Looking for nostalgia: memory and national identity in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's a time to live, a time to die.

Wu, I-Fen

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is generally regarded as the most important director in Taiwanese New Wave Cinema. His films made between 1983 and 1996 have a consistent focus on Taiwan's past that mark them as the most important materials dealing with histories and social changes as they unfold. His best known films, A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989), along with The Puppetmaster (Ximeng zensheng, 1993), and Good Men Good Women (Haona naonu, 1995), form a trilogy representing Taiwan's colonial history, manifesting his approach to the collective memories of Taiwan, revealing his confidence in expanding the sphere of subject matter from the individual to the public.

Before making A City of Sadness, Hou consistently drew on his personal life experiences and those of his co-writers' in the overall structure of the narratives, through which he represented the history of the increasingly industrialised and westernised Taiwan. The Boys from Fengkuei (Fengkuei lai de ren, 1983) was adapted from Hou's adolescent experience; A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong-Dong de jiaqi, 1984) was based on its screenwriter Chu TienWen's short story, and was about her childhood at her grandparents' home in central Taiwan; A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, 1985) was strongly autobiographical of Hou himself; Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen, 1986) was its screenwriter Wu Nien-Jen's memory of growing up in a miner's family. These films looked at the past with nostalgia, filled with remembrances of childhood and adolescence, but nevertheless depicted Hou's generation in ideological movement, redefining national identity in a way that did not centre on ethnicity. Hou is a Chinese Hakka, who was born in China and grew up in Taiwan; Chu Tien-Wen is a second generation mainlander, whose mother is a Taiwanese Hakka, and Wu Nien-Jen is a typical Taiwanese. (1) These three people with different ethnic backgrounds shared the same experience of living in Taiwan, which became the trigger for them to rethink the meaning of national history and reconstruct it on the screen. By projecting themselves into their films, Hou and his screenwriters tried to offer the cinematic equivalent of historical representation, raising questions of identity on a symbolic level, in which they appeared to articulate themselves while simultaneously being articulated into history.

A Time to Live, A Time to Die represents the history of the 1950s, when the Chinese Nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-Shek was defeated by the Chinese Communist party in the Chinese Civil War, and formally retreated to Taiwan with a substantial wave of refugees in 1949. Compared with European migrations to America, Australia, and New Zealand, which were, as Benedict Anderson points out, largely due to the expansion of European imperial and colonial power, the Chinese migrations to southeast Asia were, on the contrary, rarely the products of overseas adventures or territorial expansion planned by the Middle Kingdom. (2) Either I because of wars or the hardship of life, the inhabitants of southeast China had been moving to Taiwan since the seventeenth century, which paved the way for the Taiwan's gradual development as part of Chinese culture. The last great wave of Chinese migration to Taiwan, which took place between 1945 and 1949, produced two million refugees who sought refuge from calamity rather th an seeking a good life, and who became a privileged community as the Nationalist government was eager to construct a de-Japanised Taiwan as soon as possible, with policies implemented through language and education. The Chinese-speaking refugees newly-arrived thereby grew to be the dominant group in post-war Taiwan, a rare case of a social minority forcing Taiwan to identify with Chinese authority through the gradual absorption of its population into politi co-cultural units. Like the Europeans who had begun to name places in their colonies with new versions of old toponyms in their lands of origin, the Chinese Nationalist government renamed Taiwanese cities after their own, particularly in Taipei, intending to create an imagined China in Taiwan, as if they were the only legal authority representing China. (3) Viewing itself as the inheritor of China, the Nationalist government in Taiwan aimed to have these new places safeguard the continuing authority rather than the parallelism of the old ones; in other wor ds, China and Taiwan did not co-exist in equality--the relationship between them was a fight for inheritance rather than a sibling competition.

Intensely embedded in a climate of political and cultural disciplines, the historical landscape of post-war Taiwan was marked by an era in which the very notion and function of history was to create a sense of "Chineseness", and to repress the shape of memory about Taiwan into a prohibited issue. This hidden corner is illuminated in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A Time to Live, A Time to Die, in which the director not only meditates on a forbidden era of historical memory, but also on the political issues that inform the widely shared memory of the national past. Hou has strong ties to the characters whose memories are portrayed in the film: he is from the second generation of mainlanders growing up in Kaohsiung, as his family moved to Taiwan in 1947 when he was one year old. Representing the past through his personal memory, Hou's A Time to Live, A Time to Die is strongly autobiographical, and his voice-over narration over the opening shots indicates that this film is about the memory of his childhood. Like his other tw o films, A Summer at Grandpa's, which was actually shot at its screenplay writer, Chu Tien-Wen's grandparents' home, and Dust in the Wind at its screenplay writer, Wu NienJen's home town, Hou shot this film in the house where he grew up in southern Taiwan, in order to add the authenticity of his memory. Revealing a nostalgic impulse surrounding the era of the 1950s, A Time to Live, A Time to Die reflects a historical moment in which the past is recollected through a memory of youth that embodies a certain vision of Taiwan's history. Instead of probing the sensitive issues of political conflicts and historical ambiguities to emphasise the historical reality, A Time to Live, A Time to Die focuses on ordinary family life without delineating dramatic ups and downs, simply seizing history through the transformation of a family. Memory of childhood provides a focus in this film for turning the past into a nostalgic preservation of a history which is repressed and rewritten, and turns the past into a narrative that offers profundity to an era whose history is officially defined.

Turning nostalgia into a series of history, Hou's A Time to Live, A Time to Die illustrates the past in a regressive way in which it is recalled as it has been remembered. This film is certainly not the only one in Taiwanese New Cinema in which nostalgia impels memory to re-trace history. Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991), and Wu Nien-Jen's A Borrowed Life (1994), for instance, are both complex and suggestive about the era of their childhood, touching upon some ambiguous areas of Taiwanese history. (4) But the significance of A Time to Live, A Time to Die lies in its approach of tracing history, which focuses not merely on the issue of identity of the Chinese mainlanders, as dealt with in A Brighter Summer Day, nor simply on the impact of the colonial authority upon the Taiwanese, as tackled in A Borrowed Life; it shows the process in which a second generation Chinese mainlander identifies with Taiwan through his growing experience which, though deeply imbued with nostalgia, reflects the national pas t and points to a shift of socio-political climate. This sense of nostalgia does not only influence the film's presentation of the past, but also implicitly mirrors the changing political and cultural landscape of the 1980s, when Taiwan was about to start its political and social reformations. Shot one year before the establishment of Taiwan's first opposition party, the Democratic Progress Party (DPP), two years before lifting the fifty-year martial law, and three years before the collapse of Chiang's regime, A Time to Live, A Time to Die has been assumed to represent an awakening of national consciousness, cloaking the director's search for national identity in the folds of history. At the time this film appeared, Hou Hsiao-Hsien was one of the few directors engaged in a process of national soul searching, reconstructing history as a function of reflecting the present. Preoccupied with memory, the tone of historical nostalgia that pervades A Time to Live, A Time to Die is set in order to foreground the issu e of national identity that has been silenced from the late 1940s through to the 1980s. As Pierre Nora declares, "only memory gives the idea of the Nation.., its pertinence and its legitimacy"; (5) it is precisely Hou's memory that becomes a strategy for constructing the national past, having a fully historical grasp of the past and the present, and addressing the potential problem of Taiwanese people's national identity which has previously been refused acknowledgement by the Chinese Nationalist government.

A Time to Live, A Time to Die is probably the closest film to Hou's heart precisely because it is strongly autobiographical. It begins with Hou's voice-over narration, which flows through the scenes, in which the camera shoots in extreme long shots, of his father sitting in front of his desk, his mother and elder sister cooking in the kitchen, and his brothers playing together in the house, heightening the sense that he is an insider looking at a world to which he himself belonged. Hou combines spontaneous performances from non-professional actors with a stylised visual use of the long shot to capture the richness of everyday life, giving a visual purity through the simple storyline and the startling simplicity of fixed-frame shots. A subtle nostalgia is evoked in the opening shots in which the memory of Ah-Ha's (Hou's) childhood prevails in the recurring images of his profile of family life, which create an atmosphere that seems to blur the boundary between images and reality, reviving the historical era of the 1950s and 1960s.

As the film title disappears, Hou moves the focus to Ah-Ha, who is summoned by his grandmother in Hakka dialect while he is playing a game with his friends in the village square, and is then seen to bury his money and marbles under a big tree before going home. The images of the square and the tree, as well as Ah-Ha's home, are repeated throughout the film shot at a similar angle, as a contrast between the unchanging landscape and life's changes, implying that history remains constant through the variation of life. As the shape of the past is gradually accumulated through the images of childhood memory which are glimpsed from the opening scenes, it is worth noting that a broad historical context is also being unfolded; for example, as the film opens, the family's Japanese style house comes into shot, which reminds the viewer that the Japanese government retreated from Taiwan as it was defeated in World War II, and that later many mainlanders moved to Taiwan to take over the property left vacant by the Japanes e. Often shot with long takes at eye level, the scenes of the family's Japanese house display a spectacular mise-en-scene, commanding a limited field of vision, which demands the viewer's participation in the characters' everyday lives. Hou's cinematic style in A Time to Live, A Time to Die parallels that of the Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu, who was fond of shooting scenes at eye level with 360 degree space, and often framed his shots with the features of Japanese architecture such as doors and corridors to create spatial possibilities. Although Hou has never admitted Ozu's influence upon his films, his A Time to Live, A Time to Die, however, looks similar to Ozu's style. For example, the Japanese paper door, which is framed in the centre, divides the screen into at least three areas: the father's study, the living room, and the kitchen offscreen. This creates a second frame inside the film frame, and emphasises the graphic qualities of the images. When Ah-Ha is chased by his mother around the paper door t o retrieve the money he has stolen, the off-screen space outside the frame is emphasised as Ah-Ha ascends and descends the stairs several times, which not only extends the visual dimensions of the movie screen into an invisible area, but also reminds the viewer that what is outside the frame could possibly add significance to the framed action preferred by the camera. (6)

It is graphically fascinating to create visual dimensions by framing the doors, but most importantly, the visible and invisible in front of and behind the doors, as well as the audible and the inaudible inside or outside the house, provide the backdrop to Hou's construction of history. His arrangement of mise-enscene and filmic narrative in A Time to Live, A Time to Die is in every way an illustration of nostalgia, through which he displays historical and cultural complexities. The specific Hakka background of Ah-Ha's family is firstly manifested at the beginning of the film when Ah-Ha's grandmother repeatedly calls his nickname, Ah-Ha-Gu, in Hakka, and the use of dialect in the family emphasises the generation gap between Ah-Ha and his parents. Here it comes into the sharp focus that Ah-Ha's parents and grandmother never speak Mandarin nor Taiwanese, and on the contrary, that Ah-Ha and his siblings rarely speak Hakka. Ah-Ha spontaneously responds to his mother in Mandarin when he denies stealing her money, a nd later, Ah-Ha's brother tells his grandmother in Mandarin that Ah-Ha has passed his examination. The language diversity reflects different attitudes towards history between the Chinese mainlanders and their children, which is particularly obvious when memory plays a role shaping history. For instance, when the whole family is sitting together in the autumn afternoon, chewing sugarcane in the living room, Ah-Ha's father talks about the death of his close friend when he studied in Guangdong. Listening to his father's remembrance of the past, Ah-Ha's mother joins the talk and tells what happened to this friend's wife before she learned of her husband's death. None of the children speak, except the elder sister, who occasionally responds to her mother in Mandarin, and they all sit quietly chewing the sugarcane, unable to participate in their parents' memories.

The children's alienation from their parents' memories suggests that the construction of historical sense mainly relies on a shared memory of the past, a point which is manifested in the scene in which Ah-Ha's aunt sends a letter from South Africa to pass on the news of his adopted brother, Ah-Ching, who was left in the mainland by their parents. While Ah-Ha's parents sob in regret at leaving him alone in Guangdong after reading the letter, Ah-Ha's younger brothers seem to be more excited about removing the foreign stamps to put in their album, rather than paying attention to hear from a brother whom they have never met. The parents' memory of the past emphasises the connection between China and Taiwan, the continuity between past and present, but in fact forms an unbridgeable chasm between them and their children in the realm of national history. Unaware that the change of political situation in 1949 has led to a conspicuously new construction of historical identity, Ah-Ha's parents depend upon their memorie s in China for a sense of identity, which eventually turns them away from the changing historical and cultural landscapes of Taiwan. A strong sense of emotional dissonance is thus raised when the younger generation cannot sense the most profound tremors of their parents' past. There are scenes in which Ah-Ha turns down his grandmother and asks curiously, "what do we do in China?" when his grandmother enthusiastically asks him to go back to China with her. Ah-Ha cannot figure out why she is so keen to return to China as their home is in Taiwan. On that summer afternoon, Ah-Ha and his grandmother are walking along the country road, and it is later understood that she is taking him back to the mainland. Cutting to a tracking shot of a road on which Ah-Ha and his grandmother are strolling, and back to the long shots with long takes of the train and the landscape, the camera shots beautifully frame the countryside of southern Taiwan, portraying its geographical beauty in a painterly composition. While taking a res t at a snack vendor, the grandmother patiently asks the owner, a village girl, how to get to Mekong Bridge in Mei County but is not understood at all, as Hakka dialect is not spoken everywhere in Taiwan, and the bridge is not known. The road back to Mei County in Guangdong, which is intensely remembered by the grandmother, is not only her most profound memory of home, it also embodies the values of an aged woman's identification with nation, which has been emotionally lived in the geographical and historical landscape of China. The grandmother's confused sense of geography clearly relates to her loss of historical sense, which is bound to her memory of the past, and deeply imbued with the consciousness of a society that she used to know. Unable to acknowledge the transformation of society and transmit its values, the grandmother has not only lost her sense of geography but also that of history. Her wish to return to China becomes a delusion, which draws a boundary that binds her to her imaginary world in whic h she cannot recognise the fact that Mekong Bridge is no longer a link in the journey home and that she can never walk back to the mainland, because the Taiwan Strait geographically separates Taiwan and China, over which there is no bridge.

Embedded in their insistent nostalgia, which enables them to believe the political propaganda of the Chinese Nationalist government, which declares its authority to represent the mainland, Ah-Ha's parents and grandmother resist recognising the changing cultural and historical landscape, brought about by political transformation, and refuse to identify with a society which has nothing to do with their struggles and memories of China. Their estrangement from Taiwan is made clear when the eldest daughter goes through her parents' belongings after the mother's funeral, among which is the father's memoir. The shot is focused on the father's calligraphic handwriting while the daughter reads and sobs. She tells her brothers that their father did not plan to stay long in Taiwan, and therefore bought all cheap bamboo furniture; he did not even let their mother have a sewing machine for many years. It is precisely his desire to return to China that defines him in an ideological position which is politically and histori cally indifferent to Taiwan. The parents and grandmother all seem to confront the ideological conflicts as their memories of the past shadow the present, which makes the contrast between the past and the present more complex. The ideological contradiction is implied in the visual images: Ab-Ha's grandmother frequently gets lost whenever she is out of the house; Ah-Ha's parents are always framed inside the Japanese style house; the fence of the house is often shot with a closed entrance door. It can be said that the fence signals a boundary that divides inside and outside, the present and the past, reality and the imaginary, separating Ah-Ha's parents and grandmother from the shift in historical and cultural patterns.

Inside the fence is the parents' legendary narrative of the past, and outside is the children's plenitude of the present that points to a broader social and cultural phenomenon, embracing a certain idea of Taiwanese identity. Ah-Ha speaks Taiwanese when he plays with local children in the village. In the scene in which Ah-Ha and his friends spin a top in the village square, the shot is focused on the spinning top, while the children's Taiwanese quarrel is loudly heard off-screen. In school, Ah-Ha speaks Mandarin with his classmates, as it is strictly prohibited for students to speak Taiwanese at schools. After the bell rings for next class, the next scene is in Ah-Ha's classroom, in which a boy stands in front of all the students, announcing with a joking manner that " teacher says we are returning to the mainland China!" Ah-Ha slings a stone at him, yelling, "you are lying"; the whole class laughs and starts to make a noise. Here Hou uses language to imply Ah-Ha's identification with Taiwan, and again, to em phasise that the mainland exists only in the imaginary realm, which is remote and unpalpable to Ah-Ha's generation.

When told to get ready to return to the mainland, the young Ah-Ha takes it as a joke; when playing pool with friends in the local soldiers' club, the adult Ah-Ha has a fight with a mainlander, who is irritated by their having fun while he and his companions are listening to the live broadcast of the vice-president's funeral. Shot in a certain distance with a long take and low-key lighting, it is difficult to understand what is going on between the mainlander and Ah-Ha's group through the visual image, as the figures are not easily distinguishable until Ah-Ha is dragged out of the club, and we see that he is the one in trouble. When dealing with the gang fight, Hou has his camera shots fixed at a distance, intending to have the tension prevalent but not to judge who is right or wrong, and this shooting style is often seen in his other films. (e.g. The Boys from Fengkuei, and later, A City of Sadness) The camera shot remains at the same angle after Ah-Ha is taken out, focusing on the window through which Ah-Ha is seen, impatiently and angrily, to stand next to the mainlander who is nagging him to behave more properly, with respect to the late vice-president. Framed as a second frame of the screen, the window is like a screen within a screen; the viewer seems to be able to enter the first screen, as if they were Ah-Ha's friends, holding their breath to see what is going on. Annoyed by the mainlander's nagging, Ah-Ha unexpectedly pushes him, and then both groups start fighting. The tension between the mainlander and Ah-Ha is obviously raised by ideological conflicts, as the former's patriotism is fuelled by a growing preoccupation with the Chinese national past and with the ideology he has been taught to remember, which is completely beyond the latter's comprehension. For Ah-Ha, the local soldiers' club is a place to play poor rather than to cultivate patriotism; for the mainlander, the death of the late president is a national loss and deserving of national mourning as he is an image representing the Chinese nationa l past. The ideological conflicts between them reach their height when Ah-Ha and his friends throw stones to break the door of the soldiers' club, suggesting that the official version of history based on the Chinese national past has been questioned, and the patriotism fostered by the myth of Chinese identity has been challenged.

Sound has been widely employed in A Time to Live, A Time to Die, evoking emotional states and significantly contributing to political references. The live broadcast of the funeral of the late vice-president, which, emotionally and sadly, narrates the accomplishments in Mandarin, is in stark contrast to Ah-Ha's swearing in Taiwanese, when he is asked to properly observe the funeral. The broadcast in A Time to Live, A Time to Die is acknowledged, on more than one occasion, with a distinctly right-wing stamp, addressing the disturbing zones of recent history. For example, on the National Day when Ah-Ha's family are chewing sugarcane and chatting in their living room, the radio is broadcasting news of an air battle between Taiwan and China. The broadcast reports the heated battle, and propagandises how strong the Taiwanese air force is to defeat that of Communist China over Mazu Island. (7) While the news continues, there is no discussion about this battle. It seems that nobody is disturbed by the news, as if the y are used to the political tension between two countries.

The broad sweep of Hou's political concern, as well as the sense of political and social crisis, is hinted at in his use of sound. Throughout the film, the political issue has never been mentioned. Yet, in some ways, it is at the epicentre of the themes and issues, fully addressing the complexity and difficulty of the political situation in the 1950s. This political instability is explicitly expressed when a group of teachers talk about newspaper articles. A medium shot of a newspaper headline demands the viewer's attention, in which the military tension between Taiwan and China, and Chiang Kal-Shek's instruction to the national army to await orders, are reported. Rather than unnecessary conversation or fussy action, Hou uses a shot of coconut trees swinging in the background of blue sky, in which the chirping of grasshoppers is heard; he cuts to a shot of a group of people standing together, and then to a shot of the newspaper. A propaganda song is heard which urges, "Regain the mainland, which is our territ ory, and the people there are our compatriots," reflecting the social phenomenon of that era in which anti-Communist ideology was strongly implemented by the Nationalist government. At first glance, it seems that every shot is irrelevant, every composition static, and every cut plain. No action is exactly intended as a comment on another; no conversation leads particularly to the next shot, but the political instability of the 1950s is simply but clearly explained. Although it is the political turmoil which has been described, a feeling of tranquillity prevails through the images. That night, the noise of tanks rumbling past in the darkness is heard over the scene of Ah-Ha's family deeply sleeping. Except for the father who wakes up to look through the window, it seems that nobody is bothered by the thundering noise. The next scene is in the early morning, a muddy road with the tracks of tanks left the previous night, but it soon looks like another beautiful day with a shot of bright sunny morning. The ongoin g political tension exists but does not shadow the younger generation's world. (8)

A Time to Live, A Time to Die moves slowly, with a small number of scenes, whose images appear simple on the surface, but can be seen an closer analysis to contain deeper meaning. Sound has been used remarkably as a narrative strategy to explore the wonder on that surface, and to mirror the emotional state of the characters. For example, the sound of rain is particularly built around moments of intense emotion surrounding events like illness and separation to reflect the characters' sense of loss. In the first half of the film, Ah-1-Ia's father appears to be ill and weak from asthma and tuberculosis. The children, who seem to be remote from their father, hardly ask about his illness, nor panic when they see him vomiting blood, as if they are used to accepting his illness as a part of family life. However, when the doctor is sent for to see their father, their concern and fear for his health is revealed, as they all stand aside and look at him. The sound of heavy rain heard in the scene of the typhoon reflects the family members' worries of their father and their fear of losing him.

The rhythm of the raindrop in A Time to Live, A Time to Die is an essential theatrical device conveying a sense of poetic sentiment, an expression of subtle feelings towards a world in which life is constantly changing and does not allow everyone to interpret each moment in his own way. The day before the eldest sister's wedding, Ah-Ha's mother recounts the old days to her, stretching from her secret love affair, to her marriage, to the death of her second daughter. In the living room, an interior shot with extremely long take shows the mother and daughter sitting on tatamis, the former showing the latter the family heirloom and photographs. (9) A nostalgic sadness is evoked in this scene when the mother starts to narrate that she had a secret crush on her colleague but dared not to tell her parents; she was worried about her husband's emaciated health and the poverty of the family after the marriage; she was nagged by her mother-in-law for having two daughters in a row, and was urged to adopt a baby boy for a good luck; (10) and she regrets that she did not take good care of the second daughter, who died of food-poisoning. The mother's reminiscence of the past is completely shot in one take; the camera never moves, holding long enough at the same angle to allow the atmosphere to brim over with the mother's sorrow and sadness, while Ah-Ha's eldest sister listens, remaining silent until her mother sobs at the end of her story. (11) This is a quiet, sentimental moment, and only the pouring rain outside the window is heard. Silence and emptiness often appear in Hou's films, they are treated as though they are audible sounds and tangible objects. Responding quietly to her mother's narration of her past, the eldest daughter's silence is quite subtle here, a rather good mean by which to express her share of her mother's feelings; the sound of rain actively arouses emotional upsurge, spreading the atmosphere of sorrow in a subdued manner surrounding the mother and the daughter, for the memories of the past, and also for the latter's impending departure to get married.

The sound of rain dropping on the roof or flipping upon windows marks the sense of silence in A Time to Live, A Time to Die, giving it form and meaning. When Ah-Ha causes trouble for his tutor and is nearly expelled from school, his sister is sent for to talk to the dean of students. In the shot, Ah-Ha is sitting and looking at the camera while in the background the sister and the dean of students discuss how to discipline him. Ah-Ha says nothing, not even defending himself. In the next shot, Ah-Ha sees his sister off, and then remains silent, walking noiselessly to the bicycle parking lot. It is raining heavily outside, and rain drops rhythmically on the tin awning. Ah-Ha finds his tutor's bike, and stabs its front wheel with a screwdriver. He calmly leaves, gradually disappearing in the pathway. The sound of rain renders Ah-Ha's silence electric, and is much more meaningful than anything Ah-Ha could have said to interpret his rebellious youth.

Apart from the use of sound which is very emotionally charged in A Time to Live, A Time to Die, empty shots are frequently found in other moments. Kathe Geist defines empty shots as "empty of identified characters, as transitions between scenes and sometimes as interludes within them." (12) As Chae points out, Hou's empty shot, in which the characters are absent and a certain place is focused with a static camera movement, forms a narrative in A Time to Live, A Time to Die to link the emotional development of sequences. The night when Ah-Ha's father dies, the power supply is cut off, and the screen turns black for a few seconds. The eldest daughter finds out that the father is dead when she lights a candle in his study. In the second half of the film, when the mother goes to the local hospital for the last time, Ah-Ha and his brother help her to get into a pedicab, and then there is a cut to the shot of the moving pedicab in the background. The camera remains even after the pedicab has left the screen, leavin g only the empty road in the rain, as if to suggest the mother will never come back. She dies that night. At the end of the film, Hou again inserts an empty shot to imply the grandmother's death, by framing the stool beside the tea table where she had often sat. The camera shot then moves backward to the tatamis on which the grandmother stiffly lies, while the details of her death are narrated. (13) This kind of empty shot forms a unique narrative style in Hou's films, conveying a sort of resigned sadness, as well as a calm acceptance of the unpredictable shift from life to death. Also, the empty shot stimulates the viewer's understanding of the scene, which appears empty and static but contains implicit meaning. For example, the father's empty chair is framed in the film's opening shot to imply the family's memory of him. The remembrance of his father sitting in front of his desk working on the paperwork he brought home is Ah-Ha's deepest memory of him. This chair in his study thus "becomes a symbol of his p hysical absence and memories about him" as he dies when Ah-Ha is still a young boy. (14) As Hou mentions at the beginning of his narration, this film is about his childhood, especially the memory of his father, but this sounds unmotivated as the father is barely present, nor does he seem close to his children. However, it is later understood that it is his fear of infecting them with his tuberculosis that makes him keep his distance from them. (15) The chair is left empty after his father's death, yet it fulfils Hou's impression of his father, and of his time with his father. The empty chair is filled with memory; emptiness is, in a sense, a kind of fullness. It is interesting to find out that the fathers in all Hou's early films are weak: the father in The Boys from Fengkuei is an imbecile; the one in A Summer at Grandpa's just shows up twice to pick up his children; in Dust in the Wind the father is a disabled miner; in Daughter of the Nile he is an injured policeman. Contrasted with the image of the mother , which is tough and strong, that of the father sketched in Hou's films is powerless, which indicates that his childhood memory of his own father, who was physically ill, shaped the representation of fathers in the films.

Generally speaking, Hou's long shots are filled with deep, untapped feelings that evoke a nostalgia towards the past. When Ah-Ha gives his first love letter to May, the camera shot frames both of them in the centre, and then cuts to Ah-Ha's point-of-view shot, of looking at May leaving, and afterwards remains focused on her back until she is hardly seen in the distance. Following Ah-Ha's point-of-view shot, the audience share a deep sense of loss as if they were Ah-Ha himself, gazing at May disappearing at the end of street, evoking an intense, nostalgic sadness connected with memories of youth and the vanishing of a world which used to be lived so intensely. Ah-Ha's gang-fight, his first experience in the red light district, or his harassment of a cloth vendor: all these everyday activities are shot to form a rhythm of life, drawing the viewer's attention to experience of the landscape of Ah-Ha's past. Indeed, Hou attempts to oblige the viewer's historical consciousness to return to an era which no longer ex ists. This is obvious in one scene in which the eldest sister's friends come to visit, and one of them proposes to take a picture for the family: grandmother, mother and Ah-Ha join the daughter and her friends in the front yard, and everybody smiles and looks at the camera. Hou's camera shot freezes at this moment while the colour of the image becomes yellow as if an old picture were being presented on the screen. The freezing of this shot, which produces the effect of a photograph, is the freezing of a historical moment, encouraging the viewer to meditate upon the meaning of history, and to think of the history that separates the observer and the observed. The understanding of historical transformation through the 1950s to the late 1960s is poignantly reflected by the Ah-Ha's attitudes towards the deaths of his father, mother, and grandmother. From the panicking fear, to great sorrow, and then to calm acceptance, Hou seems to think optimistically that a new historical era is about to start, as the old genera tion has gradually passed away. In the last few shots of the film, his grandmother dies on the tatamis without being discovered until her body start to rot. Ah-Ha and his brothers all stand still looking at their grandmother until the undertakers arrive. One of the undertakers gives the brothers a dirty look, as if to accuse of them neglecting their grandmother. For the last shot, in which the four brothers' gaze for a long time at their grandmother's corpse, it looks as though they return a gaze to the camera, as if they are looking at the audience; the Taiwanese film critic Chen Kuo-Fu comments that it is the younger generation's witnessing of the passing of the previous century. A Time to Live, A Time to Die is a film about historical and national memory; this film finds its viewpoint in history, and returns it to the audience. (16) History is constituted only if it is considered; it is regained only if it is looked at. (17) Seeing history projected on the screen, the audience becomes the object of history 's gaze, and is expected to think about the meaning of history and its related issues.

(1.) Hakka people, who speak Hakka dialect, are one of the main ethnic communities among Taiwanese, Chinese mainlanders, and Aboriginals in contemporary Taiwan. The Hakkas originated from central China but gradually migrated further south towards the southeast coastline, such as Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan provinces and Taiwan. In the late Qing dynasty (after 1867 A.D.), the Hakkas moved to Hainan island, Taiwan and overseas to flee from wars. See the website: www.asiawind.com/hakka/history/htm. The "Chinese mainlanders" refer to the Chinese who moved to Taiwan after 1945, when Taiwan was handed over by Japan to Chiang Kal-Shek's Chinese Nationalist government. The "typical Taiwanese" generally refer to those whose ancestors had moved to Taiwan mainly from Fujian province since the seventeenth century. In A lime to Live, A lime to Die, Ah-Ha's parents who are Hakkas from Guangdong province and move to Taiwan after 1945, are generally regarded as Chinese Hakkas.

(2.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991, pp. 187-190. The Middle Kingdom refers to China, which means "the centre of the world". Anderson suggests that Cheng Ho's voyages far across the Indian ocean in the fifteenth century, which were carried out at the orders of the Yung-lo Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, were rare events in Chinese history that were intended to enforce a court monopoly of external trade with Southeast Asia and the region further west, against the depredations of private Chinese merchants.

(3.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 187. The way that the Chinese renamed Taiwanese cities is similar to the Europeans who had begun to name places in their colonies with new versions of old toponyms in their lands of origin.

(4.) Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is based on a real story that happened in 1961, when a high school student in Taipei killed a fourteen-year-old girlfriend. A richly layered world of the 1960s is built in this film through Yang's portrait of rebellious teenagers mired in night school and lost in gang activities, of the popularity of American rock music spreading in Taipei, of the mainlanders' remaining detachment from Taiwan having retreated from mainland China over ten years, and of a repressive bureaucratic system constraining social development. Yang points out that what he is interested in exploring in this film is not the murder itself, but rather the environment in which the teenage homicide happened. Politically disciplined and socially reserved, the portrayal of the 1960s in A Brighter Summer Day is repressive and constrained, as Yang's retrospective view is mainly focused on the community of mainlanders, who are not sure if they could return to mainland China, but do not feel confident living in Tai wan. As a second generation mainlander, Yang provides another profile of mainlanders in Taiwan, who were simply ordinary people living at the edge of society with the haunting memory of the Chinese civil war. Huang Jien-Yeh, The Films of Edward Yang, Taipei: Yuang-Lieu, 1995, pp. 159-162. See also Shelly Kraicer and Lisa Roosen-Runge, "Edward Yang: A Taiwanese Independent Filmmaker in Conversation," CineAction, no. 47, 1998, pp. 48-55. In contrast to Yang's concern with Chinese mainlanders, Wu Nien-Jen focuses on the Taiwanese who had experienced the Japanese colonisation and later the Chinese Nationalist regime in his first film, A Borrowed Life, which is in memory of his father. After being a screenplay writer for many years, Wu shot A Borrowed Life in 1994, in which the history of post-war Taiwan is widely shared with the Taiwanese people's struggling between different identities imposed by different ruling authorities. Hsieh Zen-Ch'ang, "An Interview with Wu Nien-Jen," Film Appreciation, no. 71, Sep/Oct 1 994, Taipei, pp. 51-57.

(5.) Pierre Nora, "La nation-memoir," in Les lieux de memoire 11.3, p.653, quoted in Naomi Greene's Landscape of Loss: The National Past in Post-war French Cinema, New Jersey: University of Princeton Press, 1999, p.24.

(6.) Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: The Athlone Press, 1986, p.2, mentioned by Tony Barta in "Screening the Past: History Since the Cinema," Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, Westport Praeger, 1998, p.10.

(7.) Mazu Island is a part of Taiwan's territory, and is very near to Fujian province, the south-east of China.

(8.) Youn-Jeong Chae also discusses the relationship between the political references and the lives of the characters in his Ph.D thesis, Film Space and the Chinese Visual Tradition, New York: New York University, 1997, p.135.

(9.) Tatamis are thick Japanese mats made of straw, which are laid in order on the floor on which people sit and eat.

(10.) The older generation believes that the adoption of a boy would be a good sign to bring the family a boy, and that of a girl brings a girl.

(11.) Chae has a similar analysis of this scene in Film Space and the Chinese Visual Tradition, p.132.

(12.) Kathe Geist, "Narrative Strategies in Ozu's Late Films," in Reframing Japanese Cinema, eds., David Desser and Authur Nolletti, Jr., Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, p.92.

(13.) Chae, Film Space and the Chinese Visual Tradition, pp. 129-130.

(14.) ibid: p.128.

(15.) This point is also mentioned by Chae in Film Space and the Chinese Visual Tradition, pp. 127-129.

(16.) Chen Kuo-Fu, "A lime to Live, A lime to Die: The Memory of History", Lien-He Daily News, August 14, 1985. Taipei.

(17.) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London: Vintage, 1993, p.65.

I-Fen Wu is currently teaching film and literature at Tamkang University in Taipei. Her research field is mainly in film and culture studies.