A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) is an autobio-graphical film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, in which thedirector, who was born in China in 1947 but grew upin Taiwan, recalls his youth and adolescence. Themovie is part of a ‘biographical trilogy’, throughwhich the director reconstructs the memories of hisgeneration. Hou had acquired a solid technical back-ground in the early part of the 1980s, when hedirected three successful musical comedies.The turn-ing point was The Sandwich Man (1983), a portman-teau feature film that marks the birth of the NewTaiwan Cinema movement and for which he directedone part. Then came Boys from Fenggui (1983), apartly autobiographical film, in which Hou, still hov-ering between commercial film-making and personalexpression, started investigating the themes thatremained the focus of his later work – growing up,the generation gap, sexuality,Taiwan’s economical andpolitical problems, and the rural–urban dichotomy.He also started investigating a new language toexpress these themes, by experimenting with non-professional actors, long takes, still camera shots andelliptic editing. Boys from Fenggui is still experimen-tal, but the biographical trilogy demonstrates matu-rity. The first chapter is Summer at Grandpa’s (1984),based on the memories of the writer Zhu Tianwen.The second is A Time to Live, A Time to Die, which isautobiographical (the screenplay was co-written byZhu Tianwen, as all other Hou movies have been).The third is entitled Dust in the Wind (1986), and isbased on the experiences of Wu Nianzhen, thefamous Taiwanese screenwriter, actor and director.1

The very first film of the Taiwan New Cinema, InOur Time (Edward Yang, Ke Yizheng, Zhang Yi andTao Dechen, 1982), also deals with memory, as thedirectors were asked to work on an episode takenfrom their youth. The New Cinema opposed artisticmovies to commercial comedies, realism to studio-made films, non-professional actors to the star-

system, and reflection on society and human lives topure escapism. The directors, and in particular Hou,started describing their own experiences, trying to putreality back on the screen by dealing with the famil-iar landscapes of memory. Hou, with his Taiwan tril-ogy of A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster(1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995), YangDechang, Wu Nianzhen and the other Taiwan NewCinema directors undertook a very precise processmoving first to deal with autobiography, and thenwith history tout-court. Because of the socio-politicalcommitment of Chinese artists, the investigation ofthe past cannot stop at personal feelings and nostal-gia; it also has to deal with the nation itself, societyand cultural identity.2 A Time is consistent with theChinese tradition of placing the personal story withinthe greater context of history, and Hou’s cinematicstyle is consistent with the Confucian vision of acommitted artist. As I shall note later, it should beemphasised that some stylistic procedures alsoexpress the director’s deepest feelings, even if in animplicit and poetic manner.

Biography, and particularly autobiography, is tra-ditionally a literary genre that links back to history asits original source. As Nienhauser reminds us, ‘Theprincipal aim of autobiography was to celebrate one’sname and make known one’s parents.’3 The firstautobiography in China is usually identified as theLisao, a famous poetic composition by Qu Yuan,which starts with a description of the poet’s geneal-ogy.4 The autobiographical notes by Sima Qian inthe conclusion of his historical opus magnum, theShiji, are also noteworthy.5 Here the presentation ofthe author’s life is justified and takes on significanceowing to and through the text itself.The intertextualreferences form a network from the past to the pres-ent, inscribing the writer in a rich and noble traditionthat gives order to the world. The identity of theindividual man is to be found and understood in this

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semantic context, thanks to his being part of a largerscheme. The historian finds his place in society andthe meaning of his life by defining himself as the onewho hands down and keeps the memories of pastevents alive. He finds a way to be remembered byremembering.6

Autobiography (zizhuan) is far from the modernWestern tradition of autobiography, characterised byromanticism and psychology.7 It is more a matter offinding a place in society (and nature) that can pro-vide a sense of harmony in existence. It is also a wayto pay respect to the memory of parents and family,which is, together with society, the greater context ofhuman existence.

In accordance with Chinese cultural tradition,Hou speaks of himself in an indirect manner. (It issignificant that nothing in the film suggests the factthat Hou will become an artist.8) He evokes the mostpersonal memories and re-creates images of his youthon screen. These were the strongest images that hadmarked his imagination and have gone on to becomeobsessions in later years. However, this procedure iscarried out through a de-personalisation of the nar-ration, putting his intimate feelings at a distance andchoosing a detached perspective, as if he were merelya spectator of his own story and not the protagonist.The real protagonists are his family and his country.The scholar Ni Zhen writes:

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s systematic and highly stylized cine-matic prose expresses very incisively and vividly theethical spirit of Confucian culture and the emotionalattachment to the native land typical of the Orient.Thefamily is a cohesive, highly symbolic unit of Confucianculture, the fundamental space within which to view andexamine the psychological world of the Chinese.9

The movie also features some cultural traits thatemerge indirectly: Hou seems to revitalise the biji tra-dition. The biji is a literary genre dating back to theSong Dynasty. It is a diary form in prose, a miscellanymade up of annotations, which are often very refinedand poetic.10 The most remarkable example is ShenFu’s eighteenth-century Fusheng liuji (Six Chaptersfrom a Floating Life). ‘This work, now consisting offour chapters … amounts to a systematically arrangedautobiographical review of the author’s life; withinthe Chinese tradition it is unusual for its detail andcandor.’11 It is difficult to classify the Six Chapters

among the literary genres. It anticipates some featuresof the modern novel (xiaoshuo), because it contains anatypical expression of the self as well as a self-con-scious pleasure in pure writing that is neither sociallynor politically engaged. The latter is a characteristicthat Lu Xun ascribes to the novel.12 However, we donot find classical narration with a beginning and anend, but a juxtaposition of impressions and strongimages, characters and landscapes. Therefore, the bijiis a mix of a very traditional sensitivity, as well as aninnovative and modern way of dealing with memo-ries. It refuses exposition according to the logic ofcause and effect, preferring an impressionisticapproach and refusing to write a Bildungsroman inwhich the characters are exemplars. We will not findcatharsis, redemption or a climax, but the placidrhythm of life floating along. Another importantcharacteristic of the autobiographical biji narrative isthat it has an episodic structure, and does not followchronological criteria. Hou’s films do follow achronological line, but like the biji form they accu-mulate their details according to atmospheric affini-ties and the similarity of various visual impressions.So, like this typical Chinese form and unlike theWestern tradition of autobiography, Hou’s films arerepetitive and apparently not demonstrative, and pro-ceed by accumulation and not by synthesis. Certainscenes repeat like a hypnotic rhythm through thefilm: the women of the family talking while they siton the wooden floor in a medium-long shot; theeldest son working at the father’s desk in a mediumshot with the camera placed outside the room; thegrandmother sleeping on the floor in a medium shot,and so on. Hou uses autobiography as a means toexpress personal feelings and to develop a uniquestyle of his own in an episodic manner that recalls thebiji tradition, as well as to describe and hand downthe experiences of his family and country in thexiaoshuo tradition.13

As for his visual approach, it is interesting thatHou does not admit any direct inspiration, but citesonly the ‘panoramic vision’ of Shen Congwen(1902–1988).14 The writer’s influence on Hou couldonly be indirect. Shen’s autobiography15 starts with awide perspective on the writer’s hometown, thehouses and the people, and only later is his characterintroduced. This is exactly what happens in Hou’smovies, which also follow this descriptive techniqueof proceeding by successive reduction. This is how

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Hou introduces himself into the narrative of A Time.After the description of the house in Hou’s ownvoice-over over a few still shots, the grandmothergoes to the village looking for her grandson. There isa wide pan shot of the little town, then a cut to amedium shot that focuses slowly in on a group ofchildren playing. Hou must be among them, butwhich one is he? This is a very elegant and discreetway of introducing himself into the story.The begin-ning of the film already introduces the poetics of thecontemplative slow rhythm, the aesthetics of the longtake and the composition of long shots includingblank spaces.16 Unlike other writers of the period,Shen Congwen had only been negligibly influencedby Western literature (as Hou is not ostensibly influ-enced by Western cinema). Their approaches to cre-ation are very instinctive and unmediated. Both arestrongly attached to the soil of their motherland andcelebrate it in their works, and both rejected formalschooling to learn from real life. Their attitude issomehow similar, and quite atypical in the Chinesecontext. Furthermore, as in Shen Fu’s memories, HouHsiao-hsien and Shen Congwen’s works both displayan alternation between an intimate description of theauthor’s inner feelings that is doubly striking giventheir position as distant observers and a detacheddescription of their backgrounds, often made up of anenumeration of family names, place names and visualdetails, transferred in Hou’s case into cinematic lan-guage by the use of the long-take description of vil-lage life and geometric compositions that inscribe thecharacters in their family and social context.

Made up of very long takes, elliptical narrative, anaesthetics of stasis and elaborate geometric composi-tions, Hou’s mature aesthetic reached complete har-mony in A Time. This aesthetic claims the status ofart for film-making, and imposes a distinctive autho-rial gaze and the patient habit of careful observation.The long shot is used with a full understanding of itspossibilities: every frame is divided into multipleframes made up of windows, doors and mirrors. Theframe is balanced and in perfect stillness, the move-ments of the characters providing an internal rhythm.Once again, this is a stylistic strategy, but it also cor-responds to the way things were perceived at thattime, when all doors and windows were always open,when people were used to talking for hours sitting onthe doorsteps of their houses, before skyscrapers, tiles,pollution and the urbanisation of Taiwan. Thanks to

these techniques, the spectator feels as if he were anintimate witness, just like little Hou.17

Hou works on reality, flirting with documentaryfilm – almost all his actors are non-professionals. Hetries to revive old pictures of his family, re-creatingthe exact conditions of the past for new people. Onesequence shows his sister’s class, all in a line in amedium shot, and a photographer taking a picture.The students are still but moving; they comb theirhair and arrange their clothes. The image cuts to anold black-and-white picture of a class. With this edit-ing, like a poetic juxtaposition placing the real pictureagainst the fictional shot, Hou signals one sense ofthe movie; it is a new form of archaeology, an attemptto re-create the past by restoring movement back to astill image and bringing the subjects back to life.

This attitude also confirms a deep interest inmemory and historical reconstruction. ‘It can beargued that this desire to (re)construct a family orregional history is in itself the result of an obsessionwith history, which is certainly a dominant Chinesecultural trait’, argues Leo Ou-fan Lee.18 Memory isfragmented, and Hou, free from any demonstrativeproject or a romantic representation of the self, cre-ates particles that can be inscribed in history.

One of the indirect ways to introduce history innarration is to use the eyes of witnesses as a filter,especially the bewilderment in the eyes of children.Another formal strategy (frequent in A City of Sad-ness) is to utilise news from the radio to let the histor-ical context filter into the private lives of the family.Hou’s family, following his father, moved to Taiwanonly two years before the separation from the main-land. As suggested in the film, Hou feels the island ishis homeland because he lived there all his life; buthis parents cannot help feeling they are exiles. Theycannot find their place in the new country where theywere supposed to live only a few months, but wherethey find themselves obliged to stay for ever. Thestrongest symbol of this situation is undoubtedly thecharacter of the grandmother. The old lady disap-pears from time to time and is found walking lost inthe neighbourhood. She is looking for a mythicalbridge that can take her back home, because shecannot stand to be far from the graves of her ances-tors. With this significant character, Hou creates botha touching figure of a ‘time to die’ and the unstop-pable decay of body and mind, as well as a metaphorof exile. Bai Xianyong argues in some of his best

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short stories that the Chinese in general are parrici-dal because they ‘killed’ the legacy of Confucius in thefirst decades of the century, denying the importanceof tradition while worshipping the idea of animported modernity.19 If this is true, the Chinese-Taiwanese must be even guiltier, having severed theties with their motherland. Another importantsymbol of the father’s generation’s sense of exile isprovided by the father’s chair – the same metaphor asused in Boys from Fenggui. It is made, as is the rest ofthe furniture, of bamboo. As the sister discovers byreading her father’s journal after his death, this wasnot an aesthetic choice but a practical need. Bamboois cheap, flexible and light.The father did not want tosettle down in Taiwan and was always ready to returnto the continent as soon as the KMT Nationalistarmy took it back. The Hou family’s bamboo furni-ture becomes both a sign of the premature death ofthe father and subsequent economic difficulties and ametonymy of Taiwan, an empire born from exile,from retreat, loss and emptiness. There are otherelliptical strategies indicating the tense situation ofthe times. For example, one morning after a sleepless

night for Hou’s father, the people of the village findhuge tank tracks in the mud outside their poorhouses. War is thundering just outside the door, withits fearful rumble. Tension is created, and a sensationof malaise and threat filters into the film in a verysubtle way. This visual procedure also corresponds toHou’s real experience, as he was just a child in theearly 1950s and only became aware of the situationand drama of his relatives by small clues and briefintuitions in exactly this manner.The spectator neversees the threat waiting off screen, only its shadowdrawing over the serenity of daily life. Last but notleast, this is also an expressive example of how a low-budget movie can resolve problems without sacrific-ing strong meaning and deep impact.

It is significant that after the most dramaticsequences, which imply time to be linear, there is ashot focused on clusters of trees and the sky, suggest-ing a circular idea of time. Historical or privatetragedies are to be reconstructed and re-created infront of the camera, but the sky is always the same,the same blue now as when Hou was a child. Theepisode thus preserves its significance, engraved for

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ever in memory, but is also seen as inscribed in theserene circularity of nature.

Could this mean that there is no lesson for theyoung Hou to learn? Perhaps it is useful to return tothe idea of the biji form and the English title of thefilm.20 The structure of the film, though apparentlyvery simple and linear, is punctuated by key imagesthat create an echo, linked together by the artist’s ret-rospective eye. It is possible to classify life experiencesaccording to various inventories. As Shen Fu cata-logues his experiences under titles like Of SmallDelights in Idleness and so on, Hou lists the peacefulmoments and the pleasures, and the violence and themourning, under the categories of ‘a time to live’ and‘a time to die’, respectively. The time to live includesthe nostalgic description of his youth, childhoodgames, first loves, lost sensations of summer smells,long talks around a table and the anticipation typicalof every adolescence, as well as the feeling of loss(conveyed by the long, still takes). In these moments,the movie seems free, spontaneous and almostrandom.

The time to die is the hidden structure of themovie, the trace of signification. Even if these tragicevents seem to flow with the natural movements ofthe seasons, they are actually symbols of crucialmoments in Hou’s life.They are different stages, eachof them bringing a different awareness.

The first death is the father’s. In Hou’s process ofgrowing up, this signifies lack, an awakening andawareness of emptiness, and rupture. (It is possible touse the same terms for the Taiwan nation, as well.)The father’s death occurs during a blackout; his pass-ing away is not shown, but the screen remains blackfor several seconds. After a few scenes, there isanother powerful ellipsis, the most significant tempo-ral ellipsis of the film. After long scenes of mourning,there is a medium shot of young Hou going to thebathroom. Hearing a cry, he turns his head. There isa close-up of the young Hou, his eyes wide open withfear. The next cut to a medium shot shows that it ishis mother who cried out. Then there is anotherclose-up on Hou, who is now a teenager. Somethinglike ten years have passed.This is an efficient and sur-prising stylistic choice, made even more notablebecause close-ups are so rare in the film. This cutoccurs after one hour, almost midway through themovie. Significantly, Hou decides to avoid represen-tation of the mourning period and the difficult years

without his father, so that these dramatic and painfulevents remain off screen. They are not seen, but theirpresence casts a shadow on the rest of the movie,implicit, but strong nonetheless. The boy’s existenceis built on emptiness, on a sense of loss. In this way, itis exactly like the film, for Hou’s voice-over at thebeginning of the film states, ‘this film is about myfather’. However, the father passes away very soon, somore precisely, it is a film about the absence of thefather. This absence had profound consequences forHou, the most direct being loss of respect for author-ity and lack of respect and projects for the future,which his gang of friends shares and expresses inpointless violence and rebellion against authority.21

Childhood ends, in Hou’s experience, with deathand pain; ellipsis itself is a loss, things missing. Fur-thermore, the cut is on a pair of eyes: the first expressthe terror of a child who sees his family broken; thesecond just give the lazy glance of an annoyedteenager. But can the audience not see in that gazethe shadow of a past tragedy? It is an invisible reflex,a faded trace, but by approaching the two dimensionsof his character in this manner, Hou suggests a darkcontinuity. This continuity is the impotence thatexists when faced with loss. Hou manages to describethe more imperceptible consequences of drama (andof history), like the trace of infinite sadness in theeyes of his characters, and he entrusts the unspoken,the suggestion and minimal description of smalldetails to mirror ineffable feelings.

The death of the mother is also treated with aparticular stylistic strategy that creates the invisiblearchitecture of the film. It underlines the peculiarstructure of echoes and repetitions, and establishesa connection between sexuality (the son’s pubertyand first sexual experience) and death (the mother’sillness).

I do not think this reveals a vision of sexuality assin or implies an oedipal relationship, but rather itunderscores the cycle of the seasons, and of life anddeath. Perhaps, by dealing with such delicate and dif-ficult themes together, there is also an attempt toaccept them as complementary and inscribe them inthe natural flow of events. Besides that, the sequenceof the mother’s agony is similar to that of the father’s.This gives a sense of the creeping circularity of time,like nature always repeating its own fearful symme-try.These must have been terribly strong images thatthe young Hou could not elaborate until the making

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of the film, and they remain identical and obsessive.They filter experiences, while also lending poeticunity to the film as leitmotifs. In this sense, I believethat behind the veil of the interest in history andsociety, it is possible to glimpse traces of deep reflec-tion, and the author’s feelings and obsessions. Hougives flesh and blood to the ghosts imprinted on hisretina, crucial points where everything dropped awayand then all resumed. The long takes and the otherformal features discussed above allow these images topenetrate into the eyes of the spectator as they pene-trated Hou’s eyes, like ink absorbed by paper.

The last strong image is the death of the grand-mother, an image that gives Hou the possibility tostate indirectly what he will be. She dies in her sleep.The nephews find her when some ants are alreadywalking over her body. First we see a close-up of theyoung Hou writing, then a long shot of the housefrom outside as the voice-over starts again, followedby a medium shot of the grandmother lying on thefloor (possibly sleeping, as usual). Then there is aclose-up of her hands, with ants running over her fin-gers, a medium shot of the woman, in which it is evi-dent that her face is white, and then a long-take longshot as the nephews arrive. This end is lyrical (thequiet silence of the image, the sweet death of thewoman) and prosaic (the voice-over speaks withapparent detachment), violent (the clotted blood, theneighbourhood reproaching the three nephewsbecause they did not discover the body earlier) andtender (the three hovering close to each other). Thefilm ends with Hou’s voice-over as we see a mediumshot of the nephews looking at their grandmother’sbody. He says, ‘I remember’, and it is as if he weretaking over his mother’s role, for she was alwaysremembering family histories and refused to let thedoctor operate on her because she would not havebeen able to speak, and that is what she needed to do.Now she is dead, and the role of the person whospeaks and remembers and tells the stories must befilled again.

Tied with love and modesty to his recollectionsand to his lost adolescence, Hou, who comes togetheras both character and director only at the end of thefilm, is a sweet murmur of memory. He is the onewho is not going to forget, who is going from one vil-lage to another to remember his people, the way itwas in the lost time of their youth.This voice cries ona chaotic island, in a city of sadness, in a country

rocked by the post-economic boom and by forcedWesternisation, and from an alien country repudiatedby his own native land, seeking success and moderni-sation with dangerous enthusiasm. Hou murmursabout time lost and time found, using cinema not asan amazing machine but as art; a potential madeleineboth personal and social. The hiatus between a timeto live and a time to die must be filled (or, it is full tothe brim) with other times, especially a time forreflection and a time for memory, and this movie rep-resents them softly, with a gaze full of affection. Hou,the character, facing his dead grandmother, does notthink, but remembers. In this way, he grows.22

NOTES1. See Bérénice Reynaud, ‘Taiwanese Cinema: From the

Occupation to Today’ (‘Cinema di Taiwan:Dall’occupazione giapponese a oggi’), in The History ofWorld Cinema (Storia del Cinema Mondiale), vol. 4, ed.Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 857–877;Peggy Chiao ( Jiao Xiongping), New Taiwan Cinema(Taiwan Xin Dianying) (Taipei: Shibao wenhuachuban qiye youxian gongsi, 1988); Marco Müller, ed.,Taiwan: New Electric Shadows (Taiwan: nuove ombreelettriche) (Venice: Marsilio, 1985); Yingjin Zhang andZhiwei Xiao, Encyclopaedia of Chinese Film (New York:Routledge, 1998).

2. See Robert Hegel, ed., Expression of Self in ChineseLiterature (New York: Columbia University Press,1985); Wendy Larson, ed., Literary Authority and theModern Chinese Writer; Ambivalence and Autobiography(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

3. William H. Nienhauser cites the Confucian scholarLiu Chih-chi in The Indiana Companion to TraditionalChinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1986), 842.

4. ‘Descendant of the ancestor Kao-Yang,/Po-yung wasmy honoured father’s name./When the constellationShe-t’i pointed the first month,/on the day keng-yin Iwas born.’ In Burton Watson, trans. and ed., TheColumbia Book of Chinese Poetry (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1984), 54.

5. The Grand Historian [the author’s father] graspedmy hand and said, weeping, ‘Our ancestors wereGrand Historians for the house of Zhou … willthis tradition end with me? If you in turn becomeGrand Historian, you must continue the work ofour ancestors. … Now, filial piety begins with theserving of our parents; next, you must serve your

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sovereign; and, finally, you must make something ofyourself, that your name may go down through theages to the glory of your father and mother.

In Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Sources ofChinese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1999), 370.

6. See Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience ofthe Past in Classical Chinese Literature (London:Harvard University Press, 1986), 136–137.

7. C.T. Hsia, The Classical Chinese Novel (New York:Columbia University Press, 1968), 312.

8. Hou says: ‘I have always been searching for aparticular Chinese style and method of expressingfeeling.The Chinese people have always gone about atortuous and roundabout route in expressingemotions.’ Peggy Chiao, ‘History’s Subtle Shadows’,Cinemaya, no. 21 (1993): 8.

9. Ni Zhen, ‘Classical Chinese Painting andCinematographic Signification’, in CinematicLandscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinemaof China and Japan, ed. Linda C. Ehrlich and DavidDesser (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 75.

10. Wilt Idema and Lloyd Haft, A Guide to ChineseLiterature (Ann Arbor, MI: Centre for ChineseStudies, University of Michigan, 1997), 58–59,161–162.

11. Ibid., 188.12. Lu Xun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Beijing:

Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 80–81.13. Lu Xun cites the Han Dynasty History: ‘Xiaoshuo were

the talk on the streets … All the talk of the streets andhighways was recorded.’ And then, citing the scholarChi Yun: ‘… the xiaoshuo writers were successors ofthe Zhou dynasty officers who collected information… the task of these officers was to help the ruler tounderstand country ways and morals.’ Lu, A BriefHistory, 4, 6.The word xiaoshuo is now used toindicate the novel.

14. In Michel Frodon, ed., Hou Hsiao Hsien (Paris:Cahiers du Cinéma, 1999), 73.

15. Shen Congwen, Recollection of West Hunan, trans.Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1982).

16. For discussions on the ‘Chineseness’ of this style, see(among others) Lin Niantong, ‘A Study of the

Theories of Chinese Cinema in Their Relationship toClassical Aesthetics’, Modern Chinese Literature, 1, no.2 (1985): 185–198; Yeh Yueh-yu, ‘Politics and Poeticsof Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films’, Postscript, 20, no. 2/3(2001): 61–76. Note also that there are at least twoversions of the film in circulation, one of which doesnot begin with the voice-over.

17. In Stanley Kwan’s 1996 documentary, Yang + Yin:Gender in Chinese Cinema, Hou says he feels a strongsense of nostalgia for a time when life was lived in acommunity. Now, he complains, everyone is hiddenbehind thick walls of concrete.This sensation istransmitted in his movies.

18. Leo Ou-fan Lee, ‘Afterword: Reflections on Changeand Continuity in Modern Chinese Fiction’, in FromMay Fourth to June Fourth, ed. Ellen Widmer andDavid Der-Wei Wang (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1993), 378.The author refers to LaoShi, Ba Jin, Shen Congwen, Mo Yan and others.

19. See Bai Xianyong, ‘Winter Nights’, Chinese Storiesfrom Taiwan: 1960–1970, ed. Joseph Lau (New York:Columbia University Press, 1976), 337–354.

20. I am aware that the original title conveys a differentmeaning (Tongnian wangshi means ‘the past things ofyouth’). Still, as in every Taiwanese production, theoriginal title is accompanied by an English title,directly chosen by the director himself.

21. It is possible to make a comparison with the gangs inTsai Ming-liang’s films, especially Rebels of the NeonGod (1992).These latter are much more nihilistic anddesperate; they live in a modern city. If the young LeeKang-sheng in The River (1997) is a kind of Oedipus,the strangers in A Time are like his daughter,Antigone, forced into exile. As Lee does not blindhimself, but sees everything and goes on living,indifferent, here the Medeas, with the naturalindifference of time and the seasons, simply get usedto the new place. If still some contrasts exist with thegeneration of Hou’s parents, his generation is like ariver that creates its new bed, with time and patience,and without tragedy.

22. In Yang + Yin, Hou says that he wants to teach hischildren two values: respect for themselves and theability to adapt.

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