I'd just finished reading my reading materials for my module - Understanding Chinese Cinema. The reading materials really enlightened me. I finally managed to grasp a little of how a director thinks. Take China's movie director, Zhang Yimou. He uses children in his film to portray the future generation of China. The father is the old generation of China. Though Zhang Yimou's films have been widely appluaded by the West, his homeland however bans his films, for reasons that his films do not portray the "real" China, but the China that satisfies the perceptions of the West.

Taiwan's movie director, Hou Hsiao Hsien, is one of my favourites. I truely believe he is one talented film director. In one of his films, City of Sadness, which highlights the conflict between Taiwan and China, and the February 28, 1947 massacre of an estimated eighteen thousand to twenty-eight thousand native-born Taiwanese. Hou Hsiao Hsien illuminates Jean-Francois Lyotard definition of "history", which states that history is made up of wisps of narratives, stories that one tells, that one hears, that one acts out... City of Sadness depicts the personal narratives of the Lim family and their friends. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who plays a deaf-mute in the film portrays Taiwan's voiceless, marginalized existance. What I felt most deep-renching were the sentences uttered by Lim Wenxiong, the eldest son of the family, "We Taiwanese are the most pitiable. First come the Japanese, the come the Chinese. We're eaten by everyone, ridden by everyone, but cared for by no one at all."

The conflicts betweeen Taiwan and China goes way back to the Qing dynasty era. The Qing court gave up Taiwan to Japan after a crushing defeat. Then came 1945, after 50 years of Japanese colonial rule came to an end, and 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist KMT forces established a government-in-exile after the Communist army captured Mainland China. From the KMT perspective, Japan's surrender(WWII) and the end of its occupation of Taiwan were a great victory that "liberated" the Taiwanese from oppression and exploitation and returned them to the "warm embrace of the Chinese motherland." It was to be the start of a new era of peace and prosperity for the Taiwanese people - a sense of hope and expectation for the future that is conveyed in the celebratory opening scences of City of Sadness. Taiwanese jubilation and optimism, however, was short-lived, as the behaviour and attitudes of the Nationlist officials sent to govern the island began to alienate and antagonize the native population.

While the ancestors of those who consider themselves native to Taiwan did come from centuries ago, interaction between the island and the Mainland was in fact extremely limited throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as the island was virtually ignored by the central Chinese government, which did not hesitate to cede Taiwan to Japan in 1895. The island's sense of separateness and difference was aggravated by its half-century under Japanese rule and again by the Nationalist government's arrogant behaviour when it took over the island from the Japanese in 1945. Chinese officials did not welcome the Taiwanese populance as their own; instead, they adopted the attitude of a conquerer. Nor did the Taiwanese people welcome the new arrivals from the Mainland as their Chinese brothers and sisters ( In the film, Taiwanese often refer to mainlanders using the derisive term Ashande, the one from the mountains ). There are many scenes foreground the multiple levels of translation necessary for Taiwanese and mainlanders to even communicate with each other, an obstacle that clearly raises the potential for mutual understanding between the two groups.

Hou Hsiao Hsien sees his exploration f the past in City of Sadness as a necessary catharsis for the Taiwanese people, without which the tensions and conflicts of society cannot be put to rest. As he said, " I hope that a renewed understanding of 'Two-two-eight' will help everyone to finally cast away its dark shadow and go on living with energy and vitality. What I desire most is for audiences who see my film to leave the theater not only with tears in their eyes, but with a new sense of pride, of empowerment, and with the determination to move towards the future."

Talented director. I admire.