By Brian Hu
Giant Leaps, Rocky Landings
In Taiwan, June marks the beginning of typhoon season, which, for visitors like myself used to California moderation, is a rough few months of celestial sadism, due partly to the street floods and falling trees, but also to the fact that the Pacific winds fail to adequately bring down the scorching tropical temperatures.
For young locals, typhoons are nothing compared to June's other series of storms: school placement exams. In the past month, three of my cousins have undergone these multi-day pressure cookers which make taking the SATs look as breezy as a game of checkers. It seemed that every weekend, somebody's future was on the line, be it my cousin taking his high-school placement test or another cousin taking the dreaded college entrance exam, known in Chinese by its infamous name, lian-kao. In Taiwan, where scores rather than qualitative factors such as recommendations and extracurriculars determine one's academic ascension, such tests are regarded as the beginning or ending of one's adult life, and thus students (or at least those with the money) spend their nights, weekends, and vacations in cram schools studying math and science well above their grade levels. Just hours after the test, the evening papers have already posted the answers, and despite their efforts to refrain, pressure -- be it personal, familial, cultural, national -- breaks down all defenses and my cousins nervously tabulate their scores. And it doesn't end in college; even my oldest cousin, who has successfully conquered these two exams, had to be tested again for entrance into graduate school. Students hardly have time to eat and play, let alone question this system, and even those who see the damaging nature of such tests have to succumb to it. After all, if you want to change the world, you need a graduate degree.
Such testing is the remnant of the Confucian system of efficiency and (male) equality in civil service, but Confucius could never have anticipated the test-taking mania and heartbreak involved with the monetary and emotional investment paid by families so that their children can enter the best possible school, which seems to me Taiwan's equivalent of the American dream.
Meanwhile, in the news we hear the story of Taiwan native Wu Chia-ching, the 16-year-old who just became the youngest person to ever win the World Pool Championships. In a much publicized response, Wu tearfully dedicated his win to his grandmother who had always encouraged him to play and practice pool, and thus he vowed to buy her a house with his prize money. This parallels the big sporting news last summer when Chen Shih-hsin became the first Taiwanese to win a gold medal at the Olympics, and the local media rushed to dig up her bleak past and the hard work that elevated her from a world of gangsters to the company of Olympians. In both news stories, ordinary Taiwanese work hard, overcome expectations, and become national heroes. The end.
Such stories are not unlike the films by Lee Hsing from the golden age of Taiwanese cinema, the “healthy realism” breed of melodrama pushed by the reigning Kuomintang government. In such films as Beautiful Duckling and He Never Gives Up, personal, economic, and family problems are settled through hard work, loyalty, and determination. That spirit of service through obedient labor persists today in the school entrance exams, and is further reinforced by the media, which is always looking for the latest homegrown hero.
What isn't reported is: what happens next? Or worse, what happens to those who don't make it? Regardless of whether one succeeds or fails, something from one's youth is lost. In Lin Yu-hsien's terrific new documentary Jump! Boys, there is a scene where a former gymnastics coach looks at a photograph of his former students and tells us where they all are now. One is a teacher, one is in prison, one is an elementary school gymnastics coach, whose class of six boys from Ilan is the subject of the documentary.
The filmmaker is the coach's younger brother, and more than anything, the film is the filmmaker's touching letter of love to his elder brother, expressing his admiration for someone who once competed with the world's best, became a star in the local media, but then fell to injuries and ultimately a life of petty crime.
Lin's camera frequently lingers over his brother's face, which though still young, looks beaten by a harsh life. He's still heavily built and inscribed on his body are the muscles that become remnants of his earlier life. Coach Lin, like most serious coaches, can be cruel to his young athletes, and we become tempted to connect his demeanor to his life experiences, as well as to see him as a symbol of the system which churns out tough and beaten Taiwanese test-takers. It's somewhat ironic that, at the end of the documentary, the coach tells us that he feels his mission is to pave a tough road for future national heroes, especially given how he appears to the camera as a fatigued, sad loner beaten by the same path he now presents for five to seven year-olds.
The director of Jump! Boys asks the right questions throughout, and his cordial relationship with the young gymnasts elicits some of the film's most heartbreaking moments. When he asks the children if their coach is mean, most are too afraid to answer, but their teary eyes speak volumes. He asks the children to talk about each other, and we discover how normal and free-spirited they are, which is in direct contrast to their cold-faced coach. The filmmaker talks to the parents about their childrens' rough practices and injuries, and the sincerity of their responses tell us about the concern and faith they have for their talented children. He asks the childrens' teachers to discuss the role gymnastics plays in the development of their personalities. However such conversations never turn into sappy commercials for school athletics; instead, the teachers imply the tragedy of it all: that some children have limits to their scholastic abilities and gymnastics is simply there to cushion their inevitable fall.
Coach Lin is never depicted as a villain; that would be too easy. Instead, his younger brother tells us that Lin may never have made it to the highest level of his sport, but it is how Lin dealt with the limbo of being a has-been, and crawled out of society's pressures to dedicate himself to what he knows best -- gymnastics -- that makes him a hero in his brother's eyes. Because the film is most interested in Lin's personality, history, and emotional baggage, the film's structuring event -- the national elementary school gymnastics championships -- becomes secondary, and in fact the team's performance becomes more a footnote than the film's conclusion. In this way, Jump! Boys escapes the easy sentimentalism of other competition-driven documentaries such as Spellbound and last year's Taiwanese rock-doc Ocean Fever, to become closer to the gymnastics equivalent of the French documentary To Be and to Have.
The most alarming thing about Jump! Boys is how easy-going it is. Despite its serious core, the documentary is never didactic, but rather loose, playful, and deceptively simple. The film uses animated sequences to visualize the children's dreams, but also to lend a certain cuteness. Further, any film featuring first grade boys in leotards will necessarily be adorable. The film's emotionally charged and socially conscious content but easy-going tone is established in the film's opening narration, in which the sober-toned filmmaker gives the background of his brother before warning us, “but this documentary isn't about my brother; he's not dead yet,” and then proceeds to introduce to us, one by one, the young stars of his film. You could accuse the film of excessive cuteness, but this quality only makes the film's darker elements more crushing and the rays of hope and redemption more satisfying. The film is a crowd-pleaser in the best possible sense: it appeals to the emotions in order to express its love and to illuminate the humanity of a society lost beneath the mad scramble of cram schools and placement tests.
The Taipei Beat: Column #1
A review of Ocean Fever