A mainland dude’s researching journey in Taiwan (1) – reflection on my film and dissertation

Having grown up in China, I have my perception of Taiwan from television shows, the internet and state-owned or government-owned news media. I have never seen Taiwan as a very different place from any major province in mainland China and I did expect a similar culture, cuisine, personalities before I actually went there. It has never occurred to me that Taiwan is so different that I have to adjust to its daily habits, manners and even language (despite that we all speak mandarin) until I spent my first couple of days in Taipei city.

The decision to go to Taiwan was made partially because of the title of this degree programme, which is known as International Journalism, and partially because of some conversations I had with some Taiwanese friends that I met during my studies. It was striking to hear people from Taiwan constantly distinguishing themselves from the Chinese and even trying to use second languages to distance themselves from anything that relates to China.

For me, it feels almost similar to the situation where a Scottish or Welsh say to an English that they are not British, apart from the fact that it worries me. The worry was even more intensified after I spent several days in Taiwan.

One day I went out surfing with some newly met friends. One very nice lady took us to a local restaurant after my pathetic exhausting first surfing experience in Yilan. It was very local and people were playing some Mongolian music composed by one of those most famous classic music icons. We ended up talking about food cultures. The same lady started explaining origins of some food, and asking me questions like “what is it like in your country” or “do you have something similar in your country” with a specific stress on the “different nationalities”.

My hands stopped in the air, and with them one slice of meat wrapped with spring onions which can be almost the same as some of the dishes you can find in many towns or cities on the other side of the Taiwan Channel. I smiled most of the time and nodded, respectfully though it’s hard to take in that kind of information for me. The reason is simple: it’s highly possible that her grandparents were from some coastal provinces in mainland China but she doesn’t know or doesn’t care this part of history in her family. Other than those slightly awkward moments, she was a gorgeous, generous and kind person and the night was lovely.

I don’t know how to sum up those feelings: I felt pleased and welcomed whenever I went to any restaurants or shops in Taiwan due to their very friendly services; it felt so familiar to see people working hard day and night to make a living in no matter what kind of weather situation; I felt it’s a shame that many young people in Taiwan have never had the opportunity or the will to learn about China or Chinese people; I felt strange whenever I turned the TV on and saw HBO or Fox broadcasting a newly released American TV series; I felt ambushed when I noticed how people treat education and researching differently in Taiwanese universities; and I did feel a bit of belligerence when my accent exposed my identity and the news reports were showing about Chinese officials being attacked in another city in Taiwan – those feelings were with me throughout the entire period of 16 days, and I had to take a lot of them away for my interviews and film.

The overall experience in Taiwan was very informative. I was absorbing new information every single day and I didn’t even think it would ever stop.

I interviewed people that I did not expect to see at all before I got there. Professor Lin did not reply to any of my emails but when I showed up in front of his office, his assistant helped me hook up with him. We did the interview the day before he headed to America. Jieshou Jin, the politician who went to one of the islands himself, was actually a new contributor for me because I had never thought about interviewing him until my friend brought his name up in one of our conversations. She told me that her dad said I should interview Jieshou Jin when I was sitting in a Seven Eleven supermarket.

Those two interviews changed my entire concept of my film. They are all fighters in this dispute. One was experiencing political harassment when pursuing further study in America. One was having a conversation directly with the president of Taiwan’s authority. Their engagement made this film more than “a fisherman’s day” or a recap of “the old people’s fight”. They made it clear that people should know what has gone wrong and why it does matter, despite some of their thoughts contradicting what I got from Taiwanese fishermen.

The interviews went very well. Unfortunately, I was not diligent enough to check all the tapes after the interview/before I headed back to the UK. Several tapes were damaged and a huge part of some of the interviews was lost, which again pushed me to adjust the film structure based on whatever I had at that moment. Honestly, it was not easy. Actually it never had been since I did not have the brain for film producing and the chosen shots and sequences turned out not to be as useful as I originally thought, such as the fishing market shots, city shots in Taipei and a time-lapse effect shot of the city getting lit up when it was getting dark on a hot summer night.

It all came down to one core issue of this project, which is researching. Before I left for the film, all I had thought about was which format I should use to present this journalistic current affair story instead of how I was going to construct the film and what kind of pictures I would need for this type of film, in which a lot stories happened in the past. I should have been more prepared for the possible situations. However, I did learn really a lot about filming and producing, the hard way.

The film accounts for a huge part of this dissertation, however, in terms of the entire outcome; I do think that I have done a decent job. The whole idea of using the Two Level Game Theory as an important analysing tool to explain and explore the topics has proven to be helpful. The theoretic model reminded me of the people that I should talk to and the questions that I should ask. It indeed offers a new vision of looking at this international dispute. With the engagement of the negotiator, who happens to be one of the fishermen, the research was complete and the literature review has been evidently valuable for this particular research.

Frankly, the approaches I took to research this subject were not easy. It was hard to balance the practical researching methods and the theoretical ones. I, as a researcher, had to pay attention to how appealing the documentary is and how insightful my analysis is, especially when it came to a point where I have to make sure the film was made for the purpose of serving and supporting the research. In this case, in order to investigate what has been going on in Taiwan, many parts of interviews were used in the film regardless of the footages that I could get from the scene.