I am a bit sad to think I will be leaving this wonderful island in just over two weeks. I have really grown quite attached. I could easily stay here another 6 months or a year since I really feel like I have just barely scratched the surface here, both in terms of the people and culture as well as the materials that might potentially be useful to me in my dissertation research.
It is the little things about life here that really just make me smile. To give one little example, for the 3rd time in a row, as I walked home from the NTU library around 21:00, I saw a group of elderly residents of a neighborhood I pass through lounging in one of the many small parks and watching a Kung Fu movie on one of those large projector screens. The event doesn’t look very formal or organized, so I can only imagine that one of the locals dragged out the projector and large screen so the neighborhood could all watch it together.
Traditionally Taiwanese villages would put on entertainments (puppet shows, opera, and later movies) for the benefit of the Temple gods. When I did my fieldwork it was not uncommon to see old martial arts films being played on a giant screen to half a dozen little kids in front of the temple. This doesn’t seem to be a temple screening, but I wonder if it isn’t related to this tradition.
When I lived in Taiwan for a short period in 1988 there used to be quite a few film screenings like this in an alley next to my house, in the middle of town. It was wonderful! Whith that climate it works well.