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Taiwanese Resurgence

• Byline:PAT GAO
• Publication Date:08/01/2012

The Han Tang Yuefu Ensemble performs a scene from The King and Queen of the Shang Dynasty earlier this year. The ensemble is known for using classical Taiwanese dialogue to explore ancient Chinese subject matter. (Photo by Central News Agency)

A local language tradition is being revitalized through pop culture.

Culture and language are inextricably joined in every society, and Taiwan is no different. Mandarin is the official national language, but large segments of the population speak Hakka, Holo and indigenous languages. To celebrate Holo language and culture, the first World Min-Nan Culture Festival was held at several venues around Taiwan in April and May this year. Holo people in Taiwan are descended from emigrants who moved from mainland China’s southern Fujian province over a period spanning the 17th through the 19th centuries. In Mandarin, Fujian province is also referred to as Min, while nan is the word for south.

Among other events, the World Min-Nan Culture Festival featured academic forums and a film expo in Tainan City, southern Taiwan. The festival was organized by the Taipei-based General Association of Chinese Culture, which is chaired by former Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄).

While the government officially calls the language used by Holo people in Taiwan Minnanese, many local language proponents view it as more than just a Minnanese dialect and prefer to call it Taiwanese. The Roman alphabet has been used to write Taiwanese since the early 19th century, when Western missionaries began developing a system to record local people’s everyday speech. More recently, the Ministry of Education released the Taiwanese Phonetic Alphabet in 1998 and the Taiwanese Romanization Scheme in 2006. In practice, however, some individuals write Taiwanese with only Han characters, others use only romanized words and yet others use a mix of the two systems. Those that rely on a mix usually romanize words for which Han characters are less than ideal.

Many advocates and educators see the use of a mixed writing system as a significant tool for the preservation and continuation of the Taiwanese language. “Romanized script can be an effective complement to Han characters in the Taiwanese writing system,” says Lin Fang-mei (林芳玫), a professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University.

Yang Kuei-mei, a popular Mandarin and Taiwanese-language movie actress, performs at the opening ceremony in Taipei for the Celebration of 50 Years of Taiwanese-language Films in 2006. (Photo by Central News Agency)

Regardless of how the language is written, Lin believes that the decision to term it Minnanese or Taiwanese is significant and depends on whether the emphasis is on international or local culture. “If you call the language Minnanese, it can be seen as a cultural force that crosses national boundaries,” she says. “If you call it Taiwanese, then it represents local cultural development in its highest form. That’s because the nuanced expressiveness of Taiwanese makes it suitable for everything from grassroots to highly elitist cultural productions.” At the high end, Lin points to the language’s use in kua á hì, or Taiwanese opera, as well as in other performing arts that have ancient Chinese roots. On the other hand, Taiwanese is also frequently used in the more commercially oriented production of pop music and television shows. Lin says the language’s suitability for everything from highbrow art to mass-market fare has helped Taiwan develop a cultural complexity that stands out prominently among the world’s Minnanese-speaking societies.

Inseparable in Film

As language and culture are inseparable in film, a major part of the World Min-Nan Culture Festival was devoted to cinematic works from Taiwan and other Minnanese-speaking societies in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore. The festival’s film expo featured a mix of older and more recent movies and was organized by the College of Sound and Image Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts. According to the college’s dean Ray Jiing (井迎瑞), the event was held to show the market potential and cultural reach of Minnanese films, as the language is spoken by around 60 million people worldwide.

Jiing was formerly director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive (CTFA), a semi-official organization that now operates under the Ministry of Culture, which plans to turn the archive into a national film center. Experts and academics put the total number of Taiwanese-language films made to date at around 1,000, of which about 10 percent survive today. In the late 1980s, Jiing began heading a project devoted to restoring Taiwanese-language films made in the genre’s prime years during the late 1950s and 1960s. Toward the end of 2006, the CTFA’s restoration efforts resulted in the screening of 25 Taiwanese films in conjunction with the Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s top prizes for films from Mandarin-speaking societies.

A romanized Taiwanese-language Bible released in 2008 and entirely hand-written (Photo by Central News Agency)

The restoration of Taiwanese-language films is aimed at recovering a largely forgotten piece of Taiwan’s cultural heritage, Lin says. “The films represent the earliest major effort to make local feature-length movies in Taiwan,” she says. “They’re not only significant in terms of historical value, but also because of their great aesthetic appeal.” Lin points to the example of the horror movie The Bride from Hell (1965) by Xin Qi (辛奇, 1924–2010), a Taiwanese-language film director and Japanese-trained playwright. Xin was interviewed in the early 1990s as part of a CTFA project on Taiwanese-language filmmakers working in the late 1950s and 1960s and received the Golden Horse lifetime achievement award in 2000. The story of The Bride from Hell was adapted from Victoria Holt’s (1906–1993) novel Mistress of Mellyn (1960). Xin’s film version was made in the German expressionist style and evokes a subtle, mysterious ambience through techniques such as emphasizing the contrast of light and shadow, Lin notes.

The Bride from Hell is also a favorite for Ryan Cheng (鄭秉泓), a film critic and lecturer at three universities in central and southern Taiwan. “The movie is quite entertaining and thrilling and does a good job at making a Western text work in Taiwanese settings,” Cheng says. The academic praises the motion picture as “awesome” despite the fact that it shares some of the artistic and technical deficiencies seen in other movies of the time, most of which were filmed in black and white. Cheng says The Bride from Hell and several other similar works occupy a place on his list of favorite films because of their cultural and historical value. “It’s just like many Hong Kong people treasure their old Cantonese-language, black-and-white movies,” he says.

Lin points out that making Taiwanese-language films in the late 1950s and 1960s was difficult because of the government’s focus on promoting Mandarin. The then state-backed Central Motion Picture Corp. (CMPC), for example, focused only on producing Mandarin movies, while the Golden Horse Awards were founded in 1962 specifically to honor and encourage the making of Mandarin films. “Taiwanese-speaking films weren’t prohibited by the government at that time, but they also weren’t encouraged,” Lin says.

A Kaohsiung City education official monitors a Taiwanese-language class at a local elementary school. (Photo by Central News Agency)

The government’s growing emphasis on Mandarin during the 1960s and 1970s can be clearly seen in the era’s popular patriotic, romantic and martial arts movies. Some in the cinema industry were able to make a smooth transition from Taiwanese-language to Mandarin movies. “Taiwanese-speaking films gave way to the Mandarin films in the 1970s, but many experienced technicians, directors and actors who’d made movies in Taiwanese crossed over to work in the Mandarin film and television industry,” Lin says. Director Lee Hsing (李行), for example, made the hit 1959 Taiwanese-language film Brother Wang and Brother Liu Tour Taiwan—one of the restored movies screened at the recent Tainan exposition—before going on to become a heavyweight in Mandarin films. In 1964, Lee co-directed Oyster Girl and directed Beautiful Duckling, both of which used Mandarin dialogue, were filmed in color and became quite popular.

Hints of a renewed emphasis on Taiwan’s native roots began surfacing in the late 1970s in written works about local life and ordinary people, Cheng says. That grassroots trend extended beyond the literary domain when the New Wave Cinema movement began in the early 1980s. Many of the movement’s films were based on the locally oriented novels of the 1970s and some featured a mix of Taiwanese and Mandarin dialogue.

Language Realism

Oyster Girl and Beautiful Duckling were part of a drive by the CMPC to produce “healthy, realistic” Mandarin-language films, most of which centered on the themes of civic virtue and morality. Such films departed from reality, however, when they portrayed ordinary residents of rural communities speaking fluent standard Mandarin, which was relatively uncommon. Lin points out that true “language realism” did not take shape until the 1980s, when the Golden Horse Awards started recognizing films with dialogues that mixed Mandarin with local languages. That move has encouraged the making of movies that reflect the everyday environment shared by many people in Taiwan.

Taiwanese opera troupe Ming Hwa Yuan performs Madame White Snake, a classic story from Chinese mythology, in 2004. (Photo by Central News Agency)

While the renewed popularity of films with Taiwanese dialogue in the late 2000s echoes the heyday of such films in the late 1950s and 1960s, the recent works are also clearly products of today. “The dialogue in the old Taiwanese-speaking films was in a more formal or affected style, whereas the latest works speak colloquial, lively Taiwanese and present a much wider perspective on social reality,” Lin says, referring to hits like Cape No.7 (2008), Monga (2010), Seven Days in Heaven (2010), Night Market Hero (2011) and Din Tao: Leader of the Parade (2012). “For example, people in the old Taiwanese-speaking movies seldom cursed, yet the recent films do that a lot,” she says.

Cheng believes the popularity of Taiwanese is spreading in the entertainment industry. “You can see it … in those performers who didn’t grow up speaking the language, but now learn to sing some Taiwanese songs to show they’re on top of the latest trends,” he says.

Although speaking Taiwanese is back in style, Mandarin still plays the dominant role in Taiwan, both in the film industry and in society as a whole. As Lin puts it, that makes Taiwanese the “most major of the minorities,” including other once-suppressed local languages such as Hakka and aboriginal tongues. To give Taiwanese its due, Lin calls for greater institutional support for the language and the culture behind it. One way of doing that, she says, would be establishing a Cabinet-level unit charged with overseeing Holo affairs that would parallel the existing Hakka Affairs Council or the Council of Indigenous Peoples. As director Xin Qi said during his interviews with the CTFA, “Taiwanese can express very deep meanings with simple wording. We need to use every means possible to hold on to this unique language and culture.”

A scene from the 2010 hit film Seven Days in Heaven, which features extensive dialogue in lively, colloquial Taiwanese (Photo Courtesy of Magnifique Creative Media Production Co.)

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw