Tracing a Journeyman’s Electric Shadow: Healthy Realism, Cultural Policies, and Lee Hsing, 1964–1980

Abstract

Almost 20 years after Taiwan’s return to China under Nationalist rule, the first domestic color film was produced in 1964. Oyster Girls, codirected by Lee Hsing and Lee Chia (no relation), was an immediate box office success and went on to win the Best Feature Film award the following year at the Asia Film Festival (renamed the Asian Pacific Film Festival in 1983). A landmark for Taiwan cinema’s technological achievement and a tremendous commercial and international success, this film marked the beginning of Healthy Realism (jiankang xieshi zhuyi). Three decades after the inception of this movement, film critic Chiao Hsiung-Ping lamented that, because of the movement’s emphasis on an “impoverished peasantry” instead of “efforts toward modernization,” it could at best be considered a “glorious failure.”¹ Chiao grouped Healthy Realism with the Yellow Plum Melody costume musicals² and melodramas based on popular romance novels by Qiong Yao, all of which, in her words, are “lost in nostalgia and escapism.” Her sweeping condemnation is, in retrospect, unjustified, but nonetheless instructive because of its revisionist rhetoric. The grouping of those different films and genres into one historical category overlooks the muddied history of the structures and modes of production within which those different genres had to operate.