Taiwan Today

Each girl is a candle in our life, casting light on each phase of our crazy, endearing pursuit of love, helping us boys move step-by-step toward becoming a man.
What we should do is to like that girl more, a bit more, a bit, a bit more.
She should be liked as though the waiting could not fail.
Then we can persist with a belief in love.
“Ko-teng, I hope I can give this girl happiness,” Liao Ying-hong says, his voice becoming lively again.
“Don’t just try, you must do it.” I clench my fist and cannot help shedding tears.
If writing down my memories of love has a meaning, it is the wish that each boy and girl reading these stories would acquire a little bit of courage to love.
—You Are the Apple of My Eye, Giddens, 2006

An online novelist makes a splash in the world of cinema.

On the last day of 2011, the list of Hong Kong’s top-grossing Mandarin, Cantonese or Taiwanese-language films had a new No. 1. The spot had previously been claimed by the Hong Kong-produced Kung Fu Hustle since its release in 2004, as the movie generated record box-office earnings of HK$61.27 million (US$7.9 million). The movie’s director, Hong Kong film icon Stephen Chow (周星馳), boasts a great number of fans in Taiwan including Giddens (九把刀), the director of You Are the Apple of My Eye, a campus love story released in Hong Kong theaters in October 2011 after already earning more than NT$400 million (US$13.3 million) in its home country. When the box office earnings in Hong Kong for You Are the Apple of My Eye were poised to break those of Kung Fu Hustle, Giddens described the news on his blog as a miracle that he had never dreamed of, even for a second. That a Mandarin-speaking film from Taiwan could outsell all locally made works in the Cantonese-speaking society of Hong Kong is truly nothing less than miraculous, says film critic Liang Liang (梁良), a member of the Chinese Script Writers Association based in Taipei.

In 2011, locally produced films saw their best showing in Taiwan’s domestic market in more than two decades. According to the Government Information Office, local works earned about NT$715 million (US$23.8 million), or 17.46 percent of all box-office earnings in Taipei, a great leap from 7.13 percent the previous year and from the mostly less than 2-percent level since the 1990s. Among the 36 Taiwanese movies released in 2011, You Are the Apple of My Eye was perhaps the biggest surprise in terms of its overall attraction at home and abroad. The film is based on Giddens’ autobiographical novel of the same name that was published in book form in 2006 after being posted on the Internet, like his many other works. The Mandarin title means literally “the girl we all chased during those years,” while the story is set mainly in the author’s alma mater, Ching Cheng High School, in his hometown Changhua City in central Taiwan. The “apple,” Shen Jia-yi, is a common subject of the pubescent yearnings of the male protagonist and his classmates. The plot extends beyond high school to university, and ends with the protagonist attending Shen’s wedding. For the director, the film is created as a “time machine” that brings a boy back to meet his girl again in a “parallel dimension of time and space” where they are always a couple. “The genuine affection of this innocent love story transcends gender, age and region. It touches on a common memory for many people, so it fills a great market niche,” Liang says. For this reason, the romance has outperformed the genre’s usual limited regional popularity, and has been able to attract large audiences in other Mandarin-speaking societies, the film critic says. Together with its sales in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the film, which was made for around NT$50 million (US$1.7 million), has earned more than NT$1 billion (US$33.3 million) in Southeast Asian markets including mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore.

Like many other critics and observers, Liang believes that another reason for the film’s success is the large readership that Giddens has developed through his online writings. In recent years, Giddens has been one of the most-talked-about Taiwanese authors and a leading fiction writer on major bestseller charts, which were formerly dominated by Mandarin translations of foreign books. Giddens, or “nine knives” in Mandarin, is the penname of 34-year-old Ko Jing-teng (柯景騰), who has written more than 60 books since he started posting his stories online in 2000. The emergence of online novels like Giddens’ followed in the tradition of a popular campus romance story that then-graduate student Tsai Jih-heng (蔡智恆) posted in 34 parts on his university’s intranet bulletin board system in 1998. Since then, online writing has been seen as heralding a more democratic, inclusive age of literature. For one thing, the circulation of works online undermines the gatekeeper role of editors at publishing houses and of literary pages in newspapers in selecting works for readers, who can now have direct exchanges with online authors and can decide for themselves whether or not they like a work. At the same time, online novelists’ close contact with their audience helps produce literature that relates more directly to the experience or interest of general readers, although such works might fall short of traditional literary standards. All in all, despite their diversity in motif and content, popular online novels display a distinct sense of local, everyday life, an aspect absent in the translated works of popular literature. For example, Waiting for Someone Café, another campus love story Giddens wrote in 2004, is set in northern Taiwan’s Hsinchu City, where the author spent his university years. Featuring a smoothly flowing narrative with the writer’s signature witty and conversational style, Waiting for Someone Café is one of Giddens’ works that many fans have said they would like to see on the big screen as the author-director considers his next filmmaking project.

Among Giddens’ other bestsellers is the martial arts story Kung Fu (2004). Also set in Changhua, the novel develops around a junior high school student and an old kung fu master. Unlike many other online novelists, including Tsai, who stick to love stories, especially those set on campus, Giddens’ works range across genres from love affairs to horror stories, martial arts, science fiction and social satire. Liang notes that such a great scope has helped Giddens to develop a strong readership base in the Internet community. The ready-made fan base has the potential to bring about a marketing “explosion” such as was seen for the film version of You Are the Apple of My Eye, Liang says.

Pop Connection

In fact, Giddens’ writings have an inherent connection with other aspects of pop culture and entertainment as many of his works were created with future adaptation into comics, television series or movies in mind. Before his story of puppy love with Shen Jia-yi draws to a close, the novel’s narrator finds himself at Shen’s wedding, musing about seeing his story on the big screen.

I saw the bride and bridegroom kissing each other. All of a sudden at that moment, a particularly enthusiastic scene occurred to me. A unique ending that sees our adolescent story become a film.

According to many admiring comments from audience members on the eventual film, that new ending proved to be a powerful visual footnote to a love story that is partly hilarious and partly regretful, but also delightfully sweet. It reveals a natural link between popular literature and other entertainment forms.

The film’s production company, Star Ritz Productions Co. Ltd., has sold the film rights of a number of Giddens’ other works to buyers in the domestic and foreign markets. Among such works, The Killer Who Never Kills, a novel from Giddens’ Killer series, has since been made into a film in Taiwan that garnered more than NT$50 million at local theaters in 2011, and rights to make a Hollywood version have also been granted. A comic book adaptation of Kung Fu has also been created by a Hong Kong author. In the world of television, the idol drama Love, Full Count released in 2007 is based on Giddens’ novel of the same title. Star Ritz has been a lead producer of television drama series including Meteor Garden (2001), the show that created a craze for idol dramas in Taiwan. The company’s president, Angie Chai (柴智屏), served as executive producer for You Are the Apple of My Eye.

Young Generation

Film critic Liang points out that while it was Chai’s first experience making a film, her background in idol dramas served the production well as she was able to grasp the feel and interest of younger generations. You Are the Apple of My Eye also marks the first filmmaking venture for another major investor, Sony Music Entertainment (Taiwan) Ltd., which was responsible for marketing the film. “Nonetheless, a record company can have a deep understanding of cultural propensities and regional distinctions in the greater Mandarin-speaking market,” Liang says. “Thus, its contribution to the making of the film helped shape a pop flavor different from that of traditional Taiwanese films.” In other words, together with the input of writer-director Giddens, the film is a combination of creative energies from the worlds of local television dramas, pop music and online literature. For at least a decade, these sectors of Taiwan’s entertainment industry have produced works that often outperform foreign competitors in the local market, and have been helping the Taiwanese film industry, which began showing signs of a revival in the mid-2000s, catch up with the ongoing renaissance in the local cultural sector. This year, two locally made hit films released in January for the Lunar New Year holidays were directed by television drama directors. Black and White Episode I is the film version of a popular police television drama series, which was mostly filmed in southern Taiwan’s Kaohsiung City, while Din Tao: Leader of the Parade tells the story of a Taiwanese folk parade art group based in central Taiwan’s Taichung City. Both works resonated with the public through their portrayal of distinct characteristics of local society, just like a number of other popular homegrown works in recent years.

While Giddens had directed an episode of the four-part movie L-O-V-E (2009), You Are the Apple of My Eye was his first attempt at a full-length feature film. Ko Chen-tung (柯震東), the actor who portrays Giddens in the film, is a university sports student, and was a complete unknown when he won the role. He has since been named best new performer at the 2011 Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s most prestigious honors for films from Mandarin-speaking societies. Liang points out that, rather than leading to an immature work, the relative inexperience of the film production team contributed significantly to shaping a refreshing rhapsody about youth, free of the “calculation” that the film critic says characterizes the production of most big-budget films dominating the mainland Chinese market.

Emotions over “Experts”

Such films, including those jointly produced by Hong Kong and mainland Chinese companies, like to “show off how much money they spend, how many superstars they have on the screen, how many exciting action scenes they create as well as how many special effects they made overseas,” Liang says. He says that, instead of being made under such a “production line” model by filmmaking “experts,” You Are the Apple of My Eye builds a more direct emotional connection to audiences, a link that the film critic believes forms the core value of a film. In Giddens’ own words, this is a movie “made by the audience for the audience’s sake.”

Notably, in a Taiwanese film like You Are the Apple of My Eye, Liang discerns a “cultural identity” that is being lost in movies from Hong Kong, as many of the territory’s filmmakers have moved to mainland China’s movie industry where they work more like “skilled technicians.” He points out that during the golden era of Hong Kong films in the 1990s, before the region returned to Chinese rule, its filmmakers achieved a subtle balance between presenting a distinct identity and catering to commercial concerns, and were keen to try new material and new forms of expression. For example, Yesteryou Yesterme Yesterday (1993), an adolescent coming-of-age story like You Are the Apple of My Eye, sold well, won critical acclaim and was followed by two sequels. It seems that what has been left behind by Hong Kong filmmakers is being picked up by Taiwan’s new-generation directors like Giddens, Liang says, as the author-turned-director represents a local move toward humanistic cinema that incorporates commercial appeal.

In Mandarin-speaking societies, Giddens demonstrates a creative force that is seeing Taiwanese works gain momentum in pop culture markets. On the last day of 2011, Giddens thanked Hong Kong audiences of You Are the Apple of My Eye for leading the film to its No. 1 position in the earnings chart there. “My homeland Taiwan is the root that gives great power to the film,” he wrote on his blog. “And Hong Kong gives wings to the film.” With that root and those wings, Taiwanese creativity is set to be the apple of many more people’s eyes.

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com