Fei Xiang (费翔), a Taiwanese American entertainer active since the 1980s, has achieved remarkable success in music, TV, film, and Broadway, across multiple national boundaries, including the PRC, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S. This paper examines how Fei Xiang contributes to the production of popular geopolitical narratives that link the PRC, Taiwan, and the U.S.

Focusing on Fei Xiang's 1987 performance of the song “Cloud of Hometown” on China’s most-watched TV program, CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, I will first provide biographical background on Fei Xiang, highlighting how his family history connects PRC, Taiwan, and the U.S. I will then analyze the song itself, originally performed by Chinese Malaysian singer Wen Zhang, which conveys themes of longing for one’s homeland and draws from Wen’s personal experience of studying and living abroad. When Fei Xiang performed this song on CCTV’s stage, he genuinely expressed a desire to meet his maternal grandmother and family members in China for the first time. However, CCTV framed the performance in a way that produced popular geopolitical narratives, implicitly asserting sovereignty over Taiwan and appropriating Fei’s family reunion to legitimize potential geopolitical claims concerning Taiwan.

This paper concludes by reflecting on how Fei Xiang’s family history reveals the complex relationships between China, Taiwan, and the U.S., while also illustrating how personal stories can be easily—and dangerously—appropriated for geopolitical purposes.

How did Taiwanese-language films (taiyupian) imagine foreign travel? The height of the taiyupian era was the 1960s, when Taiwan’s economic boom was taking off, filling citizens with aspirations to international travel that they could not yet afford. It was also the Cold War era. Most scholarship on taiyupian focuses on it as a domestic issue within the context of the islander-mainlander (benshengren-waishengren) binary opposition. Yet, as I have argued in Lee and Espena’s Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinema (2024), it can also be analysed through the lens of the Cold War as a culture of “compliance without commitment.” How then did fantasies of foreign travel manifest themselves in taiyupian? This paper takes Tarzan and the Treasure (Taishan Baozang, 1965) and True and False 007 (Wangge Liuge 007, 1966) as case studies. In keeping with the general circumstances of aspiration with limited means, both films were shot on location – not in Malaysia and Hong Kong, where the action supposedly takes place, but instead in the hills outside Taipei. I will argue that both films also manifest a cosmopolitan culture in their appropriations from Cold War capitalist popular culture. At the same time, their narratives tell cautionary tales that acknowledge the aspirational culture of the time despite being caught between larger forces beyond their control and therefore emphasize the important of family as the only reliable foundation for benshengren.

Hung Hung 鴻鴻 (1964 – ) ranks among the most unique and intriguing contemporary Taiwanese poets known for his artistic multitalent as a poet, filmmaker, theatre director and scriptwriter. His multi-artistry has been projected into his poetry. Cinematic techniques present in his poetry are specific in juxtaposing camera shoots by the lyrical speaker and sequencing of stanzas in many of his poems. Additionaly, Hung’s poetry also showcases art synesthesia of audio-visual objects and phenomena, as well as narrative aspects. As Ying Kong pointed out in her insightful study on “Cinematic Techniques in Modernist Poetry”, modernist poetry should not be appreciated only for its sound and rhythm, but also for its similarities with movies. She further elaborated on this mentioning that modernist poetry conveys meaning in apparently comparable way as movies do in its fragmentation, juxtaposition, sequence of cross-cutting, editing etc. There can be traced the same principles as in motion pictures in many of Hung‘s poems, providing a captivating intersection and communication of cinema and poetry in his poetic texts. The aim of this paper is to look into these principles and the way they interact in a selection of Hung’s poems.

"Special panel, as discussed with KK"