earlier chapters discussed the narratorial functions
of contrasting the past and the present in literary representation.For
instance,in“Three Sworn Brothers of Xizhuang,”Lin Shenjing
uses the contrast to highlight better, more harmonious ethnic
relations, as opposed to an earlier time when misunderstanding and
distrust wrecked the lives of the Taiwanese villagers and the nameless
mainlander. ChenYingzhen’s “The Mountain Road,” in contrast,
privileges the past over the present in its condemnation of capitalism
inTaiwan.Whether the past is rife with ethnic conflict and the present
is free of tension, or the past is praised for political idealism and the
present is censured for indulgence in material comfort, the contrast is
manipulated to serve political ends or politicize the re-creation of a
turbulent era.
After the lifting of martial law in 1987, members of the intellectual
and political arenas were finally given an opportunity to look back and
reflect on the period of suppression of dissent and protest.Consequently,
changes in the political climate and cultural terrain have often resulted
in a comparison of past and present. Some people lament the loss of
innocence and political conviction, and others condemn the politicians’
exploitation of opposition movements for political capital. For
instance, Hsu Hsiao-ming, who directed the movie Heartbreak Island,
points out that “many people in our society have benefited politically
and economically from the Formosa Incident” of 1979.1
The question
of whether the past can ever be completely recaptured and re-created
in literary and cinematic texts continues to plague practitioners of both
art forms.The concern over the demands placed on film directors and
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audiences in the cinematic representation of the past is dramatized in
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, GoodWomen, the third installment of his
Taiwan trilogy.This chapter examines further the contrast between past
and present and analyzes the ways of representing theWhiteTerror on
the screen.As Hou’s and Hsu’s films were adapted from literary texts, a
comparative study of film and fiction further illuminates the complexities
of narrating the oppressiveWhiteTerror era.
GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women is partially based on Lan
Bozhou’s “Song of the CoveredWagon,” which was analyzed in chapter
2. Lan’s text adopts the form of personal testimony, having eyewitnesses
speak directly to the reader about Zhong Haodong’s life and following
a roughly linear progression, from Zhong’s birth in 1908 to his
execution in 1950. In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinematic rendition, personal
testimony is replaced by a different narrative strategy: a film within a
film.A movie is being made about the experiences of two real-life figures
fromTaiwan’s past,Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu,played by the
actress Liang Jing, whose own life also is divided into past and present.
In her past (three years earlier), her boyfriend was shot to death while
dancing with her in a nightclub.Liang Jing settled the gangland murder
by accepting 3 million new Taiwan dollars. In her present, the anonymous
person who stole her diary calls her on the telephone without
speaking and faxes her portions of the diary concerning her relationship
with her now deceased boyfriend.The film within a film is shot
in black and white, and Liang Jing’s life is done in color.Voice-overs
describe Jiang Biyu’s life, with Liang Jing as the narrator.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s strategy in Good Men,GoodWomen is an extension
of his techniques in the first two films in the trilogy, which intentionally
distance the audience from the events depicted on the screen.That
is, between the first and third film, the trilogy increasingly emphasizes
the untrustworthy nature of visual representation.Hou’s second installment,
The Puppet Master (Ximeng rensheng, 1993), tries to prevent the
audience from identifying with the characters by having an actor, Lim
Giong (Lin Qiang), play the puppet master, LiTianlu, while Li himself
speaks directly to the audience about his life. Such features keep the
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audience aware of the artificiality of representation, for “transparent
‘documentation’ of historical ‘truth’ is impossible. Knowledge of the
past is always subjective and fragmentary,shaped by the needs and concerns
of the individual writing in the present moment.”2
In Good Men,
Good Women, Hou reaches the apogee of his distancing narrative style,
applying a technique that is simultaneously self-referential and selferasing.
By showing the process of filmmaking and by framing the life
story of Zhong Haodong and Jiang Biyu in film fragments,Hou forces
the audience to confront the process of make-believe and cinematic
artifice.That is,the movie constructs the stories of Jiang Biyu and Liang
Jing while simultaneously deconstructing the process.
The final installment of Hou Hsiao-hsien’sTaiwan trilogy was originally
to be set in contemporary (1990s) Taiwan, portraying a political
prisoner’s difficulty in adjusting to post–martial law Taiwan upon his
release. It was intended to contrastTaiwan’s past and present, as the film
would conclude a trilogy covering the island’s history from Japanese colonization
to post–martial law Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But the original story line was later replaced by the life of Jiang Biyu
and Zhong Haodong, as portrayed in Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered
Wagon,” although the contrast between past and present was preserved
in the narrative technique of a film within a film. Consequently,
as I have indicated, some people consider the film as criticism of the
Taiwanese youths of the 1990s for their indulgence in material comfort,
moral degeneration, and aimless lifestyles.3
But I argue that although
plausible, such an interpretation is too narrowly teleological, for the
director is not content merely to depict a clear-cut contrast. Instead,
the most noticeable cinematic feature of Good Men, GoodWomen—layering
the stories of Jiang Biyu and Zhong Haodong’s lives in China
and Taiwan and Liang Jing’s past and present—is a narrative technique
dramatizing the pernicious effects of theWhiteTerror by exploring the
ways the Taiwanese approach their past while raising questions about
our knowledge of the past, both personal and national.
What Is the Past?
Unlike Lan Bozhou’s story, which covers the life of Zhong Haodong
more or less in its entirety, Hou’s rendition uses the film within a film
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to focus on Jiang and Zhong’s life before their departure for China
and the period immediately following their return to Taiwan. Obviously,
although a film within a film cannot encompass the lifetime of
a character, this narrative strategy is able to highlight the fragmentary
nature of a quasi-biography.The filming allows us to see only snippets
of the characters’ lives; the juxtaposition of three time zones further
enhances the discontinuity, while problematizing our knowledge of
events.It also raises the question of how someone,film director or not,
represents the past.As the following analysis shows, the issues of what
one can know and how one recounts the past are contingent on each
other and mutually implicated.
One scene that subtly but effectively tackles the impossibility of
knowing the whole truth is of a discussion group session led by Zhong
following his return to Taiwan, the one that most directly touches on
the cause of his arrest. He concludes that the 2/28 Incident resulted
from the landowners’ exploitation of the tenant farmers rather than
from a conflict between the Taiwanese and the newly arrived mainlanders.Whether
or not his interpretation is accurate should not concern
us here; instead, what is of interest is the filmmaker’s oblique reference
to the impossibility of understanding the past, either recent or
distant.There is a sense of futility in Zhong’s downfall, as his attempt
to understand the causes of a recent event and his efforts to spread his
belief prove to be fatal. In short, the past can be dangerous.
The sense that the past simply cannot be recaptured is presented in
a highly allegorical manner in a scene in which Jiang and her friends
become prisoners, accused of spying for the Japanese.This is the first
extended depiction of their life in China and the tenuous connection
with their distant past—the Motherland. In repeated and yet
somewhat varied interrogation scenes, an interpreter is required to
negotiate between theTaiwanese-speaking intellectuals and the suspicious
Cantonese-speaking army officer. Four of the prisoners—Jiang
Biyu, Xiao Daoying, Xiao Daoying’s wife, and Zhong Haodong—are
repeatedly asked about their reasons for coming to China. Although
humor is inserted in the interrogation,4
it is evident that emotional
ties between the Taiwanese and the mainland are hopelessly broken
by misunderstandings and distrust, which are exacerbated by the language
barrier.
Seemingly to push this issue to its extreme, Liang Jing narrates the
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circumstances surrounding Zhong’s publication of Enlightenment and
how a reader inadvertently exposed his own identity and was arrested
by the Nationalist government, a scene that is described over a blackand-white
shot of Jiang Biyu’s burning books at home. It is a brief
shot with no dialogue; the audience must rely on Liang’s voice-over
narration to make the connection between the underground publication
and the reason for the book burning. A question concerning
this cinematographic strategy immediately arises:Why use Liang Jing
instead of a dialogue or intertext? I suspect that Liang’s voice-over
adds yet another layer of uncertainty to the “facts.” Narrating the reason
for Zhong’s arrest does not necessarily entrust Liang with authority
or any claim to truth,although the audience is asked to believe that
she knows the facts and is able to supply us with an explanation.
Avrom Fleishman’s analysis of an external speaker of a voice-over
best exemplifies Liang Jing’s role:
For an external narrator,to speak in voice-over is to declare authority
as an ultimate source of the story and yet . . . to refrain from
personal responsibility for the statements made.This is much in the
manner of the novelistic “omniscient narrator,” a purportedly neutral
deliverer of the facts themselves that, upon inspection, turns out
to be a coded system for inducing this impression.5
By external voice-over, Fleishman means that the narrator is not a
character in the event that he iterates, which, when applied to Good
Men,GoodWomen,is complicated,since Liang Jing is a character in the
movie but not in the film within a film she is making. Her authority
is undercut as it is being established,further creating the impression of
Liang Jing as an untrustworthy narrator.
Liang Jing’s dubious credibility is introduced in several scenes early
in the movie, in which we see her and others in costume, posing for
a still photographer. These shots are preparation for the filming of
the film within a film and are followed by another scene in black
and white, an actual scene from the film within a film.These scenes
simultaneously serve two functions: they underscore the fragmentary
nature of the story being told in the movie and, at the same time,
remind the audience of the artificiality of filmmaking. Moreover, a
brief, dialogueless, lovemaking scene in the past between Liang Jing
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and her boyfriend appears just before these introductory shots of
moviemaking. The contrast is so striking that spectators must alter
their viewing habits and their subjective relation to the film, what
the Russian Formalists termed the technique of defamilarization:“Film
audiences for whom‘seeing is believing’tend to forget that cinematic
visualizations of history are not transparent windows on the past or
mirror reflections but are, like verbal narratives, constructed re-pre-
sentations.”6
This defamiliarization appears in The Puppet Master, in
which Li Tianlu, on whose life the film is based, speaks directly into
the camera in a movie about him played by an actor.But whereas The
Puppet Master seems to imply the blurring of“acting,dreams,and life”
(hence the Chinese title, Ximeng rensheng), Good Men, Good Women
privileges the acting part.
Unlike Lan Bozhou’s story, which gives detailed descriptions of
Zhong and Jiang’s life and living conditions, as well as the guilt Jiang
feels after giving away her son, Hou’s film within a film deals with
this time period (spanning five years) with just a few scenes. Even the
Japanese,whose military presence in China is the cause of the couple’s
patriotic efforts, are given minimal space, specifically a scene in which
they sneak into the Chinese village where Jiang is staying, to steal
food. It is obvious that Hou is not interested in making an antiwar
movie. Still, the fact that the principal villain of modern Chinese history
is pushed to the periphery is noteworthy, that rather than being
shown brutalizing the Chinese or pillaging their homes, the Japanese
merely steal a little food from the Chinese villagers. Although some
viewers may fault Hou Hsiao-hsien for not painting a more negative
picture of the Japanese, for not directly depicting the savagery so well
documented in history books and so often seen in anti-Japanese films,
Hou renders them inconsequential and forces the viewers to focus on
the individual: Jiang Biyu. More important to our purpose is Hou’s
interest in the people’s history and the use of a single, brief shot of the
theft to encompass all of Jiang’s life on the mainland.
What to Do with the Past
If Hou’s Good Men,GoodWomen is intended to contrast the idealism and
sacrifice of a group of Taiwanese intellectuals with the decadent and
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meaningless life of modern-dayTaiwan youth, as some critics contend,
the character of Liang obviously serves to exemplify the contrast.Yet,
if we consider how Liang Jing deals with her own recent past and the
distant past,Jiang’s life,the focus of this contrast becomes blurred.First,
there is a palpable disconnect from the past and an apparent unwillingness
to recall her own past.The movie opens with a shot of Liang Jing’s
apartment.The phone rings,waking up Liang,who is,as usual,sleeping
amid a pile of blankets and pillows. She gets up and walks slowly over
to her fax machine, from which a page of her diary is hanging, waiting
for her. From her voice-over, we learn that the diary entry records a
recent lovemaking scene with“L”on the third anniversary of the death
of Liang’s boyfriend, Ah Wei. After reading the fax, she goes into her
bathroom; the camera remains outside, and we hear her singing about
lost love. Nothing in this shot tells us about how she feels; there is no
emotion in her voice.This shot shows us a young woman who seems to
be unaffected by her past, an impression reinforced by the subsequent
shot, which shows her making love with Ah Wei.The two scenes do
not appear to be connected,and Liang Jing seems intent on living a life
devoid of any memory of her past.The distant past of Jiang Biyu, the
character she plays in the movie, appears to mean even less to her.We
thus are left to wonder whether she is really apathetic to her past or if
the past is so hard for her to face that she pretends not to care.
The same scenario is repeated in the next shot of the present-day
Liang Jing.The phone is ringing again, and this time she answers but
there is no response, except for the fax machine that continues to
spit out a longer section of her diary. Prasenjit Duara’s comparison of
history with a telephone call is fascinatingly applicable here:“History
comes to us like a telephone call to which we are obliged to respond,
presumably, within its initiating framework. Thus we in the present
together with our caller from the past, are coproducers of the past.”7
If we substitute “history” with “the past,” then we see Liang Jing’s past
coming back to her in the form of a telephone call. But there is no
response when she answers.The initiating framework is unknown to
her,and lacking the coproducer,she is unable to produce the past.She
thus must rely on the faxed page from her diary, but the diary itself
comes to her in fragments.
Symbolically,this is a particularly important scene,for it sets the tone
and defines the theme of the movie: the ambiguous way in which the
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Taiwanese approach their past.During the martial law era,the government
suppression denied the past, especially the 2/28 Incident, to the
people. It was an imposed collective amnesia.When the people were
finally allowed to look back and examine the past after martial law was
lifted, they were confronted with the lack of an initiating framework,
as is Liang Jing in the movie, when the caller from the past refuses
to communicate with her: “How we respond to the call and how
differently we may respond from each other reflects both our present
circumstances and our creativity.”8
The circumstances reflected in
Liang Jing’s life and in the Taiwanese people’s present is the inability
to produce a meaningful response. They are left bewildered, which
exemplifies the effect of the White Terror.
Following this allegorical reading,we see the faxed pages of her diary
as a form of written history, the most common means through which
we know about the past.This metaphor is reinforced by the thermal
fax paper that transmits uncut documents.As the machine spews them
out continuously, we are presented with the illusion of continuity: one
entry follows another,creating a false sense of linkage between entries.9
But the diary entry is incomplete on two accounts. First, the faxed
pages are only a portion of a book-length diary, and second, even if
the diary were whole, it could present only an incomplete record of
what has happened,because the recorder of the diary cannot cover any
one day’s events comprehensively. Likewise, for the people in Taiwan
over the past forty years (from 1947 to 1987), history as they know
it is highly subjective and full of omissions.We can draw an analogy
between the stolen diary and modern Taiwanese history, particularly
pertaining to the 2/28 Incident.That is,by forbidding theTaiwanese to
talk and write about this part of their past, the Guomindang government
stole their history from them and, like Liang Jing’s experience of
retrieving it through the fax machine, fed it back to the people in bits
and pieces.10
Moreover, the process of reassembling historical information
is fraught with manipulation, and what is offered often reads like
fiction, which is implied in Liang’s monologue about the film they are
shooting and why she feels she is turning into Jiang.“These, of course,
are impossible thoughts thrust credibly into the audience’s head; that
the black-and-white film it [the audience] has already been watching
hasn’t been shot yet,and that real people are turning into fictional characters
while fictional characters are turning into real ones.”11
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The faxed diary alerts us to the dual theme of Good Men, Good
Women: the impossibility of gaining full knowledge of the past and an
unwillingness to confront that past.To achieve the latter, Hou’s movie
uses several narrative techniques to arrange the layered stories. The
most obvious is Liang Jing’s interaction (or, more accurately, lack of
interaction) with the role she is playing and, by extension, with Jiang
Biyu’s past.We recall that Liang is first seen dressed in costume for a
photo session, a shot without dialogue. In the early part of the filming,
we often hear her refer to the movie in a dispassionate voice. For
instance, in shot 17,12
Liang’s voice-over is juxtaposed with the visual
image of a command center in Huidan,Guangdong:“It’s been close to
a month since we started the rehearsal, but I have no idea when we’ll
begin shooting the movie. I feel I’m becoming Jiang Biyu.” Her own
words notwithstanding,Liang is never seen to be visibly affected by the
role she is playing. Some critics might argue that the following scene,
the interrogation by the Japanese,implies a kind of identification.That
is, by jumping from the present-time Liang Jing to the historical Jiang
Biyu,a connection between actor and role,present and past,is formed.
I interpret the cut differently,as the comment on rehearsal is only one
segment of Liang’s voice-over, which also includes a dream she had
the night before about Ah Wei and her puzzlement over her sister’s
negative attitude toward her.The inclusion of this personal information
about the actor’s life not only minimizes the likelihood of Liang’s
identifying with Jiang but also underscores Liang’s dubious connection
with the past: the quasi-national past represented by Jiang, her
own past with Ah Wei, and her problems with her sister.
Later shots reinforce Liang’s uncertain connection with the multiple
past. In shot 23, in which the imprisoned Jiang and others are being
transported to another location, Liang Jing’s voice-over describes how
the five of them were rescued. Her depiction sounds like the recitation
of a script, with no emotional involvement in the events in the film
within a film. Included in this voice-over is yet another brief reference
to Jiang Biyu:“That day, when I went to the hospital to see Jiang Biyu,
she said I look like her when she was young, and that she too was very
pretty.”We are not privy to Liang’s inner world and do not know how
she reacts to Jiang’s comparison, but the similarity between the two
appears to be limited to the physical.13
The voice-over is carried into
the next shot,in which Liang is looking at her fish bowl and wondering
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about her stolen diary:“I came home after filming today to find another
faxed diary entry. I really don’t know why the thief stole my diary.The
person calls but doesn’t say anything. It feels strange to read my own
diary every day.”
The juxtaposition of Jiang Biyu’s past and present and Liang’s past
and present paints an intriguing picture. In a way, past and present are
disjointed,with the past existing only on the periphery of their present
life. It is, coincidentally, an echo of Liang’s comment about reading her
diary—“strange”—an effect that is intensified by the use of voice-over,
“a resource that can be used for the cinematic equivalents of two very
different options in novelistic narration,third-person‘omniscience’and
first-person retrospection—the apparently impersonal historian’s view
and the subjective confessions of personal experience.”14
As a voiceover
narrator of Jiang’s and her own life,Liang Jing plays both roles,and
hence her narration hovers between the view of the historian and the
confession of personal experience,which conveys a sense of disconnect
that embodies the suppression of historical memories.
Signs of a similar disconnect can be found in two other segments
about Jiang’s life that Liang Jing narrates. In shot 41, in which the
Japanese are shown running away after stealing the villagers’ food, the
camera pans up to show the canopy of a tree while Liang states:
Nineteen forty-five, the war with Japan was over. Zhong Haodong
and Jiang Biyu ended their five years of guerrilla life on the mainland
and returned to Taiwan. Zhong Haodong took up a position
as principal at Keelung High School, while Jiang Biyu worked at
the Taipei Radio Station.They had put their first-born son up for
adoption in China because of the war; their second son died of a
high fever the year they returned to Taiwan.15
In Lan Bozhou’s story, Jiang relates the incident and the guilt she felt
about not taking good care of the child. In Hou’s movie, not only do
we not see the scene acted out,but we also do not hear about it through
Jiang’s voice. Instead, it is through the faceless voice of Liang Jing, the
woman playing Jiang, that the death is made known to the audience.
This scene also exposes how the story and the film deal differently
with time and events. Lan’s story relates events in detail, punctuated
by references to the time line. For instance, we are told that Zhong
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Haodong and Jiang Biyu returned to Taiwan in April 1946 (in the
movie, we learn only that they returned to Taiwan shortly after the
end of the war) and that their child died in August 1946. Lan’s story
is rife with clashes between the public (national, historical incidents)
and the personal (private, familial events). It is a text that is afraid of
losing its significance if it is not contextualized in the historical. In
contrast,Hou’s movie strives to focus on the personal,thereby glossing
over the public occurrences. In the much discussed opening shot of
A City of Sadness, the dismembered voice of the emperor of Japan is
heard on the radio announcing Japan’s surrender, while theTaiwanese
are busying themselves with personal activities surrounding the birth
of a child in an adjoining room. Hou similarly tries to relegate public
history to the margin of personal life in Good Men, GoodWomen.
Furthermore, when public events are introduced with definitive
dates in Good Men, Good Women, they are meant to cast more doubt
on the validity of than to add clarification to the circumstances. An
example is another scene narrated by Liang Jing that takes place before
Jiang Biyu is arrested. Shot 43 shows Jiang Biyu burning books:
In the fall of 1948, after school began at Keelung High School,
Zhong Haodong and his friends started publishing Enlightenment.
. . . In May 1949, the [Guomindang] retreated to Taiwan. In
August, a graduate of the Business School at Taiwan University
sent a copy of the underground publication to his girlfriend, thus
revealing his identity and causing his arrest.
Again Liang Jing’s voice is dispassionate and matter-of-fact. Most
interesting, however, is how she plays the dual role of reader of and
commentator on history.On the one hand,her emotionless voice gives
the impression that she is merely reciting events in Zhong and Jiang’s
life. On the other hand, her recitation of the enactment of events
gives the appearance that she is making a connection between cause
(the underground newspaper) and effect (the arrest). Liang serves as a
bridge between actions and consequences. But is this really how truth
is revealed? As Walter Benjamin reminds us: “Historicism contents
itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments
in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical.
It became historical posthumously.”16
In Good Men, Good Women, the
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causal linkage is intentionally broken and blurred because it is not
Hou’s intention to point out the way to search for truth or even imply
that truth can be discovered at all. The shot following Jiang’s arrest
depicts an argument between Liang Jing and her sister, who accuses
Liang of seducing her husband.17
An argument leading to a physical
confrontation further suggests the theme of unknowable facts: Liang
Jing denies any involvement with her “brother-in-law,” whereas her
sister cites what other people are saying to prove her case.
These two shots of Jiang’s past and present seem unrelated; at most
we can say that Liang’s argument with her sister serves again to contrast
the triviality of her life with Jiang’s.But does Jiang Biyu’s life really have
no bearing on Liang Jing’s life, and does one’s past, whether personal
or national, indeed leave no marks on one’s present? To answer these
questions, we must examine the ending of the movie. In shot 51, Liang
is again harassed by the anonymous,silent caller when her fax machine
spews out yet another long roll of her diary. Dragging the faxed paper
with her,Liang Jing begins talking to the person on the other end.She
asks the caller why he or she took her diary and, at one point, actually
begins to call the caller AhWei, begging him to come back.This scene
is followed by four shots dealing with Zhong Haodong’s death.In shot
56, the second-to-last shot of the movie, Jiang Biyu is seen burning
spirit money as she reads a letter from Zhong Haodong. When she
finishes, she looks up and wails. If Liang’s one-sided telephone conversation
with the thief indicates a blurring of past and present, then the
arrangement of the shots of Liang and Jiang also implies a connection
between the two, however tenuous that connection might be. Jiang’s
life is implicated in Liang’s life;18
since we all are shaped by our pasts,
whether personal or national, the final installment of Hou’s Taiwan
trilogy can be regarded as a comment on the complex, contentious
past that cannot be easily understood or interpreted but is nevertheless
intricately connected with the present.
HEARTBREAK ISLAND
Heartbreak Island is the second film by Hsu Hsiao-ming,following Dust
of Angels (Shaonianye, an la! 1992), a realist dissection of 1990s youths
living on the margins of Taiwan’s prosperity.With its vivid depiction
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of violence and drug use,Dust ofAngels was derived from the director’s
concern about a generation of youth from broken families in a rapidly
changing rural society that is ill equipped to deal with the impact of
modernization. Hsu is a highly political filmmaker with a clear social
conscience who does not shy away from ideological teleology, which
is even more noticeable in Heartbreak Island. In an interview with the
preeminent film critic Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping, Hsu revealed that
after reading the film script adaptation of Dong Nian’s “Last Winter,”
by Guo Zheng, a novelist in his own right, he read the novella himself
and was deeply moved. He then worked with Guo Zheng and
Dong Nian to revise the script, a process filled with disagreements.
Guo Zheng wanted to cast the female protagonist (Chen Linlang)
as a quasi-proletarian revolutionary, and Dong Nian, unfettered by
Guo’s “Marxist critique of a small minority monopolizing the majority
of resources,” regarded the sources for the novella and film script
purely from the perspective of personal experience.19
Hsu had his own
agenda for the cinematic representation of the Formosa Incident of
1979, which is best summed up in his own words:“I tend to feel contemptuous
of those who turned their back on their own ideals.”20
It is therefore not surprising that Hsu chose the contrast between
past and present to explore changes in the lives of some of the activists
who fell victim to government brutality in the aftermath of the
Formosa Incident. In the film, Chen Linlang finally is released after
thirteen years of incarceration. As a college student, Chen had been
involved with her teacher Wang Rong, who was active in the opposition
movement that culminated in the confrontation in Kaohsiung
in the winter of 1979. Following an abortion, she leaves the site of
conflict and checks into a hospital.WhenWang comes to see her, he is
arrested and later put in prison, from which he sends her a letter written
in blood. Mistaking his invocation of their relationship as “eternal
love,” Linlang turns to such extremist tactics as making and throwing
bombs as a way to avenge his wrongful execution, for which she is
arrested and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. After she reenters
society, she finds, to her great disappointment and anger, that most of
her former comrades have turned into complacent bourgeoisie who
are content with their middle-class lifestyle.Worst of all isWang Rong,
now married with a newborn baby boy and running a successful coffee
shop and qigong classes in the basement of the shop. Disillusionment,
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a sense of betrayal, and dislocation eventually drive Linlang to kidnap
Wang’s son and,true to the ending of Dong Nian’s novella,to commit
suicide by slitting her wrists.
Just as Hsu Hsiao-ming, by declaring his contempt for those who
betrayed their own ideals, made Heartbreak Island as a political statement
and cinematic manifestation of personal belief, it also is easy
for viewers and critics to treat this film as a mere diatribe. A closer
examination, however, reveals that it is as much a tirade against Wang
Rong and the like as a criticism of the effects of the White Terror. In
other words,Wang Rong’s change in attitude resulted from the overall
atmosphere of suppression and his personal experience of imprisonment.
A look back at the past, however, raises more questions than
answers in explaining the motivation for Wang’s metamorphosis and
Linlang’s actions, particularly through a liberal use of flashbacks.These
flashbacks, all from Linlang’s perspective, play a crucial role in dramatizing
the contrast and demonstrate that ultimately the film calls
for a political interpretation at the expense of the personal, the failed
romance between Linlang and Wang Rong.
Flashbacks, writes Maureen Turim,“give us images of memory, the
personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the
shared and recorded past.In fact,flashbacks in film often merge the two
levels of remembering the past,giving large scale social and political history
the subjective mode of a single, fictional individual’s remembered
experience.”21
In Linlang’s case, her flashbacks are clearly intended to
serve as a collective memory of the lost past, in which personal history
is intertwined with the political, and it is precisely this mixture that
underscores the theme of the film.AsTurim further explains,
One of the ideological implications of this narration of history
through a subjective focalization is to create history as an essentially
individual and emotional experience. Another is to establish
a certain view of historical causality and linkage. By presenting the
result before the cause, a logic of inevitability is implied; certain
types of events are shown to have certain types of results without
ever allowing for other outcomes than the one given in advance.22
The historical causality in this film, represented through Linlang
and, to a lesser extent,Wang Rong, fingers an oppressive political cli-
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mate as the culprit for the inevitable compromises one has to make.
Furthermore, we should not take too literally Hsu Hsiao-ming’s selfproclaimed
indictment of those who betray their ideals, for the cinematic
style ultimately produces an irresolvable contradiction between
directorial intent and the film.
Past as Causality
Heartbreak Island has,strictly speaking,two pasts:the political—Wang’s
involvement in opposition politics—and the personal—Linlang’s
relationship with Wang Rong. Owing to the nature of the film, the
political and personal aspects are intertwined from the very beginning.
Since the flashbacks to Wang’s political activities and his relationship
with Linlang are presented solely from her perspective, the political
aspect is unavoidably colored by her recollection, interpretation, and
re-creation,which serves as the historical causality and linkage posited
by Turim. The director uses this historical causality to explain and
dramatize Wang Rong’s betrayal, but the highly personalized nature
of the flashbacks and their connection with the present problematize
Linlang’s action,consequently turning the film into an examination of
a former political activist/rehabilitated terrorist.
All together there are seven flashbacks,presented in the classical sense
of flashbacks in that, except for the first one, they all are triggered by
Chen Linlang’s present situation and thought processes. But the flashbacks
form an organic whole to explain her kidnappingWang’s son and
taking her own life.The film opens with shots of a long dark hallway
and Linlang looking out through the slot in her prison cell door.Then
the opening credits appear on the screen,followed by aTaipei cityscape,
in which Wang Rong is engaged in a qigong session and his mother
returns from shopping with his baby, who is then handed over to his
wife,An-an.Then the camera cuts to Linlang in prison,thus beginning
the first flashback: the voice-over news report of the riot in Kaohsiung
(1979, about a decade earlier) bleeding into a scene at a hospital, where
Linlang is lying in bed with a friend at her side when Wang Rong
appears in the doorway.The police quickly come in and take him away.
It is not until the fourth flashback that we learn the reason she was in
the hospital: she had just had an abortion, and the hospital stay was the
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result of complications from the procedure. These two introductory
segments draw a stark contrast between Wang’s normal family life and
Linlang’s life in prison, as her flashback emphasizes the difference and
gives the audience the first hint of her later actions.
Like the disjointed arrangement of events depicted in Dong
Nian’s original novella, Heartbreak Island begins with Linlang’s past
in an anachronistic manner by flashing back to the reason of her
imprisonment—Wang Rong’s arrest—but the connection is made
clear only later when we learn from her conversation withWang that
she intends to avenge his (presumed) execution. In short, the Linlang
of the past was not a political activist with strong beliefs but a young
woman who had lost her lover/mentor to the Nationalist government’s
political oppression.We are reminded of the Grieving Founding
Mother in Li Ang’s “The Devil in a Chastity Belt,” in which the
female protagonist loses her husband to the government’s surveillance
machinery during the same incident.Whereas the Grieving Founding
Mother opts for involvement in the political process—running
for office—to counter the government’s power, Linlang chooses the
radical action of making bombs. Both texts evoke the image of a
suffering woman turning to political activism not because of her
political convictions but because of her love for the man in her life.
The main difference is,of course,that Linlang is looking backward to
search for a reason to move forward, and since “recollection is about
the confrontation with absence and forgetting,”23
her inability to deal
with the changes in her present life drives her to further drastic, even
desperate, measures.
As triggers to recalling the past, the seven flashbacks explain more
about Linlang’s action than about Wang Rong’s transformation, or
about the (dis)connect between past and present. Flashbacks 2, 3, and
4, three consecutive segments, are sandwiched between similar shots
of the newly freed Linlang in her old apartment.After the first flashback
of Wang Rong’s arrest, we learn three important things about
Linlang’s past:
Flashback 2.Wang enlightens Linlang about inequalities in the world.
Flashback 3.Wang and Linlang visit Wang’s hometown.
Flashback 4. Linlang talks to a doctor about her pregnancy and her
desire for an abortion.
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Flashback 2 is important in that it conveys the image of an apolitical
Linlang, thus underscoring the changes taking place in her life.
As the flashback begins,Wang is shown writing late into the night.
When the sleeping Linlang wakes up, Wang instructs her on the
importance of opposition movements, prompting her to question
why he must be the one who fights the injustice. Flashback 3 takes
Linlang and the audience back to Wang’s hometown, where his Taiwanese
gentry family lives.We see Wang’s mother presenting a pair
of golden bells (a homophone with Linlang’s name) to Linlang, and
Wang’s father, like most Taiwanese parents, discouraging Wang from
getting involved in politics.
Taken together, these three flashbacks form an elliptical narrative
of Linlang’s life before prison.Although they have no apparent logical
connection (spatial or temporal) with one another, we must assume a
chronological order from her initiation (into opposition politics) to a
visit back to Wang’s hometown to her decision to stop the pregnancy.
Maureen Turim’s observation on flashbacks with nostalgic characteristics
is illuminating here:
Nostalgia is a figure ambiguously attached to the flashback;the past
is an object of desire, due to its personal, intense, and even liberating
attributes, but it is also dangerous and frightening. Flashbacks
in most cases terminate at precisely the point at which they must
be sealed off, in which the imperatives of fixing interpretations and
reaching judgments in the present must be imposed.24
We detect a sense of nostalgia at work in Linlang’s recollections, and
indeed for her,a judgment has been reached and she findsWang Rong
in order to confront him.
The next flashback, the fifth, occurs shortly after Linlang spots
Wang and his family leaving in his car, and she faints. In this flashback
we see the young Linlang running home to see her mother engaged
in sexually charged intimacy with a man who is not Linlang’s father,
whose absence is never explained.Then the camera cuts to a scene of
the adult Linlang calling her mother from a pay phone.We can assume
that this particular flashback is triggered by seeing Wang and his family,
but the flashback itself also prompts her to phone her mother.
The fusion of different facets of past and present elicits a subjective
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response that plays a significant role in a chain of actions in Linlang’s
life after prison, because flashbacks
infuse the present with the weight of the past, allowing an already
subjectively rendered site to give way to another that is even more
subjective, in that it is constituted as a memory image. If subjectivity
is the site of these fictions, memory is the site that offers
explanations for the dark subjectivity one experiences in the present.
The flashback becomes a means of expressing the mood of
remembrance in instances in which memory is bitter, nostalgic,
melancholy, obsessive—anything but simply happy.25
In other words, Linlang’s past, presented as flashbacks, is used to illuminate
the causes of her present actions.Turim’s characterization of
the memory as bitter and obsessive is an apt description of Linlang’s
state of mind.
Although the obsessive nature of Linlang’s memory is an adequate
explanation for her act of kidnapping, the flashback contributes little
to linking her political beliefs to the kidnapping, especially when we
examine the scene in which she confrontsWang Rong about the abandonment
of his ideals.When Wang argues that “times have changed,
and we must change too,” Linlang stresses that she wants to help him
finish what they started,to which he responds,“You’re crazy.”The leap
from her wish to continue their former activities to kidnapping his
son is too great to be an acceptable explanation, except that her mental
state is deteriorating rapidly.The arrangement of these flashbacks
makes us wonder whether she is searching in her relationship with
Wang for a surrogate family.This impression is intensified when she
later kidnaps his son, since her abortion (depicted in flashback 4) has
made it impossible for her to have children. Or perhaps she believes
thatWang’s baby will replace the one she lost in order for her to form
an imagined family. Either way, these flashbacks construct logical links
and offer information about her personal motivation.
The only direct reference to the Formosa Incident and Wang’s
involvement in it appears in flashback 6, with highly symbolic significance.
It is triggered by Wang’s letter written in blood, which Linlang
finds at her mother’s house after she leaves prison. It is, we recall, this
letter that turns her into an avenging bomb-making terrorist.The sight
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of the letter takes her and the audience back to the past,where she and
Wang are engaged in a conversation; but we hear only a news report
about the arrest of two members of the opposition movement on
the day before a demonstration in Kaohsiung escalated into a violent
confrontation between riot police and protesters.The conversation is
followed by a scene in which Linlang visits an abortion clinic, after
whichWang puts her on a bus back toTaipei.The flashback ends with
her on the bus, watching the city of Kaohsiung become embroiled
in unrest as blood begins to flow between her legs. Chronologically
what comes next is the scene of her stay in the hospital, presented in
flashback 1.
Astute viewers will quickly grasp the connection among the blood
Wang uses to write the letter, Linlang’s blood from the abortion, and,
more subtly, the blood shed on the streets of Kaohsiung. Although
the director indicated that he was interested more in exploring the
lives of marginal figures involved in the Formosa Incident than in the
incident itself or of major figures like Shi Mingde andYao Jiawen, the
reference to blood points to the film’s delicate engagement with violence
that occurs at the scene, without resorting to a gory depiction.
Linlang’s pregnancy, brought on because of her attraction to Wang
Rong’s ideology and terminated on the eve of the Formosa Incident,
symbolizes the end of an era.It is,ultimately,a fruitless struggle.Nonetheless,
like the letter written in blood, the abortion has lasting repercussions
in their lives a decade later. Similarly, the Formosa Incident
of 1979, although resulting in the imprisonment of many opposition
activists, has always been credited as the single most important event
in Taiwan’s democratization. That is, the consequences of an event,
whether personal, like a terminated pregnancy, or political, like an
aborted attempt at obtaining greater civil liberties, can be influential
for years afterward.
Flashback 7, depicting Linlang’s intention to leave Wang Rong
before the incident casts another shadow over her, for it leads to her
kidnapping scheme. In the flashback, upon seeing her packing,Wang
tells her that she can leave if she is afraid, and she replies tearfully that
she is afraid for him, for his safety. By this time in the film, we know
everything there is to know about their past and about his metamorphosis
from political activist to“normal”bourgeois husband and father.
It is safe to argue that by placing this last piece of information about
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the past here, the director intends the audience to see the reason why
she kidnaps Wang’s baby: Linlang has become a woman avenging the
wrong done to her by Wang Rong (and perhaps by society), which is
exactly the kind of movie Hsu did not want to make.26
Compounding
this (mis)representation of Linlang is her suicide, which further
renders her as a displaced and dislocated character, a social misfit. It
seems, however, inevitable that suicide is the way out for Linlang and
perhaps for the film itself. If Linlang represents an unwanted past that
post–martial law Taiwan, symbolized by Wang Rong, would rather
bury, then what better way to deal with it than to literally kill it off?
This is the impression left by the final scene of the film: an ambulance
is driving off with Linlang’s body while Wang Rong stands there, one
arm holding the baby and the other around his wife’s shoulder. Order
has been restored in Wang’s life, which was temporarily disrupted by
the haunting past, and Linlang, the ghost, has been exorcised with her
suicide.The present is finally rid of the past.
Appearing as the last flashback in the film, this scene deserves
further discussion, not only because it reiterates Linlang’s reasons for
her past and her present acts, but also because it serves the dubious
function of conveying the alleged purpose of the film. At the end
of the movie, when Wang confronts his former girlfriend-turnedkidnapper,
he utters tearful regrets that it was his fault and that he
should have let her leave years before.The former political activist’s
sentiment is understandable, for from his perspective, he is responsible
for Linlang’s transformation. But his lack of more meaningful
reflection on the past is apparent and disturbing to the extent that
we wonder whether Linglang, and not Wang, is the intended target
of critique for betraying one’s ideals. That is, the characterization
of Linlang as a kidnapper fails to convey the director’s contempt
for those who betray their ideals, since she does not appear to have
any political ideals and is portrayed as close to deranged.27
Most
unsettling is the ending shot, in which Wang, along with his wife,
is presented as a bereft parent and the victim of a vengeful former
girlfriend. In order not to reduce the film to a melodrama of lost
love and revenge, we must treat Linlang symbolically as Wang’s past
coming back to haunt him.
Wang’s distant attitude toward Linlang represents a disconnect with
the past, similar to Liang Jing’s unwillingness to remember the past in
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Good Men, GoodWomen. Linlang’s imprisonment can then be considered
as discarding or burying one’s painful memory of the past, even
though the past remains in one’s unconscious. Not unlike Liang Jing’s
distance from her own past and from Jiang Biyu’s life,Wang Rong’s
desire to forget should not be regarded merely as emblematic of the
victory of a bourgeois lifestyle over political dedication but as a result
of the pernicious effects of the White Terror, which has changed a
former political prisoner into someone who just wants to live a normal
life.28
As mentioned earlier,Linlang’s suicide is a cinematically and
politically expedient strategy to rid the present of the past, albeit in a
disquieting manner that reminds us that “women, in being relegated
to absence,silence,and marginality,have thereby also to a degree been
relegated to the outskirts of historical discourse, if not to a position
totally outside of history.”29
Present as Consequences
Despite Hsu Hsiao-ming’s caustic criticism of people likeWang Rong,
Heartbreak Island is more than a political diatribe.In fact,by examining
the changes in the minor characters’ lives over the decade following
the Formosa Incident,we discern its impact on them.For instance,the
young college girl who was Linlang’s best friend is now the mother
of two, and she refuses to tell Linlang whereWang Rong is, obviously
believing that Linlang should forget about the past. In the scene in
which Linlang asks about Wang, we see the girl crying on Linlang’s
shoulder. Although we are not told the reason for her tears, we can
speculate that despite a seemingly comfortable life and two children,
she is not happy with her life.Also of interest is that Linlang is the one
lending her a literal shoulder to cry on. Another friend, obviously a
member of the opposition movement, is now selling cheap clothes in
a night market. He justifies this development by claiming that times
have changed and he needs to make a living.30
Yet another acquaintance from an earlier time, Jinguang, a political
fanatic, wants to run for president and asks Wang to serve as the
minister of defense in his administration if he is elected.Jinguang later
offers Linlang the same position,reiterating the importance of treating
the soldiers with love and care.Although we may laugh at Jinguang’s
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unrealistic dream and delusional fantasy about being the president,
we cannot ignore the altered political climate after martial law was
lifted, in which the naive dream of running for president is available
to anyone, without fear of dire consequences. Compared with
the persecution of activists who demanded more civil liberties during
the demonstration that resulted in the largest-scale arrest since the
1950s,Jinguang’s freedom to say and do whatever he wants is a change
that should not be ignored. Hence, his character invites us to ponder
whether the present is indeed worse than the past.
The film’s most problematic character is Linlang, whose search for
Wang Rong and kidnapping of his son can be seen as an attempt
to create an imagined family. After her release from prison, in addition
to her disillusionment with the changes in her friends, Linlang
returns to her home in a juancun (villagelike residential compounds
for mainlanders relocated to Taiwan), only to find her mother lying
dead in bed, an obvious suicide.This seemingly gratuitous plot twist
serves to remind the audience that Linlang has nothing,no friends,no
family.To be sure, we can attribute the changes, especially the belated
news of her mother’s death, to the political oppression of the martial
law era, which has created a distance between mother and daughter.
But from a neighbor’s incessant criticism of Linlang, we learn that her
flight from home, like her radical actions after Wang’s arrest, was not
politically motivated.
The problematic nature of Linlang’s character derives from her
gender. As we have seen, in the fictional and cinematic rendition
of defiance against government oppression in Taiwan, women are
almost never depicted as active participants.They are either innocent
bystanders, like the protagonist in “A Minor Biography of Huang
Su,” or guilty by association, like the Grieving Founding Mother
and Jiang Biyu. Linlang appears to be the only female character who
takes control of her life, but the contrast between past and present
makes her actions appear misguided and dubiously motivated. Here
we may find it useful to contemplate E.Ann Kaplan’s questions about
“the relationships between images of women on film and the level of
fantasy, desire, unconscious wishes and fears that has both individual
and social/historical formations. Whose desire is at work in a particular
film?Whose unconscious is being addressed?”31
On a practical
level, because the film script is the product of people with different
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ideologies, it inevitably results in a distracted film. On a discursive
level, it is not too far-fetched to argue that Heartbreak Island addresses
the unconscious of the Taiwanese (men) in the 1990s, while women
serve as a foil for a cinematic gaze at the dislocated present and the
lost past.
fiction versus film
The differences between literature (mostly fiction) and cinema
demand changes and adjustments when a literary work is adapted
into a film, whether adapting John Steinbeck’s realist, social critique
The Grapes of Wrath or John Fowles’s metafictional The French Lieutenant’s
Woman: “When a novel, short story, or play is made into a
movie, a metamorphosis occurs. We often speak simply of ‘filming
a book,’ as though the characters in a work could step off the page
and perform before a camera, but this expression fails to convey
the complicated process involved.”32
When compounded by other
factors, such as politics and ideology, the conversion to cinema can
further alter a literary text to the point that a film bears only remote
similarities to its original source.33
The two novellas, “Song of the
Covered Wagon” and “Last Winter,” analyzed in chapter 2 use complex
narrative strategies that only further complicate the adaptation
process. Lan Bozhou’s utilization of eyewitness testimony, though
technically easy to accomplish on screen, makes a poor cinematic
version of the original. Similarly, the mise-en-scène of Dong Nian’s
intricate chronology of events poses an insurmountable challenge
to any director foolish enough to take on the task. Furthermore,
different authorial and directorial intents accentuate the alterations
that are inevitable in this process, as demonstrated by the following
comparative analysis.
Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” tries to restore history
by focusing on an individual, but his employment of eyewitness
accounts nevertheless underscores the reality that no account
can claim to be complete.The narrative strategy of beginning Zhong
Haodong’s story with the moment just before his execution also entails
an artificiality that makes the reader keenly aware of its constructedness,
despite the linear, progressive history—from his childhood to his
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unjust death—that follows. Moreover, by inserting itemized historical
events, the narrative also creates the perception that public events are
somehow more important than an individual’s life, which, in turn,
privileges the very government-oriented historical writings that Lan
sets out to refute.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women, in contrast, narrates
two women’s lives in a disjointed manner while questioning our
knowledge of the past. In an oblique way, it also examines the Taiwanese
people’s approach to their past. Liang Jing, living a life seemingly
detached from her own past, as well as Jiang Biyu’s past, is
emblematic of such an attitude. But the structure of the movie also
underscores people’s tenuous connection with their past. Robert
A. Rosenstone’s comment on experimental films best characterizes
Hou’s approach to the past in Good Men, Good Women: “History as
experiment does not make the same claim on us as does the realist
film. Rather than opening a window directly onto the past, it opens
a window onto a different way of thinking about the past.The aim
is not to tell everything, but to point to past events, or to converse
about history, or to show why history should be meaningful to people
in the present.”34
It is clear that Lan Bozhou and Hou Hsiao-hsien have approached
the representation of the White Terror very differently. As someone
who has been continually interviewing and unearthing eyewitnesses
and survivors, Lan is keen on rediscovering the past.35
In his effort to
comprehend and recover that past, he cannot avoid the logic of causality.
For instance, Zhong Haodong’s eventual execution is seen as a
result of his involvement in leftist activities, which is directly linked
to the Guomindang’s anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. Hou
Hsiao-hsien, in contrast, explores the fragile link between past and
present to simultaneously re-create and question the representation
of the past, in a detached and yet quotidian manner.36
The differences
between Lan and Hou can easily be ascertained by their narrative
styles and,to a lesser extent,the focus of their stories.The first-person
narrators—Jiang Biyu, Zhong Shunhe, and Zhong Liyi—in “Song
of the Covered Wagon” speak directly from their own experience,
thus creating a sense of authenticity and credibility. Good Men, Good
Women,however,is told exclusively from Liang Jing’s perspective,giv-
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ing the impression that the film is, after all, one woman’s story. In
addition, we cannot help but notice that Zhong Haodong, the center
of Lan’s story, does not occupy a significant space in the film. Liang
Jing and Jiang Biyu (particularly because she is played by Liang Jing)
are the focus of Hou’s movie, a subtle reference to women and history
best expounded by ChuT’ien-wen:“After men all died for their
struggles, women came out to comfort the battlefield and bear witness
to historical facts.”37
Similarly,owing to the differences in media,Hsu Hsiao-ming deviates
from Dong Nian’s version in dramatizing the story of Chen Linlang
and Wang Rong regarding the Formosa Incident. Dong Nian’s
“Last Winter” was written within days of the Formosa Incident, at a
time when creative freedom was limited and writers needed to practice
self-censorship. He was restricted in commenting on the incident,
thus resorting to elliptical references to news reports. When
Hsu Hsiao-ming made Heartbreak Island in 1995, the changes in the
political climate gave him not only more freedom but also a perspective,
both unavailable to Dong Nian. Hence the Formosa Incident
becomes the past in Linlang and Wang Rong’s lives, and their present
is contemporaneous with that of the film audience.This temporal shift
is a highly political and politicized choice by the director, for Hsu is
not as interested in representing the Formosa Incident as in condemning
those who abandon their ideals.
Dong Nian’s novella moves back and forth between the past—
Wang Rong and Linlang’s romance—and the present—the Formosa
Incident of 1979. By using dates to punctuate the temporal shifts in
order to avoid giving the impression of a flashback from the perspective
of a certain character and through the incorporation of news
reports, the novella creates an impression that collective memories
can be manufactured.After the archival documents were made available
to the public and eyewitness accounts were collected and published,
it became clear that contemporary reports from the news
media (print and electronic) about the Formosa Incident were biased
against members of the opposition movement, painting a picture of
terrorist mobsters with the intention of overthrowing the government.
The film version, using flashback, becomes the story of one
woman’s life from naive, apolitical college student to bomb-making
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terrorist-cum-kidnapper. The juxtaposition of past and present via
flashbacks creates the impression that all of Linlang’s actions hinge
on her desire to recapture the past, although it is unclear which past
she tries to recover: the political past, when everyone seemed to be
imbued with lofty ideals (Wang being the epitome), or the personal
past, when she and Wang were lovers. There is a displacement of
the political with the personal in Heartbreak Island, whereas in Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women, the personal is clearly meant
to dominate the political.
Noteworthy also is Wang Rong’s wife,An’an, who plays virtually
no role in Hsu’s film. Except for frantically searching for the baby
after the kidnapping, she is largely invisible. In the fictional version,
however,she is prominently featured.As a member of a younger generation,An’an
is ignorant ofWang Rong’s past involvement in radical
activities and is uninterested in politics.Throughout the novella, she
is petulant and constantly engaged in willful behavior. In particular,
bewildered by Wang’s silence and detachment, she asks him whether
he is “hiding something from her.” The literary portrayal of An’an
not only sets up a contrast with the older generation—Wang and
Chen—but also hints at Taiwan’s younger generation’s lack of historical
memory. By diminishing An’an’s significance in the film, Hsu
has effectively and drastically changed Dong Nian’s text and eliminated
the importance of generational memory in the transmission of
knowledge about Taiwan’s tortured past. Consequently, multilayered
pasts versus present in “Last Winter” are replaced by a streamlined
contrast between the past and the present of two main characters in
Heartbreak Island.
Dong Nian’s novella concludes withWang Rong’s visit to Linlang’s
tomb, where he waters the chrysanthemums while thinking,“All the
entangled gratitude, grudges, happiness, and suffering were truly in
the past.”38
A sense of closure, embedded in the emphasized notion of
letting bygones be bygones, colors the overall tone of the novella.39
The ending is clearly a humanistic gesture aimed at the need for reconciliation
and tolerance, but the inherent danger of such an ending
is the slippery slope of forgetfulness to obliteration of memory. Hsu
Hsiao-ming, likely concerned about this tendency to forgive and forget,
halts the cinematic narrative at the moment of Linlang’s suicide.
WhenWang Rong,with his nuclear family intact,watches the medical
126 cinematic re-creation
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personnel cart Linlang’s bloody body into an ambulance,the audience
is left to ponder his state of mind and the entangled issues of Taiwan’s
past and present.As evidenced in the cinematic and literary texts studied
in this chapter,the contrast not only serves as an effective narrative
strategy but also carries prominent ramifications for the future, for the
recalling of the past is always about the future.
PastVersus Present 127
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