One day, he (the teacher) came to class saying that som eone had gone to the discipline office to report him, accusing him o f spreading thoughts o f yellow , red and black. B ut these are alread y o u t o f date, w hat is fashionable now is green, understand!53

In contem porary C hinese usage, the colours o f "yellow ," "red" and "black" are m etaphors for sex, Com m unism and depression. B y introducing "green" for environm ental issues, the protagonist satirises the teacher as being out o f date and the politics o f Taiwan as irrelevant.

Their irreverent attitude is also reflected in the w ay they use sexual jokes as a m etaphor for the world. For instance, as they com pare w om en from the six Continents: "The women from fourteen to eighteen-years-old are like Africa, h a lf undeveloped, virgin territory, h alf explored. . . ,"54

53. "Ni-luo ho nu-erh" (Daughter of the Nile), TYHSC, p. 173. 54.Ibid., p. 182.

City people are shown as so driven by the desire for a better m aterial life, that it often results in the breakdown o f a family, or stress caused by financial pressure. The broken home is exem plified by the m ainlander father o f Hsiao- yang's friend A-shan, who makes a bad investment in the eel business and loses all his money, destroying family harmony. As the protagonist says: "His parents often fight, it can be very violent; the next m orning, his m other's face has ointm ent on, and his father also finds a plaster to stick on his chin to pretend th at he is the one who has been hit."55

The effect o f financial stress is illustrated by the protagonist's uncle who owns a factory making optical lenses, and is in a state o f hysteria, because o f the pressure o f keeping his business going. To help him relax, he absurdly plays the part o f "the dancing man" (chi-t'ung) during a temple rite.56

G radually we come to feel, as does the protagonist, that her friends and relatives are all in a state o f bewilderment. In this situation, she takes refuge in her fantasy life, identifying herself with the people she adm ires, including Seiko, a Japanese singer she envies. In love with a member o f her brother's gang, A- shan, she finds relief from her physical yearning by identifying h e rself w ith the heroine o f a comic book romance (man-hua) D aughter o f the N ile, and imagining h e rs e lf to be in various exotic situations w ith the object o f h er desire. For example, she has an elaborate fantasy in w hich she sees h e rs e lf as a pow erful Egyptian princess, adored by both her lover and her people.

In "D aughter o f the Nile," Chu developed fu rth er the them e o f young adults who are struggling w ith the pressures o f adapting to an adult life in the m odem city. Chu also used scenes o f fights between young men. U nlike "Boys from Fengkuei" and "A Time to Live and A Time to D ie," w here the protagonists

55, Ibid., p. 184. 5b. Ibid., p. 179.

eventually leam to appreciate their families, the female protagonist representing the new generation in "Daughter o f the Nile" does not gain any understanding o f or sympathy for the past. W hat we have in this story are the am oral figures o f estranged young people who obviously have no system atic values. As Hsiao- yang says: "Little brother says, it is cool to rob."57

H aving never had a conventional fam ily life, H siao-yang has no tender feelings for her family. W hile sitting on her m other's sickbed, she show s no sadness:

M other is awake because o f her pain. She gets up and bends her body over to vomit and cry. I have already put the needle into the steel pot and boiled it, (then I) put on the headphones o f my W alkm an to listen to a (radio) program, how wonderful!58

She is even more alienated from her m ainlander father. Seeing her fath er cry w hen a letter arrives announcing the death o f her grandm other in China, she looks at her father coldly, thinking: "Eighty-eight years old, she should have died already (she is lucky to have lived so long), why cry?"59 She continues, saying:

M y father is a tragic figure, you know. N one o f us is on his side, his language is really like the code o f another planet, no one understands, I often think, the best ending for him would be to go back to his planet.60

57. Ibid., p. 172. 58. Ibid,, p. 172. 59. Ibid., p. 177. 60. Ibid., p. 177.

The story shows clearly that the new urban youth has nothing in common with the older generation. The young people portrayed here are unsentim ental and constantly searching for material pleasure, even to the extent o f risking death while committing crime; the protagonist's elder brother, the only m em ber o f her family for whom she has any feeling, is beaten to death by a house-holder while breaking into his house. W hen the protagonist first hears that her brother may have been killed, she becom es hysterical telephoning her friends to see if they know what actually happened.

A t the end o f the story, the protagonist is in a state o f indifference to her life, saying o f herself: "Seiko, Lin Hsiao-yang, both are me, and the story o f the D aughter o f the Nile are all here,"61 Chu leaves us feeling sorry for this y o u n g woman who has no recourse to the support o f her family or friends.

"D aughter o f the Nile" is the only film story in w hich Chu uses a first person narrator to relate the whole story. The protagonist's intricate m onologue on her fam ily history, her sexual desires, her comic book fantasy lover, her dream about boutiques and clothes, is a m ixture o f young people's slang idiom s and elegant classical expressions, evoking the glam orous, yet superficial characters against the colourful texture o f the city. The hectic life o f the city is vividly conveyed by the w ay that the protagonist delivers a co n stan t stream o f chat rather than speaking in coherent, sequentially connected sentences.

W ith this story, Chu com pletes the tran sitio n fro m the m ain lan d er orientation o f her early work, through a neo-nativist approach m ore in accord with the views o f her fellow workers, to write a story that begins to p o rtray the alienation o f her later work.

3,8 Chu's Neo-nativist Aesthetic

Chu T ien-w en's contribution to the films made by H ou's team has been described by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang as having "given n eo-nativism its elo q u en t artistic expression."62 In fact, C hu's a p p ro a c h in tro d u c e d a m odification o f the previous rural activist political line o f the N ativists b y bringing an urban elem ent into the stories, and stressing the protagonists' struggles for self-realisation and success in making a life for themselves.

As has been noted, Chu's earlier fiction had been lim ited in its dramatic scope to cam pus love stories. W e may suggest, perhaps w ith the benefit o f hindsight, that at that time, because o f the all-pervasive KM T intellectual climate in her fam ily and their social circle, she did not have the opportunity to develop a voice o f her own. It is certainly hard to image the stylistic brav u ra o f her later w ork spontaneously developing from the w riting o f her cam pus love stories w ithout some outside stimulus.

Chu became very interested in all aspects o f film-making. She wrote th at in telling a story on film one can "create one’s own rules o f the gam e," and "create a lyrical and atm ospheric m ood."63 She also said th at she, like Hou, disliked a straightforward narration o f the story and saw the creative possibilities o f flash back and flash forward. She was very im pressed b y the w ay film depicted the physical environm ent o f the action, we shall see in her later work that she devoted considerable care to the establishm ent o f the m ise-en-scene.

It can certainly be asserted th at C hu's w riting fo r the film industry represented a definite advance in the sophistication o f her plotting, and o f her

62. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, "Chu T'ien-wen and Taiwan's Recent Cultural and Literary Trends", p. 68.

63. Chu T'ien-wen, LLFC, pp. 167-185.

w riting tech n iq u es w hich w ould enable her to ta c k le th e so c ia lly and psychologically weighty themes o f her next works.

It is safe to say that Chu's co-operation with the N ativist film -m akers was beneficial to both sides. W hen we consider the philosophical and political gulf between them, it is gratifying that their aesthetic alliance turned out so fruitfully both for all concerned, and for the film industry o f Taiwan.

Chapter IV

Obsession with Sensuality: Splendour o f the E nd o f the Century