Season 6, Ep. 2: Home Sweet Home

Saturday School Podcast

We recorded the latest episode of Saturday School a while ago, but fitting that we’re posting it when I’m actually in Taiwan! This season, we’re exploring Asian films about Asian America, and this week, we’re looking at the 1970 Taiwanese film "Home Sweet Home," which gives a glimpse into why Taiwanese people of a certain generation would have wanted to come to America (masters and doctorate degrees) and their decisions to stay in America vs. come back to Taiwan.

Even though neither of us were around in 1970s Taiwan, luckily this topic is something Brian has been researching for a decade. This film is mentioned in his new book, “Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” as are statistics like: In 1965, only 5% of Taiwanese people going abroad were coming back, so “Home Sweet Home” was part of a Taiwanese government propaganda push to convince its people that if they went abroad, they needed to return to help build the nation. By 1975, 25% were coming back.

We take the listener through a lot of the film in this episode, because it’s hard to find in the US. It's amusing to us to see the characters talking about “a Western scent” some of these Taiwanese Americans exude. It's also funny that part of being Westernized involves becoming more sexually liberated/impure – a stereotype that we still see 50 years later in this year’s Netflix series "A Taiwanese Tale of Two Cities." And we bring it all back to Ang Lee, because that’s what all Taiwanese Americans are required to do when discussing Taiwanese Americanness.