My mind is baffled, full of slaughter,
Love and enmity wax and wane,
Lines of dejection describe my shame,
I sleep at night, rise in the morning,
and nothing gets done.
--Su Iam-bun
Liok Hap and Su Iam-bun and a cast of thousands wrangle with good and evil in a mythical world outside space and time, swirling with song and special effects. The legendary warriors achieved such heroic popularity in the early 1970s that the government proclaimed they interrupted citizens' daily work and banned them from the television screen. The result, however, was not a celebrity picket by the actors' guild, for these Taiwanese idols are the handy work of just one man, Huang Chun-hsiung.
The 73-year-old Huang is the creator of a cast of glove puppets that have enthralled the Taiwanese public for decades in live performances, TV shows and movies. In July this year, Huang received something like poetic justice from the current government--the prestigious National Culture and Arts Award for his achievement in a uniquely Taiwanese brand of glove puppetry.
"When Huang's show was on TV, everything stopped except for airplanes and trains," recalls Chiang Wu-tsang, a veteran Taiwanese glove puppetry researcher who plans to write a biography of Huang. "When I was late for afternoon class at elementary school because I'd been watching the puppet show, I wasn't afraid--I knew that all the teachers and even the principal would be late for the same reason."
The recognition of Huang's art as a worthy symbol of Taiwanese culture by an institution like the National Culture and Arts Award represents a further shift in cultural focus away from a Sinocentric, top-down view toward a more popular, homegrown variety. In a recent survey conducted by the Government Information Office, glove puppetry was voted the most representative image of Taiwan, outdoing icons such as Jade Mountain and the world's tallest building, Taipei 101.
Paul Lin also remembers the gloved magic that glued the entire nation to its TV sets every lunchtime. President of the Taiyuan Arts and Culture Foundation and a member of the National Culture and Arts Award selection committee this year, Lin thinks that commercial success may have detracted from his fellow members' evaluation of Huang's work. "Huang blurs the distinction between elite and popular cultures," Lin says. "But you can't deny the genuine artistic quality of his work." He believes that while Huang's accomplishment has been controversial, it is firmly rooted in the powerful Holo voices of the subtle puppet characters he has developed.
However, Lin and other committee members felt a need to find out how Huang's glove puppetry became such a deep social and cultural phenomenon. "We wanted to know how his art reflects interpersonal relationships and inner needs in an uncertain world," Lin says.
Su Iam-bun's character provides a clue. "Puppets like Su are household names in Taiwan," says Liau Sui-beng, director of Chung Shan Medical University's Department of Taiwan Languages and Literature. At a recent show in Ilan, Su retained his image as a victim persecuted by opposing forces, and his long hair flew wildly around. "This hairstyle represents a prisoner in traditional operatic drama and therefore symbolizes an inclination to endure pain and seek redemption," says Chen Long-ting. With the first doctorate in Taiwanese glove puppetry from National Cheng Kung University's Department of Taiwanese Literature, Chen thinks that Taiwanese people's identification with the long-suffering Su reveals something buried in their political consciousness, against the backdrop of painful colonial history.
Such symbolism is not necessarily the author's intention, but is likely derived from experiences of actual performances. Su Iam-bun was developed from Su Iam-hun, the hero of a play that Huang Chun-hsiung's father Huang Hai-tai adapted from an 18th century Chinese novel. Born in 1901, Huang Hai-tai is a distinguished glove puppet master and former recipient of the National Culture and Arts Award (and still alive).
Different forms of puppet shows using hand, string or shadow puppets had been staged in Taiwan for two centuries to entertain gods in front of local temples. However, under Japanese rule (1895-1945), the colonial government tried to replace local traditions with Japanese ones and banned most of the activities associated with folk customs and religions. Puppet shows were major targets, and a handful of glove puppet troupes were licensed and forced to put on plays exalting Japanese values in indoor theaters.
In the two decades following the arrival of the Kuomintang, theater performances of glove puppetry reached a commercial peak and brought about rapid change in the genre. The simple puppets used at temple shows were replaced by a generation of elaborately adorned descendants that gradually rose in height to about a meter tall. Original scriptwriting took the place of adaptations from classical novels and historical texts. Recorded modern music was layered over that of traditional live musicians, and new stage effects were introduced.
In the early 1950s, Huang Chun-hsiung, then in his early 20s, followed his elder brother Huang Chun-cing in setting up his own troupe. Making the most of all the modern staging techniques, his troupe toured the island in the 1950s and 1960s. It was then that he characterized Su Iam-bun as an accepting soul, resigned to the unfavorable situations that theater troupes had to cope with at the time, namely local gangsters demanding protection money and free admittance and an absence of social justice.
"As Huang Chun-hsiung's troupe dealt with these practical challenges, it presented figures like Su Iam-bun who mirrored its passive, yet persevering attitude and channeled repressed emotion onto the stage," Chen Long-ting says.
Memorable scenes saw Su tied to a cross by a villain and taken on a humiliating procession along busy streets or bound in iron chains and sent into exile in a hostile land. "Along with the sad music that accompanied such scenes of the put-upon hero," Chen says, "the audience also sensed a kind of endless hum, reverberating like thunder far off on the horizon." For Chen, that thunder was the sorrowful sound of Taiwan falling prey to one colonial power after another and was the prelude to the renewed interest in native roots in the mid-1970s.
Based on its theatrical popularity, Huang's troupe was approached by Taiwan Television Enterprise in the early 1970s to make a TV show. The pilot shows were so well received that they were booked into the primetime lunch hour slot and their frequency increased. Within a year, the puppet shows had achieved critical mass and became household names.
This happened in a period when all three terrestrial television stations were controlled by the long arms of the government, be it the military or the Kuomintang. Mandarin was the linguistic linchpin of the Sinocentric regime's dream of a unified China, and native Holo speakers were forbidden to speak their mother tongue in many situations.
In this light, the nation's most popular TV show, entirely in Holo, subverted the government's language policy. "Under martial law, Huang's shows--set in an unspecified time and place--turned out to be the only way to articulate Taiwanese people's common feelings," says Chen. "It marked the first radical and sweeping triumph of Taiwan's local language and culture over the construction of a 'superior' Chinese identity." Of all the entertainment forms, such as Taiwanese opera and traditional puppetry, it is said that Huang Chun-hsiung's show was perhaps the only one to attract audiences from all ethnic groups.
Before working with television, Huang Chun-hsiung had made three glove puppet films. Liau Sui-beng says that while media like film and television were once thought to toll the death knell of traditional puppetry, Huang has managed to harness the new technologies to deliver ever larger audiences. "He developed nothing less than a new genre from the traditional drama," Liao says. "In many ways his innovation has had a profound influence on Taiwan's puppetry."
Ever since the heyday of theatrical puppet plays, Huang Chun-hsiung has pushed the commercial boundaries of his troupe. He controlled the advertising for his performances, and he made matinee idols of his puppeteers and singers. He wrote Holo songs for each major character and paired them with Japanese, American and Taiwanese folk music. The songs made their singers famous and were later collected on albums that soon became hits. "Huang Chun-hsiung's puppet songs put a rocket under Holo songs," Chiang Wu-tsang says, "and made a major breakthrough in the then Mandarin-dominated entertainment world."
Su Iam-bun was given a stronger inward-looking dimension than that of his prototype, and the Holo theme songs built up the puppet characters' emotional intensity. Reflecting a good command of classical Holo, these songs continue to enthrall puppetry researchers such as Chiang and Chen and are still a source of inspiration to contemporary pop music. Toward the end of last year, for example, Wu Bai, a rock star, named part of a concert in Taipei County after the "Golden-light Play," in tribute to Huang Chun-hsiung's innovative use of visual effects and enchanting music in glove puppetry.
Wu Bai wrote and sang theme songs for the Legend of the Sacred Stone (2000), a film version of the television glove puppet shows made by the Pili International Multimedia Co. This company is operated by Huang Chun-hsiung's sons Chris and Vincent Huang, the chief scriptwriter and character voice, respectively. Pili has produced videos since the mid-1980s and now owns Taiwan's only cable TV station dedicated to glove puppetry. The endless adventures of TV puppets in Pili's more than 1,000 episodes have attracted a large number of young fans. Pili's productions are the greatest commercial success in glove puppetry and are widely considered to be an extension of Huang Chun-hsiung's creativity.
Chiang Wu-tsang thinks that while Pili has managed to explore the commercial possibilities, Huang Chun-hsiung's commercial success was largely incidental. By the same token, the broad popularity of his shows in the early 1970s staged an unwitting grassroots rebellion against the government's efforts to build a Sinocentric cultural model. No matter what is said about Huang Chun-hsiung, he is determined to see his art evolve. "Tradition is beautiful and precious," he said at his latest show in Ilan, "but I seek innovation and refinement."