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fengchen, 1986, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien) depicts just such a personal narrative.
As A Time to Live, A Time to Die was based on Hou’s own coming-of-age story,
A Summer at Grandpa’s details screenwriter Chu Tien-wen’s childhood story;
similarly, Dust in the Wind draws from the lm’s screenplay writer Wu Nien-
chen’s own experience. It tells the tale of a young boy (Wan) and his childhood
sweetheart (Huen) who leave the small mining village they grew up in and head
to urban Taipei in search for work to support their families. As his last lm
made under the Koumingtang controlled Central Motion Picture Corporation
(CMPC), Dust in the Wind marks the shift from his earlier autobiographical
“coming-of-age” lms to his later “Taiwan Trilogy” A City of Sadness ( Beiqing
chengshi, 1989, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), The Puppetmaster (Ximeng rensheng,
1993, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), and Good Men, Good Women ( Haonan haonu,
1995, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien) which re-narrates pivotal moments in Taiwan’s
history that were long suppressed under Cold War-era Koumingtang rule.
In addition to being a thematic turning point in Hou’s oeuvre, Dust in the
Wind served also as an aesthetic milestone. As critics including James Udden
(2009: 76-82) and Haden Guest (2005) have observed, the lm brought Hou’s
cinematic composition to new depths. In Dust in the Wind , Hou dramatically
expands on aesthetic and narrative strategies honed in his earlier work, making
his shots longer, more distanced, and more static than ever before. The temporal
ellipses seen as early as The Sandwich Man and notable exploitation of off-
screen space in The Boys from Fengkui are pushed to new levels in Dust in the
Wind . Moreover, concerns for rhythm and attention to musical motifs which
characterize many of his later works such as City of Sadness, Millennium
Mamboo (Qianxi manbo, 2001, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), and Three Times ( Zuihao
de shiguang , 2005, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien) are in Dust in the Wind developed
into both structuring devises and larger thematic concepts (see Guest, 2005).
Thus, while much scholarly attention has been paid to Hou’s “Taiwan
Trilogy” (see, Berry and Farquhar, 2006; Yip, 1997; Reynaud, 2002), here I
place Dust in the Wind center stage. I see the lm as a transitional cornerstone
in Hou’s larger body of work, in which Hou develops a cinematic narration
of history and memory that bridges his earlier emphasis on the personal and
autobiographical, with his later concerns of the national and transnational.
As Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar have argued, Hou’s work indexes not
necessarily a national historiography, per se, but what they explain as a
“historiological mode” of expression. Through such a historiological mode,
they argue that Hou’s lms “[do] not construct the Taiwanese experience as a
monolithic, unied, abstracted, and seemingly objective national history, but as
a multiplicity of distinct experiences, sometimes shared, sometimes separate”
(Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 37). They argue that Hou composes a localized logic
of historical narration that allows for webs of historical narrations, unbound
by any particularly privileged narrative teleology.
In this article, I push this notion of “historiology” further and suggest that
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what we see in Dust in the Wind , are historiologies that develop specically
along affective terms through overlapping and interpenetrating narratives of
love, loss, longing, worry, and even guilt…etc. In so doing, I aim to complicate
scholarship that has discussed Hou’s work either in particularly cultural
essentialist (be it “Chinese” or “Taiwanese”) terms, or that which places Hou
within larger aesthetic genealogies of cinema, without taking into account
the specic cultural-historical, not to mention largely personal, context from
which his work emerged. Here, I track the more intimate ramications, or what
I call “affective historiologies,” of overlapping cultural historical tensions
which frame and are in turn reected in Hou’s work. I argue that it is precisely
through these affective narratives that Hou, in Dust in the Wind , is able to bring
together the many public and personal marks of Taiwan’s past reected on
individual, familial, national, and even international ties that compose the
complexly intimate story of Taiwan’s own “coming-of-age,” projected on the
screen of the Taiwanese New Wave.
Times/ Ties
The lm opens with the sound of a running train, while the young lov-
ers Wan and Huen stand side by side in the train cart, journeying home from
school. As their bodies sway silently to the rhythms of the train, their intimacy
is portrayed as one that is also steady and ordinary, in harmony with the repeti-
tive sound of the tracks. When the young couple start their walk home from
the train station, the camera is xed and remote, switching from long shots of
the two slowly striding alongside the railroad tracks (Fig. 1, left), and extreme
long shots of the mountains as they slowly climb their way into the village and
arrive home (Fig. 1, right). Static and distanced, the camera leaves space for
the couple to slowly and steadily disappear into the landscape, from daytime
till dawn.
Here, we see an intimate rhythm between both the comfortably silent couple,
and their relationship with the landscape they tread. In sync, their bodies follow
their environment’s contours together. On time, they reach home just before
the last glimmer of light fades into darkness.
Fig. 1. Wan and Huen traveling home from the train station.
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The young couple’s synchronized temporality between each other and
with the rural environment is sporadically interrupted by the schedule de-
manded of and set by their families. Just as they start entering the village (Fig.
2, left), Huen and Wan are stopped by the grocery store owner who has them
carry home the rice Huen’s mother requested. Upon their arrival at Huen’s
house, they are yet again disrupted as they are scolded for returning later than
usual (Fig. 2, right).
The weight and intervention of Huen’s family expectations on the young couple
are here manifested in temporal terms: through the errand of shouldering the
family’s rice which disrupts and delays their walk, and through the expression
of concern through the mother’s alarm over their tardiness.
These familial interruptions, on the end of Huen’s family, foreshadow
that which Wan’s father soon causes. The father’s injury and the family’s need,
in turn, for Wan to shoulder the burden of the family’s nancial responsibilities
disrupts the pace and trajectory of Wan’s own coming-of -age process. This
can be seen, for instance, in the scene where Wan announces his decision to
quit school. In this scene, we hear the doctor collecting medicine money from
the mother inside the house, as the camera stays with the two generations of
family patriarchs grandfather and father helplessly resting at the doorway.
Shortly after, Wan actively enters into the frame (Fig. 3).
Wan rst returns his father’s watch, which he borrowed to keep time for
a test, and then offers to quit school and head to Taipei to search for work. As
we can garner from clues given in the opening episode where Wan offers to
help Huen with math, and later when the father reminisces over how Wan’s
teacher urged Wan to stay in school because of his talent we know that Wan’s
decision to leave school was one made unexpectedly and out of necessity.
This decision abruptly delays, and ultimately derails, Wan’s future of going
to college. It is a move which, moreover, accelerates his transition from child
to breadwinner. For, like the watch borrowed from his dad to keep time for
schoolwork, Wan’s borrowed time as a schoolboy now needs to be returned to
the family. Here, we witness Wan’s prompted adulthood emerging out of the
ssures of competing and overlapping temporalities to which he is intimately
bound his synchronized relationship with Huen, his personal progression as a
school boy, his obligations clocked through family needs, and his position as
Fig. 2. Family expectations disrupting the couples’ walk back home.
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young laborer at a time when Taiwan was undergoing accelerated industrializa-
tion and thus required mass amount of labor in its urban centers. That is, we
see Wan’s character growing out of the intersections of personal, interpersonal,
familial, and national times and ties.
Mistimed/ Misplaced
Not long after Wan’s departure, Huen follows suit and journeys to Taipei
also in search of work. However, as soon as Huen arrives at Taipei station,
the couple’s synchronized intimacy, portrayed in the opening scenes, is sub-
stituted by a series of mistimed events and agitations. Following her family’s
instructions, Huen decides to wait for Wan on the platform and not at the rear
station that Wan suggested (Fig. 4, left). Due to Huen’s displacement, Wan is
late in picking her up, leaving Huen vulnerable to the trickery of an old man
who convinces her to leave with him. Wan catches the old man in time and
wrestles back the bag of potatoes, which Wan’s grandfather prepared for him
(Fig. 4, right) while, in the process, dropping and spoiling the lunch he was
supposed to deliver for his boss’s son. Here, family intervention yet again disrupts and delays the young couple,
with Huen’s family’s instructions leading to Wan’s belated pickup, and Wan’s
salvaging of grandpa’s potatoes eventually spoiling Wan’s task and schedule
given by his boss. Such mistiming between the young couple, between them
and their families, and with their work accelerates as the narrative progresses.
Wan struggles to balance his work schedule and his night classes. Huen cries
constantly as she waits for visits from Wan and letters from home, both of
Fig. 3. Wan offering to quit school and nd work as he turns in his report card.
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which seem to come at too slow a pace. From Huen’s sorrow, we witness
the constant misaligned pace of intimacy, both between Huen and Wan, and
between them and their families.
This widening ssure between the two characters becomes especially
apparent when their plans to visit home together are again and again disrupted
by untimely mishaps at work. Just before one of their visits home, Huen unfor-
tunately burns her wrist with an iron at work and, despite her overwhelming
homesickness, is pressed by Wan to stay in Taipei less the sight of her injury
worry her family. Wan’s agitation over Huen’s carelessness, both in the work-
place and in regards to her family, is coupled by his frustration with Huen for
drinking with his pals over dinner. He yells: “Little girl, what are you doing
drinking with men!” We thus see Huen’s body become the site for contend-
ing temporal narratives. We witness the untimeliness of Huen’s injury at the
workplace derailing her desire to visit family. We also see the disjointed pace
in which Wan and Huen, respectively, perceive Huen’s coming-of-age. Wan
anxiously insists on perceiving Huen as a girl who remains unequipped to take
care of herself and her family. Yet, from Huen’s actions, we see her eager to
transition into, and perform, womanhood.
Just as Wan attempts to discipline her as if a child pressing her to stay
in Taipei, and reprimanding her for drinking with men Huen, responding to
their friend Hen-chun’s taunting dare, takes off her schoolgirl blouse for a
peacock to be painted onto it (Fig. 5). Huen’s schoolgirl outt mirrors her own
body-as-canvas, which she chooses to irreversibly transform from uniformed
schoolgirl to blossoming woman a transformation which, with the image of
a colorful peacock, Huen insists on aunting. As she strips, in (Fig. 5), Huen
claims the center of the frame and takes control over both her body, which
Wan was at that moment trying to discipline, and the male gaze (which is here
triangulated among Wan, Hen-chun, and the unknown man painted on the
bulletin) that Wan was just previously anxiously guarding her from. With the
couple’s exacerbating ssures, we thus witness the misaligned pace between
Wan and Huen’s coming-of-age clocked through their family’s respective
nancial difculties, we perceive the asymmetry between their bodies and the
labors demanded of them at their workplace, and we observe the contention
between their self-development and inter-personal intimacy. That is, we see
Fig. 4. Wan’s belated arrival to Taipei station, which quickly turned violent.
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Wan and Huen’s intimate relationship, which was originally in-sync, become
increasingly mistimed and disjointed by their own struggles to reclaim control
over their misplaced bodies.
Tempo/ Temporality
The couple’s misalignment is accelerated when the temporal logic of
the nation intervenes, and Wan is suddenly drafted to fulll his military duty,
clocked for two years. Abrupt as this national interruption might seem, de-
velopments and concerns of the national has framed this personal tale from
the very beginning. It was Taiwan’s industrializing development as a nation,
during the 1970s, that conditioned the characters’ migration to Taipei. It was
in response to the cross-strait tension between Taiwan and Mainland China
during the Cold War, that mandatory military service was set up historically
and, within this coming-of-age tale, becomes a narrative turning point. For, if
becoming the family breadwinner heralds Wan’s transition into adulthood in the
context of his family, his fulllment of mandatory military service proclaims
his manhood in terms of the nation.
Although out- of-sync his family’s need for his maturation being before
the nation’s call for his service it is the contestation of these intersecting log-
ics, familial and national, that prompts Wan’s personal growth as a character.
The stories Wan gathers right before his departure situates him within a larger
genealogy of national interruptions and personal, as well as, familial, survival.
As Wan’s employer hands Wan his last paycheck, he shares stories of serving,
and surviving, in the Japanese Imperial Army when Taiwan was still under
Japanese colonial rule. At Wan’s farewell dinner, his father laments over the
Fig. 5. Huen taking off her schoolgirl blouse so to be painted.
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fate of the family’s men, all deprived of higher education. While Wan’s neces-
sary transition from schoolboy into provider abruptly occurred before he could
nish high school, his draft notice arrived just before he could take the college
entrance exams. Similarly mistimed between national development, family
survival, and personal growth was his father’s possibility of pursuing higher
education, which was foreclosed as soon as the political regime transitioned
from Japanese colonial to Koumingtang rule. For, just when he graduated
from elementary school, “Japanese syllables changed to Chinese, everything
[previous education] went to waste.” These personal narratives tell a national
history in ux from Japanese to Chinese rule which, in turn, inuence the
trajectory of these characters’ and, by extension, their family’s fate, vulnerable
to and thus affected by the nation’s every tremor and turn.
In particular, the nation’s claiming of Wan’s body for military service not
only disrupts Wan’s personal pursuit of education, suspends his connection
with family, but, ultimately, accelerates the detachment of Wan and Huen’s
intimate ties. The pace and permeability of Wan and Huen’s relationship, dur-
ing Wan’s time in military service, is narrated mainly through their exchanged
letters (Fig. 6).Fig. 6. Letters exchanged between Huen and Wan during his military service.
At rst, we see the intensity of Huen’s affection through the number ofletters she sends to Wan. Huen, at the beginning, sends an abundant number
of letters, so much so, that his fellow soldiers tease him: “Your letters take up
all the space on the postal airplane.” In her letters, Huen describes the current
happenings of their friends and family. She details, and even encloses tokens
of, her everyday life (Fig. 6, left). Her longing for Wan’s return, nonetheless,
crops up between the lines. While letters are always already belated responses
from sender to receiver, we sense that this deferred mode of communication, to
Huen, is too slow and unsustainable for the long time they are to be apart. She
bemoans: “387 more days before you’re discharged…387, it takes a long time
even to count.” As she waits and pines for word from Wan, which is always
already delayed, the postman who delivers their letters, however, is always on
time. She notes, “When there’s no letter from you, he tells me probably the
fog keeps the planes from ying.” The postman is always timely in deliver -
ing both physical letters or messages of comfort. Not only is he the punctual
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bearer of news and affection, he, having once served at the same military unit
as Wan, becomes rst the potential stand-in and then the eventual substitute
of Wan. For, he eventually takes Huen’s hand in marriage. Thus, Wan’s pile
of letters from Huen (Fig. 6, left) is ultimately replaced by a stack of his own
letters (Fig. 6, right) returned from Huen’s old address which, by the time of
the letters’ arrival, had already become passé.
What is highlighted is perhaps the temporal, or ever shifting, nature of
overlapping attachments be it personal, familial, or national ties. The postman’s
timely appearance into Huen’s life, at a pivotal moment when her intimacy
with Wan was persistently delayed and suspended, results in Huen’s shift in
affection. Similar, is Wan’s own substitution of his father, as family provider, in
the face of the father’s untimely injury. The father’s ephemeral position in the
household was, even before his injury, hinted when we learn of his adoption into
the household which, thus, places him only as a temporary “place-holder” of a
patriarch until Wan can legitimately carry down the family name. Comparable
is perhaps the transient nature of Taiwan’s political rule which frames this tale
the shift from Japanese colonial governance to Koumingtang rule and affects
Wan’s family’s growth and trajectory for generations.
Wan’s body bears the overlapping marks of these passing, yet ever so
affecting, ties. This is made apparent, at the end of the lm, when Wan returns
home from the military, wearing the shirt Huen made for him before his depar-
ture (Fig. 7, left). As Wan crouches down his torso embodying the mark of his
ephemeral intimacy with Huen, his body recovering from the sporadic labors
of national as well as familial duties grandpa talks only about his potatoes.
He laments: “Typhoons came early this year, came quite a few times. I doubt
that they[the potatoes] will yield well…bumped into quite a few typhoons…
the potatoes are more difcult to look after than ginseng.” Here, nature itself
is depicted as equally, if not more so, capricious and powerful as human ties.
The camera lingers on the two characters for minutes (Fig. 7, left) before the
sound of the train interrupts their silence from a distance. Following this sonic
interruption, the camera cuts to the lm’s very last scene an extreme long
shot of Taiwan’s northeastern coast on looking on the Pacic (Fig. 7, right).
Fig. 7. Ending scene where Wan and grandpa talk in the open landscape.
While the camera remains still, the traveling sound of the train reminds
us of movements and actions happening, simultaneously, beyond the shot.
Thus, just as Wan and grandpa’s intimate moment is intermittently affected
by sounds of the train from afar, Taiwan’s open landscape is here framed as
equally vulnerable to the tempos of outside forces. As typhoons sporadically
like the transience of political forces, arbitrariness of family duties, and
ephemerality of intimate attachments affect the island so open and susceptible
to the whims of its surroundings; Wan, like grandpa’s potatoes, is inextricably
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bound to this island and the overlapping ties that mediates, textures, and
binds its historical landscape. Like the potatoes, Wan precariously grows
out of the weight and whims of attachments with which they are intimately
bound the land, the weather, and grandfather’s aging dexterity as a farmer
in the case of the potatoes; personal heartbreak, familial binds, and national
ties in terms of Wan. In other words, Wan’s coming-of-age story itself bears
the public and personal marks of competing narratives that texture Taiwan’s
past. We thus see Hou indexing an intimate tale of “becoming” not contained
by overpowering teleologies of national progression, foreclosed genealogies
of familial longevity, or romanticized developments of young love. For, the
history we see narrated here doesn’t follow the beat of any dominant narrative
trajectory. It emerges out of its ssures. It is thus a historical narration which
ourishes close to the ground, has its roots bound to Taiwan’s soil, and bears
the whims and weight of the heart.
Endnotes
1 For more on the social-historical background of New Taiwanese Cinema’s
rise, see, Zhang, 2004: 240-249; Udden, 2009: 49-85; Chen, 1997.
2 Besides winning awards in Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, The Sandwich
Man won awards at Mannheim International Film Festival, The Boys from
Fenghuei and A Summer at Grandpa’s both won awards at Nantes Film
Festival; A Time to Live, A Time to Die won awards at Rotterdam, Hawai’i,
and Berlin.
3 For overview and discussion of these “cultural essentialist” narratives which
have been employed by various media for very different purposes, see,
Udden, 2009: 1-5.
References
Berry, Chris and Mary Farquhar, eds. 2006. “Time and the National: History,
Historiology, Haunting.” In China On Screen: Cinema and Nation. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Bordwell, David. 2005. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging .
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chen, Ruxiu. 1997. Taiwanese New Cinema’s History, Culture and Experience,
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2nd ed. Taipei: Wanxing.
Guest, Haden. 2005. “Reections on the Screen: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust
in The Wind and the Rhythms of the Taiwan New Cinema.” In Island
on the Edge: Taiwan’s New Cinema and After . Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press.
Kellner, Douglas. 1998. “New Taiwan Cinema in the 80s.” Jump Cut: A Review
of Contemporary Media. No. 42(Dec.): 101 -115.
Reynaud, Bérénice. 2002. A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute
Publications.
Udden, James. 2009. No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. London: Eurospan.
Warner, Charles R. 2008. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Optics
of Ephemerality.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 25(1): 1 - 15.
Yip, June. 1997. “Constructing a Nation: Taiwanese History and the Films of
Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood,
Gender . Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.
Zhang, Yingjin. 2004. Chinese National Cinema. New York : Routledge.
Filmography
A City of Sadness ( Beiqing chengshi, 1989, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien),
A Summer at Grandpa’s ( Dongdong de jiaqi, 1984, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien),
A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, 1985, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Dust in the Wind ( Lianlian fengchen, 1986, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Good Men, Good Women ( Haonan haonu, 1995, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, 1982
Millennium Mamboo (Qianxi manbo, 2001, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
The Boys from Fengkui ( Fengkui lai de ren, 1983, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien )
The Puppetmaster (Ximeng rensheng, 1993, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
The Sandwich Man ( Erzi de dawanou, 1983)
Three Times ( Zuihao de shiguang , 2005, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Lily Wong is a Ph.D. candidate of comparative literature at University of
California at Santa Barbara, specializing in Chinese and Sinophone popular
culture, gender and sexuality, and lm and media studies. She has published in
journals, including Pacic Affairs, China Review International , and National
Central University Journal of Humanities. Her research pays close attention to
affective economies, historical writing, and the media formation of transpacic
Sinophone communities.