The Making of Your Name Engraved Herein: A Conversation with Patrick Liu

ABSTRACT

For his most recent feature Your Name Engraved Herein (2020), Patrick Liu turns to his own biography for inspiration. He recreates the story of his first love and, working with his former schoolmate (and now executive producer) Chu Yu-ning, shows life in a boarding school in Taiwan during the late 1980s. Starring Edward Chen and Tseng Ching-hua, the film takes us to a time when martial law has just been lifted. Chang Jia-han (Chen), nicknamed ‘A-Han’, and Wang Bo-de (Tseng), ‘Birdy,’ find themselves in the repressive environment of a Catholic boarding school, and their romance, however intense, becomes the stuff of missed opportunities. In the following interview, Liu and I explore the film’s autobiographical elements, read the film in the light of Taiwan’s LGBTQ history, and unpack Liu’s project. We begin by looking at the film’s context, before considering how much Taiwan has changed; and we continue by examining how Your Name Engraved Herein variously incorporates and subverts the tropes of American LGBTQ films. This interview contributes to scholarship by celebrating, and by analysing, a film that is important to both Taiwan and Asian LGBTQ cinema.

KEYWORDS:

• Patrick Liu
• Your Name Engraved Herein
• LGBTQ
• Taiwan
• boarding school
• romance

Acknowledgments

I am enormously grateful to Blu Tirohl and Aggie Yu for their help. I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support through an Insight Development Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Iwabuchi (2001) traces the roots of Japanese idol dramas, an important precursor to Taiwanese idol dramas: ‘In Taiwan, Japanese dramas are recognised as an established genre called Japanese Idol Drama, which was coined by Star TV when it started “Japanese Idol Drama Hour” in June 1992. The title clearly shows that Star TV thought Japanese young idols were the main attraction of Japanese dramas for a Taiwanese audience … . One of the reasons why such people watch Japanese dramas is that they feature good[-]looking Japanese idols. Food, fashion, consumer goods and music are also good topics and things that an audience enjoys watching’ (p. 63).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Ue

Tom Ue researches and teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, intellectual history, and cultural studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming), and the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). Ue has held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.