Ang Lee: A Never-Ending Dream 
BY IRENE SHIH FEBRUARY 26, 2013
Following Ang Lee’s second Best Directing win at the Academy Awards last night, this beautiful essay resurfaced. Here is my translation of Ang Lee’s words, written in 2006 (post-Oscar win). Please credit the translation to Irene Shih (and to this blog), thank you!
In 1978, as I applied to study film at the University of Illinois, my father vehemently objected. He quoted me a statistic: ‘Every year, 50,000 performers compete for 200 available roles on Broadway.’ Against his advice, I boarded a flight to the U.S. This strained our relationship. In the two decades following, we exchanged less than a hundred phrases in conversation.
Some years later, when I graduated film school, I came to comprehend my father’s concern. It was nearly unheard of for a Chinese newcomer to make it in the American film industry. Beginning in 1983, I struggled through six years of agonizing, hopeless uncertainty. Much of the time, I was helping film crews with their equipment or working as editor’s assistant, among other miscellaneous duties. My most painful experience involved shopping a screenplay at more than thirty different production companies, and being met with harsh rejection each time.
That year, I turned 30. There’s an old Chinese saying: ‘At 30, one stands firm.’ Yet, I couldn’t even support myself. What could I do? Keep waiting, or give up my movie-making dream? My wife gave me invaluable support.
My wife was my college classmate. She was a biology major, and after graduation, went to work for a small pharmaceutical research lab. Her income was terribly modest. At the time, we already had our elder son, Han, to raise. To appease my own feelings of guilt, I took on all housework – cooking, cleaning, taking care of our son – in addition to reading, reviewing films and writing scripts. Every evening after preparing dinner, I would sit on the front steps with Han, telling him stories as we waited for his mother – the heroic huntress – to come home with our sustenance (income).
This kind of life felt rather undignified for a man. At one point, my in-laws gave their daughter (my wife) a sum of money, intended as start-up capital for me to open a Chinese restaurant – hoping that a business would help support my family. But my wife refused the money. When I found out about this exchange, I stayed up several nights and finally decided: This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.
Afterward (and with a heavy heart), I enrolled in a computer course at a nearby community college. At a time when employment trumped all other considerations, it seemed that only a knowledge of computers could quickly make me employable. For the days that followed, I descended into malaise. My wife, noticing my unusual demeanor, discovered a schedule of classes tucked in my bag. She made no comment that night.
The next morning, right before she got in her car to head off to work, my wife turned back and – standing there on our front steps – said, ‘Ang, don’t forget your dream.’
And that dream of mine – drowned by demands of reality – came back to life. As my wife drove off, I took the class schedule out of my bag and slowly, deliberately tore it to pieces. And tossed it in the trash.
Sometime after, I obtained funding for my screenplay, and began to shoot my own films. And after that, a few of my films started to win international awards. Recalling earlier times, my wife confessed, ‘I’ve always believed that you only need one gift. Your gift is making films. There are so many people studying computers already, they don’t need an Ang Lee to do that. If you want that golden statue, you have to commit to the dream.’
And today, I’ve finally won that golden statue. I think my own perseverance and my wife’s immeasurable sacrifice have finally met their reward. And I am now more assured than ever before: I must continue making films.
You see, I have this never-ending dream.
Original text (in Chinese):
文 / 李安
1978年，當我準備報考美國伊利諾大學的戲劇電影系時，父親十分反感，他給我列了一個資料：在美國百老匯，每年只有兩百個角色，但卻有五萬人要一起爭奪這少得可憐的角色。當時我一意孤行，決意登上了去美國的班機，父親和我的關係從此惡化，近二十年間和我說的話不超過一百句！
但是，等我幾年後從電影學院畢業，我終於明白了父親的苦心所在。在美國電影界，一個沒有任何背景的華人要想混出名堂來，談何容易。從1983年起，我經過了六年的漫長而無望的等待，大多數時候都是幫劇組看看器材、做點剪輯助理、劇務之類的雜事。最痛苦的經歷是，曾經拿著一個劇本，兩個星期跑了三十多家公司，一次次面對別人的白眼和拒絕。
那時候，我已經將近三十歲了。古人說：三十而立。而我連自己的生活都還沒法自立，怎麼辦？繼續等待，還是就此放棄心中的電影夢？幸好。我的妻子給了我最及時的鼓勵。
妻子是我的大學同學，但她是學生物學的，畢⋯⋯業後在當地一家小研究室做藥物研究員，薪水少得可憐。那時候我們已經有了大兒子李涵，為了緩解內心的愧疚，我每天除了在家裡讀書、看電影、寫劇本外，還包攬了所有家務，負責買菜做飯帶孩子，將家裡收拾得乾乾淨淨。還記得那時候，每天傍晚做完晚飯後，我就和兒子坐在門口，一邊講故事給他聽，一邊等待”英勇的獵人媽媽帶著獵物（生活費）回家”。
這樣的生活對一個男人來說，是很傷自尊心的。有段時間，岳父母讓妻子給我一筆錢，讓我拿去開個中餐館，也好養家糊口，但好強的妻子拒絕了，把錢還給了老人家。我知道了這件事後，輾轉反側想了好幾個晚上，終於下定決心：也許這輩子電影夢都離我太遠了，還是面對現實吧。
後來，我去了社區大學，看了半天，最後心酸地報了一門電腦課。在那個生活壓倒一切的年代裡，似乎只有電腦可以在最短時間內讓我有一技之長了。那幾天我一直萎靡不振，妻子很快就發現了我的反常，細心的她發現了我包裡的課程表。那晚，她一宿沒和我說話。
第二天，去上班之前，她快上車了，突然，她站在臺階下轉過身來，一字一句地告訴我：”安，要記得你心裡的夢想！”
那一刻，我心裡像突然起了一陣風，那些快要淹沒在庸碌生活裡的夢想，像那個早上的陽光，一直射進心底。妻子上車走了，我拿出包裡的課程表，慢慢地撕成碎片，丟進了門口的垃圾桶。
後來，我的劇本得到基金會的贊助，我開始自己拿起了攝像機，再到後來，一些電影開始在國際上獲獎。這個時候，妻子重提舊事，她才告訴我：”我一直就相信，人只要有一項長處就足夠了，你的長處就是拍電影。學電腦的人那麼多，又不差你李安一個，你要想拿到奧斯卡的小金人，就一定要保證心裡有夢想。”
如今，我終於拿到了小金人。我覺得自己的忍耐、妻子的付出終於得到了回報，同時也讓我更加堅定，一定要在電影這條路上一直走下去。
因為，我心裡永遠有一個關於電影的夢。
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Editor’s note: Stoked about this film! The second feature from my friend Alvin who made Au Revoir Taipei.)
“Long before I met him, I was a fan of his writing, and his merciless wit. He’s bigger than food.”—Anthony Bourdain
Eddie Huang is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohaus—the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night—and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, Eddie wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own.
Eddie grew up in theme-park America, on a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac in suburban Orlando, raised by a wild family of FOB (“fresh off the boat”) hustlers and hysterics from Taiwan. While his father improbably launched a series of successful seafood and steak restaurants, Eddie burned his way through American culture, defying every “model minority” stereotype along the way. He obsessed over football, fought the all-American boys who called him a chink, partied like a gremlin, sold drugs with his crew, and idolized Tupac. His anchor through it all was food—from making Southern ribs with the Haitian cooks in his dad’s restaurant to preparing traditional meals in his mother’s kitchen to haunting the midnight markets of Taipei when he was shipped off to the homeland. After misadventures as an unlikely lawyer, street fashion renegade, and stand-up comic, Eddie finally threw everything he loved—past and present, family and food—into his own restaurant, bringing together a legacy stretching back to China and the shards of global culture he’d melded into his own identity.
Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the twenty-first century. It’s a story of food, family, and the forging of a new notion of what it means to be American.
Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang
Eddie Huang in Taiwan. Note to self, surf the waves the next time I’m there.
Taiwan Oyster
I cosign on Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic People’s party — who would be the first female president of Taiwan if elected.
A Rational Mind: The Films of Edward Yang
By DAVID HUDSON
In 1997 — three years before Yi Yi would introduce Edward Yang to most of those who know him at all, and ten years before Yang succumbed to colon cancer at the age of 59 — Barbara Scharres staged what was at the time a complete retrospective of his work in Chicago, prompting a pretty magnificent piece from Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Reader. He begins by imagining a “new kind of cinema” that would, as opposed to the predominant mode of proposing “various escapes from modern life,” instead “lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it.” And in 1997, he was “discovering clues about this new kind of cinema in two very different places, chiefly through the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Iran and Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang in Taiwan.”
Needless to say, several intriguing paragraphs follow in which he compares and contrasts, pairs up and delineates these four figures until, eventually: “The most novelistic of the four directors, Yang is also in some ways the most challenging: his complex plots typically incorporate several crisscrossing narrative strands; he dares us to keep track of them all. Of the four he’s also the one most fully engaged with the problems of contemporary urban life, and the one most preoccupied with the relationship between his characters and both architecture and objects.” A Brighter Summer Day (1991), he argues, “belongs in the company of key works of our era: Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome; Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó; Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Life and Nothing More, and Taste of Cherry; and Hou’s trilogy — City of Sadness, The Puppet Master, and Good Men, Good Women…. Indeed, Yang’s film surpasses these other masterpieces in its novelistic qualities, richly realizing a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the 90s. It took Yang four years to prepare — much of the time apparently spent training his superb cast, which is mainly composed of nonprofessionals. In fact, this film is so uncommonly good that Yang’s other very impressive works pale beside it.”
Again, Yi Yi had not yet been made. A deeper analysis of A Brighter Summer Day follows, leading into several solid paragraphs on other films in the oeuvre. All in all, a highly recommended read. For the moment, though, here’s Richard Brody in the current issue of the New Yorker on A Brighter Summer Day: “In the nearly four-hour span of this vast Proustian memory piece, from 1991, Edward Yang meticulously delineates the anguish of young people in Taipei in 1959 and the gang violence that pervades their lives…. Yang’s methods bring a melancholy tenderness to his recollections; he films long takes of action intricately staged in real time with a rueful, contemplative reserve, and, as in Proust, the physical objects to which he pays close attention — an American tape recorder, a radio from China, a Japanese sword, a flashlight stolen from the movie studio — both signify and effect the endurance of the past.”
“In all of his films, Yang examined the world through the cloudy prism of modern Taipei,” wrote Godfrey Cheshire in the Voice when we lost Yang in 2007. Let’s have Cinespect’s Ryan Wells interject here for a moment: “Usually when the talk moves to Yang there’s a very personal, melancholy longing for what could have been, all the while cherishing even more what we’ve been given. It’s very classic Yang, that pit you get in your stomach.”
Back to Cheshire: “Born in 1947 in southeastern China, he was brought to Taiwan by parents fleeing the Communist revolution.” Yang studied in the States and “worked briefly as a researcher in Seattle before an art-house encounter with Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God sent him back to Taiwan determined to be a filmmaker.” His “Urban Trilogy” — That Day, on the Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985) and The Terrorizers (1986) — “drew comparisons to Antonioni and Godard for their intricately austere and stylistically adroit dissections of contemporary anomie. After the disappointing reception of the five-years-in-the-making A Brighter Summer Day, Yang shifted course. His next two films, A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996), tried to give a comic spin to the director’s characteristic concern with the flux and disarray of life in Taipei. Though they suggested to some critics that Yang’s gift was not for comedy, the films led to the brilliant synthesis of Yi Yi (A One and a Two)… Though surely not intended as a summing-up, Yi Yi managed to combine the critical acuity of the Urban Trilogy and the affecting expansiveness of A Brighter Summer Day with the philosophical whimsy of his previous two films. A vision of family (and city) life as a mesh of precarious privacies, the three-hour bittersweet comedy won Yang a Best Director nod at Cannes as well as the Best Picture award from the National Society of Film Critics. It also earned Yang something he’d long deserved: a hearing with American filmgoers.”
“The fact that Yang is, to American audiences, synonymous with Yi Yi is startling because Yang’s films are all about process and gestation,” suggests Simon Abrams in Slant. “Like the Taipei of his films, Yang’s filmography is a body of work of and about progress, a body of themes and ideas that all come together in his swan song. In films like That Day, on the Beach and Taipei Story, Yang’s protagonists try to determine whether it’s better to tentatively withdraw from society or to enjoy both the perils and the ecstasies of fully engaging with the world outside their front door…. In later films, his characters are more capable of taking the highs of life with the lows. And that’s a good part of why Yi Yi is one of Yang’s most accomplished works; equal parts celebration and primal scream to modern domestic life in Taipei, it’s a mosaic of angst and love. It’s the apex of Yang’s oeuvre and a self-sufficient microcosm unto itself.”
Turn Left, Turn Right
Headed to Taiwan on a two week media press tour, all expenses paid. Riding a day (200km) of the Taiwan Cup race and getting race coverage for Embrocation Cycling Journal. Oh and stealing world-class boba recipes for Boba Guys. Updates will come via Twitter: YMFY.
“When I came to the United State, I noticed that many people don’t know my hometown Taiwan. Some people even cannot tell the difference between Taiwan and Thailand, just because they sound alike. As a designer, I think I should do something to promote this beautiful island.
The cover of the book is just like someone is watching Taiwan with telescope, and said “Ilha formosa”. It is inspired by the story of the first time European found Taiwan. They looked at this beautiful island and said “Ilha formosa” which means a beautiful island in Portuguese. After that, “Formosa” had been used as a name of this island (Taiwan) in the west for hundreds years.” - Tien-Min Liao, on her book, Ilha Formosa.
