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.
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:
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”:
He hadn’t joined the ballroom society out of interest, but had heard the other guys in his dormitory making a fuss over the teacher’s sexy body, her short skirt and high heels and the way her hips swayed like a snake. It didn’t matter if you could dance, the teacher would let you put your arms around her waist, and show you the steps one-on-one. The guys at university clearly had nothing better to do, as the next day the society’s classroom was heavy with testosterone, twenty or thirty pairs of eyes all fixed on the teacher’s lithe swaying curves.
There wasn’t the one-on-one instruction that had been promised, and the teacher had a male teaching assistant–a master’s student–who was specifically tasked with dealing with these idle young men. As there weren’t enough girls, the teacher paired boys with other boys, so after the first few classes, the guys had all scarpered, along with their ulterior motives.
Each society had to prepare a performance for the school’s anniversary celebration, but the ballroom society was having trouble finding a boy for theirs, which put the whole performance in jeopardy. For some reason, he was the only boy to have answered the phone call from the ballroom teacher. The teacher asked him personally to rejoin the team for the anniversary performance. Helpless to resist the teacher’s telephone charm offensive, A-lung put on a brave face and agreed to go back to dance practice.
First, the teacher ran through the choreography and paired up the dancers, then she delegated supervision of practices to her TA. Given A-lung’s good posture, the teacher had paired him with one of the veteran dancers of the troupe so she could help him out as a novice, to bring the performance up a notch.
However, A-lung’s partner was angry at not being given a central role in the performance. It was one thing to lose out to one of the other girls in the dance society, but to have to go on stage with a rookie like him… She hadn’t cracked even a sliver of a smile since they’d started practicing together. If A-lung made an error more than once or twice, she shot him an icy look, as if he had two left feet.
I call your name amid the crashing waves, but it’s already a thousand leagues away
Ebbing and flowing The left footprint is only afternoon The right footprint is already dusk June was originally a book of sorrow With such a poignant ending ──The setting of the sun
I’m still staring At the pure white cast in your gaze (Extract)
Luo Fu (洛夫) was one of the pen-names of Taiwanese poet Mo Luo-Fu 莫洛夫 (originally Mo Yun-duan 莫運端). He was born in 1928 in Hengyang in Hunan (then part of the Republic of China). He changed his name due to the influence of Russian literature. He joined the Navy and moved to Taiwan in 1949. He graduated from the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in 1953 and was assigned to the Republic of China Marine Corps base in Zuoying. He founded the Epoch Poetry Society along with Chang Mo and Ya Xian in 1953. He was later stationed to Kinmen where he met his wife. Towards the end of the Vietnam war he was appointed to the Republic of China Military Advisory Group, Vietnam, as an English secretary. After his return to Taiwan, he graduated in English from Tamkang University in 1973 and retired from the army in the same year. After retiring from the army he started teaching at the foreign languages department of Soochow University, before moving to Canada in 1996 but moved back in 2016 when he was diagnosed with cancer and he died in Taiwan in 2018 after receiving an honorary doctorate from National Chung Hsing University in 2017. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 for his 3000-line poem ‘Driftwood’ (〈漂木〉).
I want so badly to leave The congestion of the city That at night I expend great effort growing wings But out of fear of being taken for a demon on every morrow I bear the pain of tearing them off
Chen Chuan-hung (陳雋弘) was born in 1979 and graduated with a master’s from the Chinese program at National Kaohsiung Normal University. He currently teaches at Kaohsiung Municipal Girls’ Senior High School. He previously won first prize in the free verse poetry category of the China Times Literary Prize and the literary and artistic creation award of the Ministry of Education in the free verse category, as well as several other literary prizes. His work has been published in newspapers and magazines as well as poetry collections. He has published two volumes of poetry on a limited printing, “Facing Up” (面對) and “Awaiting Confiscation” (等待沒收).
Although I still have my opinions When it comes to the world Under a tree in the yard I watch Flowers bloom and wither and plants grow I’m often so at ease I forget to voice them
This long journey undertaken with such haste Allows no time to really understand the world The end could come at any time If there’s anything upon which I still insist It’s that I’m sure Even though I’m old now, the world is still young
Wu Sheng (吳晟) is the pen-name of Wu Sheng-hsiung (吳勝雄), a poet originally from Hsichou (溪州) in Changhua County in Taiwan. He serves as a senior advisor to the Presidential Office. After graduating from the Department of Livestock of the Taiwan Provincial Institute of Agriculture (now National Pingtung University of Science and Technology) in 1971, he taught biology at a junior high school in his hometown. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature from National Dong Hwa University in June of 2020. The majority of his work has been modern poetry, although he also writes essays. He also has an orchard in Hsichou named after his mother (純園) which is home to 3000 native trees; he lectures part-time at Providence University.
