Kareem Abdul-Jabbar posted on his substack today about Bruce Lee who would’ve been 83 had he not died 50 years ago today. I was planning to start this post writing about Bruce Lee who’s also fondly remembered on Maria Popova’s The Marginalian. Now that these two have done it better, all I’ll say is that I am excited for Ang Lee’s upcoming film about Bruce Lee!
I met legendary Taiwanese American filmmaker Ang Lee before I met my spouse, Ted Hope. Along with his company Good Machine, Ted produced Ang’s first seven films: 1) PUSHING HANDS, 2) THE WEDDING BANQUET, 3) EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, 4) SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, 5) THE ICE STORM, 6) RIDE WITH THE DEVIL, 7) CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. I have seen every one of these movies, most of them multiple times, starting from high school. They influenced my traveling to Taiwan for the first time in 1995 - 96. I’m so grateful for the work and the support of Ang Lee to this day.
I heard about Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalist Party (KMT) before I learned about President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). One of my mentors, bosses at the Council on Foreign Relations and chosen family members, Jerome Alan Cohen, was President Ma’s professor at Harvard Law School and they are still close. It was in no small part thanks to Jerry that I was able to secure an interview for INVISIBLE NATION with President Ma in a film with President Tsai because we all want the story to transcend local party politics.
I made movies in Beijing before I made movies in Taiwan. I’m discounting the short I made in Taipei in 1996, the first time I ever used a camera which was borrowed from my language teacher, to film during the inauguration of Taiwan’s first ever democratically elected president Lee Deng-hui.
It was working to get the film I made in Beijing by a Chinese director distributed that sparked that first encounter with Ang Lee in an airport. Fortunately, my friend, Karin Chien, figured out a system for Chinese independent film distribution and started a company to make it happen, dGenerate Films.
I worked at the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) before I worked at the Council on Foreign Relations. While at the NCUSCR, I worked with their Vice President Jan Berris to interview Fudan University students in Shanghai for media internships in the U.S. that if I understand correctly, is what got filmmaker Violet Du Feng started. In both jobs, I met and listened to Henry Kissinger speak more times than most people (who are as sickened by his record of war crimes as I am) would choose. I filmed Dr. Kissinger in the green room before an event with President Obama’s US Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman in my first film. It was a film about US-China relations during the extremely volatile period after the 2008 global financial crisis, a watershed moment as big as Xi Jinping’s 2019 speech about Taiwan, a first for the CCP in forty years, in which Xi stated he would not renounce the use of force to take Taiwan.
I spent the first decades of my adult life working in China, leading with love, being low ego, moving at the speed of trust, and being known as a friend of China.
Though times have changed (rapidly in the last few years), and China is inviting fewer friends in and being less friendly, to put it mildly, I have not stopped being a friend.
Still, I resent the bind that anyone who is willing to tell Taiwan’s story, any story about Taiwan, is put in where we might be called anti-China, or a China hawk simply for telling Taiwan’s story. I am not a dissident and Taiwan is not a dissident country. I reject all of these labels as overly reductive, simplistic, petty, politically motivated and outdated.
I am part of a community and the community is who I want to highlight and it transcends and crosses all of these political boundaries and nation state divisions just as art and film do. This is the power of film that most attracts me. When this film comes out, I want to fade into the background, not to hide because I’m scared, but to foreground all of those in front of and behind the camera who made this film possible.
I want to thank all of those in the Asian American and Asian communities who have taken time to support our film and give us notes to increase our sensitivity to how best to tell this most delicate story we tell in INVISIBLE NATION. In particular, Jean Tsien and Leo Chiang in the Taiwanese American documentary film community have been critically necessary to our understanding. There are many more whose names I’m protecting. I know I’m more of a vessel for this story than anything else.
While this substack is just beginning, I want to invite in all those who would like to write about Taiwan to write as we continue to enlarge and expand our circle of community and understanding. Thank you!
Note: correction from last post, heavy metal rock star of Chthonic, Freddy Lim, is serving as a legislator through February 2024.