I’m late to the game, but I finally watched Marry My Dead Body (《關於我和鬼變成家人的那件事》, literally “Concerning me becoming family with a ghost”) on Netflix over the weekend (available with English subs). The film did have its moments although not all of the jokes landed to me.
The name in Chinese follows a pattern of using overly wordy titles that started more or less with another film You are the Apple of my Eye (《那些年，我們一起追的女孩》, literally, “Those years, and those girls we chased together”). This formula is a little played out now in popular culture, however, and I think they could have gone with something a little snappier. There’s also a euphemistic tone to the Chinese title, as the marriage part is not stated overtly, referred to just as “becoming family.” The English title, although a little inaccurate in terms of spirit versus corpse, has a touch of humour to it in its echo of the phrase “over my dead body,” so I’d say the English title works quite well, as it reflects the enmity between the two main characters at the outset in typical rom-com fashion.
The film is largely well-meaning in its message: essentially that stereotypes and discrimination are a result of ignorance, and that, once homophobic people interact in a meaningful way with gay people, they begin to see them as human.
You might have heard quite a lot of talk about permanent residents and citizens of Taiwan getting an NT$6,000 tax rebate a while back, one of the last things outgoing Premier Su Tseng-chang did before he left office.
Ehhhh… that was back in January, when does the money come in?
The website went live for registration for direct deposits to bank account Wednesday,March 22 at 8 am for those whose IDs end in a zero or a one; those whose IDs end in a two or three on Thursday, March 23 at 8 am; those whose IDs end in a four and five on Friday, March 24; six and seven on Saturday, March 25; and eight and nine on Sunday, March 26. After that, you can register regardless of your ID number. The ATM and Post Office options are also now available.
Click 登記入帳 to register to get the money directly deposited to your bank. You’ll need to fill in your ARC no., the 12 digit number on your NHI card and your bank and bank account number.
So… how do I get my grubby little hands on it?(Updated March 16, 2023)
As you may or may not know, as opposed to the stimulus vouchers issued previously, this time they are issuing cash directly. According to Minister Audrey Tang, there are three main ways to collect your tax rebate (there are two other categories for special categories including remote areas, but not super important for the majority of us):
Straight to yourbank account – you can log into the online system with your NHI card and will have the option to have the money deposited directly into your bank account.
Withdrawing the cash direct from an ATM – you can go to an ATM at one of 12 appointed banks and enter your NHI card number and ID number to allow you to withdraw the cash immediately. (Prepare for some hiccups for APRC holders with this option in my estimation).
Post office counter service – for those who are fans of queueing, you can also get the cash at a post office with your ID/APRC and NHI card. If you’re a real queue aficionado and want to eat up at least a few hours, you can try to get it on the first day or target an area of Taipei with a higher concentration of senior citizens. Alternatively, you can go with option 1 and then queue up for a distinctly average beef noodle restaurant instead.
UPDATE (March 29, 2023):
You can check if you successfully registered using the tool below:
When you click “查詢登記結果” (Check the results of registration), you’ll be prompted to enter your ARC number and the 12 digits on the front of your NHI card. And if you were successful it should give you a message like this:
“Registration complete, the money will enter your account soon.”
For most people, the world of gambling either conjures up glamourous Hollywood movies, like James Bond and Ocean’s 11, or grimy old men in bookkeeper shops betting on the horses. This novel by Yan Geling gives us a mixture here by portraying the stories of big rollers in China, but lifting up their masks and exposing the grubby little men lying beneath, body odor and all.
We’re introduced to the protagonist, a middle-aged single mother living in Macau called Xiao’ou, through a story of how gambling runs in her blood, with the tragic tale of her male ancestor’s addiction. This eventually led to him taking his life and, as a result, his wife became obsessed with wiping out the male line of her family to ensure the defective gambling gene wasn’t passed down.
From there we jump to Xiao’ou’s current job as a junket operator/bate-ficha (壘碼仔/ Cantonese: daap6 ma5 zai2) in Macau; basically, these are the middlemen who bring high-rollers into casinos. Topically enough, while I was penning this review, this story emerged, giving an insight into the real world goings-on behind this fictional account.
We gradually come to learn that despite her supposed scorn for gamblers, Xiao’ou is gambling by proxy, in that she borrows money from the casino on behalf of her clients, and then has to chase up the money with them after paying the casino back on their behalf. She also offers clients the option to treble or quadruple the actual chips on the table, in an under-the-table bet with her, which makes the stakes even higher. Many are subsequently unable to pay and she risks losing big if other debtors collect from the clients before she can.
Mountains May Depart (《山河故人》 Jia Zhang-ke, 2015) depicts the breakdown of small town culture and a family unit in China, the price paid for the pursuit of the Chinese Dream and ‘going West’.
The film opens with a surreal scene of a group of people dancing to the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Although this appears jarring at first glance, the symbolism of the song when sung from a Chinese perspective, ties in with the stated ambition of one of the protagonists, Zhang Jinsheng, to bring the object of his affection, Shen Tao, to the US. In the small town of Fenyang in Shanxi Zhang has a violent falling out with his friend Liangzi over the pursuit of the female lead, Shen Tao. There are then successive jumps through time, from 1996 to 2014 and finally to 2025.
We follow Zhang Jinsheng as he wins Tao’s affections (attempting to bomb Liangzi in the process), they get married and have a baby together, while the spurned Liangzi travels to another province to work in mining. As we jump again, we learn that the marriage has failed and Zhang has taken their son to live in Shanghai, while Shen Tao remains in her hometown. She has limited contact with her son, Dollar, and they have several tense and awkward exchanges when he returns from Shanghai for her father’s funeral.
With the next jump in time, Liangzi returns home after being diagnosed with lung cancer and meets again with Tao in Fenyang where she offers to pay for his treatment. An increasingly unhinged Zhang Jinsheng has taken Dollar to live in Australia, where he has all but forgotten his mother. Zhang himself hangs around with other people from his province, unable to return due to ongoing corruption purges back home and largely unable to communicate with his son, having to resort to Google Translate to hold a conversation. Dollar subsequently develops a romantic attraction to his Chinese teacher, an older woman from Hong Kong (and mother substitute), and announces that he is leaving his father. The film ends with another rendition of ‘Go West’, this time with Tao dancing alone.
As Michelle Huang’s (黃宗儀) points out in her book ‘New Feelings Between China and Hong Kong: The Politics of Emotion in Dreams of Development’ (《中港新感覺：發展夢裡的情感政治》), the culprit in the eventual misery of each of the characters in the film seems to be globalism and new iterations of the “Chinese Dream” that spur people on towards an illusory upward mobility. Contrary to popular representations of the nouveau riche in China as an aspirational identity, Huang suggests the film’s subversion of the conventional perception of the nouveau riche (「新富」) stating:
In Mountains May Depart, the nouveau riche aren’t purely represented as smug members of the developed world, or as those who have forgotten their roots, on the contrary, impoverished people and the nouveau riche become the ‘kitchen waste of history’, with societal development they lose their desires and sense of orientation.
Zhang JinSheng ticks all the boxes of the Chinese success story on the surface, but in reality, he is unmoored in Australia (which although in the cultural west, is ironically east of China), hanging around with a group of fellow exiles from his home province and isolated from his son. Huang talks about how Zhang Jinsheng is never really able to make the conversion from small town mindset to global or international point of view and part of this is represented linguistically. Part of this small-town mentality, is Zhang’s (rather clumsy and over the top at times) hypermasculinity, whether it is his incel-like plot to blow up his friend and rival for the affections of Shen Tao, or the collection of guns he keeps in Australia. This association of small town mindset with traditional gender roles also applies to Dollar, who Shen Tao scolds for the effeminacy she perceives as Shanghai (metropolitan/cosmopolitan) affectations, which she contrasts with the 「爽快」 (lit. frank and straightforward; read masculinity) values of small towns. She angrily removes his cravat and tells him his use of the Chinese equivalent to “Mummy” (媽米) instead of “Ma/Mum” (媽) isn’t manly enough:
-Dollar, why aren’t you speaking to your mother? Call me ma! -Mummy -Mummy? Who taught you to say that? You should be more straightforward, and call me ma. -Ma -Are you a boy or a girl? Who put this thing on you?
The distance between mother and son is also emphasized through the latter’s use of Shanghainese on the phone to the woman we suppose is his step-mother and his inability to speak the local dialect. Huang states that Dollar’s ultimate unhappiness also subverts the conventional portrayals of the 「富二代」 (second-generation wealthy) in China:
Conventionally portrayed as the final victors in the social transition spurred by China’s rise and globalization, the second-generation of wealth in the film is portrayed as rootless. Dollar feels constricted and exasperated by post-socialist development.
Huang points to Tao as the embodiment of the small town culture that we see eroded throughout the course of the film, represented in the decline of Chinese New Year traditions (and Tao’s role in them at the start vs. when Liangzi returns from the other province):
In Mountains May Depart, Jia Zhang-ke uses the character of Shen Tao to embody nativist affection and values, to reflect the small hometown of his memory (or more accurately his imagination).
This evoked for me Shen Cong-wen’s portrayal of the border regions of China, chronicling an era on the brink of its own demise.
Some parts later in the film, particularly those parts filmed in Australia felt a little more melodramatic and corny compared to the rest of the film, but overall the film was well-paced and moving.
A woman travels to the east of Taiwan in the wake of her husband’s suicide in an attempt to discover the mystery behind a charitable donation he made before his death. Despite the charitable donation leading to somewhat of a dead end, she decides to stay on in the largely indigenous village. Her son, who suffers from autism, flourishes in this new environment, however her new romantic attachment, an indigenous man who helps her rebuild her house and teaches her son to hunt, may not be all he seems.
Screenshot of Unitas video (see link below)
Through most of the course of reading this book, I was expecting it to make a dramatic revelation, whether about autism, the dodgy dealings of the man she falls in love with in Taitung or the mystery behind her late husband’s charitable donation, but it never came. The book, as readable as it is, rejected my attempts to read it as a crime novel or psychological thriller. Nor does the author feel the need to resolve any of the questions thrown up by the narrative; instead of narrative resolution, the main character achieves a vague sort of spiritual resolution in the end, through the prism of her autistic son.
The book does pose some interesting questions itself, however, about autism, the experience of indigenous people and migrant workers in Taiwan and even about the healthiness of modern urban life.
I first became aware of this novel when the author asked me to translate an excerpt for a short video performance:
The short excerpt he provided, however, was quite different in feel from the novel in its entirety, as it was a brief venture into the mind of the protagonist’s autistic son.
These brief sojourns into an autistic mind (the author uses the term Asperger’s) didn’t capture an autistic voice for me with the convincing style of Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but rather endowed the child with some kind of spiritual mysticism, evoking for me the lasting controversy over the “idiot-savant” portrayal of autism in the film Rain Man.
We spend most of the time in the novel observing the child from the mother’s perspective. At first she resists the diagnosis and seeks out a “cure” or some way to access the “real child” hiding under the façade of the autistic child:
Whenever her son’s diagnosis with Asperger’s syndrome was confirmed, she and her husband were deeply shaken. First of all they thought of what mistakes they’d made, whether deliberate or accidental, that had resulted in this state of affairs. For example, some people say that when a child is first born and receives certain vaccinations, they can damage the infant’s brain cells, resulting in this regrettable situation after birth; Fu Yi-ping even started to fear vaccinations and on the suggestion of a doctor, she took up ‘biomedical therapy’. This consisted of the belief that after children are vaccinated they are unable to absorb the protein in wheat and milk products, and that sometimes this protein will seep through the wall of the intestine, and cause damage to the brain through the blood vessels.
This worrying anti-vax sentiment isn’t directly challenged throughout the novel, although her husband tries to get her to accept her child:
The message this film seemed to want to convey was of a tragic unrealized potential of love between two high school guys because the time (1988, just after the end of Martial Law in Taiwan) was not yet right for their love to flourish. The narrative that it seems like we’re supposed to read into the film is that, out of his love for Jia-Han, Birdy pretends not to love Jia-Han back and pursues a female classmate called Banban in order to try and give Jia-Han the opportunity to live a “normal life”.
If we examine the events that actually take place in the film, however, it’s clear Jia-Han crosses boundaries on several occasions, kissing Birdy when he’s asleep. Birdy, in appearance at least, is in love with a female classmate called Banban and is increasingly uncomfortable with Jia-Han’s jealousy and attempts to intervene in his love life.
This culminates in a scene in which, under the pretext of helping Birdy shower, Jia-Han forcibly masturbates him when he’s unable to defend himself due to his injury. The narrative it seems we’re supposed to read into this is that Birdy’s erection is a manifestation of the love he has for Jia-Han that he’s sacrificing for Jia-Han’s own good. This is not a reasonable deduction to make, although it may be a major theme of Japanese porn. Birdy did not consent and repeatedly tries to fend off Jia-Han’s advances. Even if this is some (rather convoluted) act of gallantry by which Birdy sacrifices his own feelings for Jia-Han so that Jia-Han can live as a model straight citizen in society (this is a major break in character for him given his constant impulses throughout the film to defend gay people, including a younger Chi Chia-wei), no means no. From Jia-Han’s perspective at this point in the movie, Birdy could very well be a straight man who is sympathetic to the disgusting way gay characters in the movie are being treated.
The film romanticizes an obsessive jealous idea of what love is, although to some extent the Canadian priest tries to deter Jia-Han from the pursuit of this unrequited love.
The ending of the film echoes this dynamic of teasing and violation of consent, with a middle-aged Jia-Han asking Birdy to come up to his hotel room, only to be refused, but then insisting on walking to Birdy’s hotel room instead, despite the rejection being quite clear.
In my imagination of the end of the film, Jia-Han walks with Birdy to his hotel, asks to come up and is politely rejected again, roll credits. This film left me uncomfortable and to some extent I think if Jia-Han had been cast as a less jaw-droppingly handsome actor, the creepiness would have been more noticeable.
It’s definitely worth a watch, but perhaps we can read it as the unreliable narration of a stalker, rather than a romantic film.
OK, so I couldn’t let a film go by without spotting an interesting bit of Taiwanese. One phrase which stuck with me was 「坩仔」 khaⁿ-á (lit. crucible) which is a contraction of 「坩仔仙」 khaⁿ-á-sian (fairy of the crucible) which is a derogatory term for a male homosexual. You can read a debate about what the term used actually is on ptt here.
It’s always fun to hear a piece of vocab you’ve learned previously in the wild.
When listening to the 「股癌」 (GooAye) podcast I heard the phrase 「佛系」 (Buddhist/noninterference approach) which is a variant of the 「佛系……法」 (Buddhist/noninterference approach to…) phrase I featured in a previous post here.
“Don’t try and explain rises and falls, but I’ve found that some people have taken what I said to the extreme, and they don’t try and look for reasons at all. It’s like they’re dedicated to noninterference and freedom.”
Here he is cautioning people not to try and try and explain short term rises and falls in stock prices, but then qualifying this by saying that they can look for longer term reasons for price rises and falls.
From listening over the last few months, I found out that the guy behind the podcast was hopeful that Trump would win the election, although his reasons are largely to do with financial policy. The podcast is definitely worth listening to for insights on Taiwanese society and the business world as well as analysis of trends in stocks and shares.
In the same week, the phrase also came up in the 台通 (Commute For Me) podcast in an interview with the spokesperson of the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (台灣基進) Chen Po-wei (陳柏惟), who led the recall petition movement against Han Kuo-yu (from 12:33 or -41:31):
Host: 那你有得到正面的回饋啊。 陳柏惟：對啊。所以那個不是自我說服唉，我覺得那個是有時間的過程。那個不是坐在家裡瞑想佛系態度。 Host: So you got positive feedback. Chen Po-wei: Yes. So I don’t think it was me convincing myself, I think it happened over time. It wasn’t like I was sitting at home meditating hoping that things would just fall in my lap.
This is also a reference to the 佛系 memes, which play on the Buddhist concept of noninterference that I featured in the previous post.
Chen also used the Taiwanese word 「𨑨迌／企投 」chhit-thô featured in a previous post as well at the 21:57 (-32:07) point. Although I only mentioned these two, there are lots of gems in this interview and it’s definitely worth a listen.
“A Sun” is a 2019 film from director Chung Mong-Hong (鍾孟宏), dealing with family relationships, crime and redemption.
The English title, I think is a play on the sounds Sun/Son, as the father in the film, a driving instructor, always says he has only one (a) son when asked by nosy older female students about his family, although the referent changes from one son to the other as the film progresses, first due to his disappointment at his younger son’s failure in school and criminal acts, then due to his elder son’s suicide. The Chinese title 「陽光普照」 (the sun shines over all things) is more a reflection on both sons growing up in the same environment, but having drastically different personal outcomes. The story has echoes of the parable of the two sons in the Bible, in terms of traditional filial expectations:
“But what think ye? A certain man had two sons. He came to the first, and said, ‘Son, go work today in my vineyard.’ He answered and said, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he repented, and went. He came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, ‘I go, sir!’ but went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father?”
“The first.”
Jesus said to them, “Verily I say unto you that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering into the Kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. When you saw it, you didn’t even repent afterward, that you might believe him.”
At first, it appears that A-he is the son who has turned from the path his father wants for him. He gets involved with a dodgy friend, Cai-tou, who goes too far in trying to intimidate someone and lands them both in prison by cutting off the guy’s hand. The family also find out that A-he impregnated his girlfriend not long before going into prison. His brother, on the other hand, has perfect grades and is the apple of his father’s eye. In the end, however, it is A-he who ends up working hard at two jobs, marrying and having a son, while the elder son takes his own life, seemingly due to a combination of being bad at talking to girls, rejection from his brother and the pressure his dad puts on him. Both sons are led to completely different outcomes by the same circumstances, and neither is happy.
Although the film has been described to me as highlighting the value of perseverance, this interpretation is thrown into question by the final twist. The only reason Caitou doesn’t succeed in destroying A-he’s attempt to rebuild his life and drawing him back into the criminal underworld, is that A-he’s father murders him. This seems an unlikely outcome in reality, and one might imagine many young offenders like A-he just getting pulled back into crime. The difficulty in finding redemption for people just released from jail is showcased by the series of interviews A-he goes to, just to be rejected when he tells them where he’s been for the last year and a half. Even A-he’s dad’s job is put into jeopardy by the appearance of Caitou’s dad at his workplace, desperate to find money to pay compensation to the victims. This was another interesting aspect of the film, in that the financial repercussions of criminal acts in Taiwan often fall on the families of the perpetrator.
Overall it is a very compelling film and well-shot. I think there could have been more resolution over the brother’s storyline, as I think the suicide was a little too easy and cliché in terms of Taiwanese drama. The appearance of the ghost of the brother bringing father and son together was also my least favourite part of the film, but led to one of my favourite scenes, when the son served the father in the Family Mart.
You have to respect a gay male podcast host for doing an entire episode on middle-aged and elderly lesbians! That’s exactly what the WetBoyRoom ( 「潤男的Room」) podcast host did this week, interviewing the contributors to a book about this subject called 《阿媽的女朋友》 (Grandma’s Girlfriends), lesbians from older generations in Taiwan.
If you’re not super familiar with the lesbian scene in Taiwan, many of them of about my generation (30s) tend to identify as either 「T」 (short for the English word “Tomboy”) or 「婆」 (lipstick lesbian). With time, the lines between these categories have blurred just as they have in the male gay community, and many people now consider these terms outdated and being a heteronormative way of perceiving gay relationships (i.e. trying to figure out who is “the man” and who is “the woman” in the relationship). It was interesting to hear in the podcast that this dichotomy was actually a more recent phenomenon in the lesbian community, but a Taiwanese term in the podcast really peaked my interest. At the 10:55 mark, one of the characters is described (in a Mandarin sentence) in Taiwanese as 「漂撇 ê 穿 褲 仔」phiau-phiat ê chhēng khò͘ á (瀟灑的穿褲子/ dashing trouser-wearer). Although I think the host actually said 「穿褲ê」, 「穿褲仔」 or girls who wore trousers, could be identified more easily as lesbians (if they were in fact lesbians) back in the day. So, it can be considered as an older version of the concept of 「T」.
Another handy Taiwanese term in the podcast (which you could likely insert in a Mandarin sentence to compliment a dinner-party host, or, more likely, to mock your friend’s paltry offering of a packet of Lays as an hors d’oeuvre) is 「腥臊」 chhe-chhau (also pronounced chheⁿ-chhau or chhiⁿ-chhau), which is equivalent to the term 「豐盛」 in Mandarin, meaning “rich and sumptuous”:
Recently I’ve been getting into a Netflix adaptation of 《花甲男孩》, a book written by Yang Fu-min (楊富閔). The author was in the younger year of my graduate institute while I was studying at NTU and I previously interviewed him (awkwardness all round) here. The series is called ‘A Boy Name Flora A’ in English (not quite sure how that got past the editors). I’ve just started, but so far it’s quite funny. As a lot of the humor in the show involves wordplay, however, I have to wonder how much of it comes across in English.
One example is in the first episode, where you can see the difficulty in trying to translate a dad joke:
液 is normally pronounced yì in Mandarin in Taiwan, although elsewhere you’ll find it listed as yè
-Oi, do you understand the Book of Changes? – I only know who the Book of Changes mother is – Who? – An LCD screen (homophone for “the mother of the Book of Changes” in Taiwanese)
So in, Taiwanese, “inbú” means 「他媽」 or 「他母」. The in is sometimes written using the following character (a combination of 亻 and 因):
Alternatively 怹 can be used.
The translation on the Netflix series, understandably maybe, gives up on trying to show where the humour is: – Hey, do you know what I-Ching is? – I only know its mother. – Who is it? – It’s I-Ching as in an LCD screen.
It brought me back to my days hanging around with a crowd from Pingtung where all the punchlines of the jokes were in Taiwanese – and just didn’t sound funny when they “explained the joke” in Mandarin after the fact.
I imagine those translating it also struggled to make a distinction between the “feel” of the Taiwanese and the Chinese in the English translation.
Anyway – lunch-break is almost over, so I’ll leave you with another bit of slang the show taught me today:
「蛇」(snake) here is short for 「魯蛇」 which is a transliteration of “loser”:
「我一生下來也沒有這麼蛇啊」 (I didn’t start out a loser.)
I’d never heard 蛇 used independently of the 「魯」 in this way before.
