On my flight back to San Francisco from Taiwan, I watched an amazing Taiwanese animation movie called “on Happiness Road”. I didn’t expect this movie to be good, but it surprised me and became one of my favorites.
This movie is shown through the eyes of the director Hsin Yi Sung, how she grew up, how Taiwan transitioned after the war against China. Hsin, was born in 1975, she has experienced curfew and it’s end, Taiwanese people fighting for the right to vote, fighting for political freedom, and fighting for freedom of speech. It’s a story about her family, and about the growth of the Taiwanese people in past 50 years.
The main character Chi, chased her American dream after going through with her studies in Taiwan. While in America her Grandmother's' passes, so Chi returns to her family on Happiness Road and threw herself back in this small developing country.
Curfew
After the Chinese Civil War, the Chinese political party Kuomintang who was led by Chiang Kai-Shek, moved to Taiwan to start their ruling. The whole country was put under curfew from 1949 to 1987, Taiwanese people weren’t allowed to speak their own language and a lot of political persecution happened to the residents of Taiwan.
People fight for the right to vote and speech
During the middle part of the movie, when Chi attended high school, the curfew had ended, but the whole country still only had one political party that held all the power, so some brave people got together and fight for the right to vote.
I became interested in the background of the director, so I looked up some interviews she had. She mentioned that when she was in graduate school, she came up of the idea to make this movie. She decided to make this movie because that she wanted to tell people the story about Taiwan and to remind our generation that we should proud of our culture and how they overcame. The movie showed a lot of details of how we grow up, she pointed out the major issues between our generation and our parents’ generation. The difference, the argument, and the way we express our love. In the end of the movie, director took us back to the Happiness road, the root of our culture.
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