Love Boat: Taiwan

Please join us for a screening of the award-winning documentary Love Boat: Taiwan, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Valerie Soe.

Tuesday, May 7th, 5:30PM, McCormick Screening Room

LOVE BOAT: TAIWAN (63 min) looks at the Expatriate Youth Summer Formosa Study Tour to Taiwan, which was sponsored by the Taiwanese government every summer in Taipei for more than 45 years. Despite its high-minded aspirations that included classes in Mandarin-language study, martial arts, and brush painting, the program’s popularity stemmed from another source: its reputation as an excellent place for college-aged Taiwanese Americans and other overseas Chinese to hook up and find romance. Because of this, although it did not take on a ship, the program is more commonly known by its romantic nickname – the Taiwan Love Boat.

Since its inception in the 1960s the Love Boat served three purposes: as a diplomatic tool for the Taiwanese government, as a place for young Taiwanese Americans to find romance, and as a means for Taiwanese American parents to insure the preservation of Taiwanese bloodlines. Although the iconic Taiwan Love Boat, with 1200 college-aged Taiwanese American running rampant in Taipei for six weeks every summer, doesn’t really exist any more, the program is still completely relevant in today’s cultural and political climate.

Although it may have seemed like an innocuous place for Taiwanese American kids to connect and party, in fact the Love Boat was a much more subtle and clever tool in Taiwan’s diplomatic arsenal. Lacking the economic, political, or military.

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