Nostalgia, adaptation and ethnic reconciliation: narratives of Juancun Mainlanders in the TV drama A Touch of Green

Abstract

ABSTRACT Military dependents’ villages, also known as juancun, are unique cultural landscapes in Taiwan. These compounds were established during the 1950s in order to house the defeated Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers and their families. There have been numerous literary and cinematic representations of juancun since the 1970s, but television dramas on the related topic did not appear until the 2000s. This article delves into the highly acclaimed 2015–2016 TV drama A Touch of Green (yi ba qing), directed by Tsao Jui-yuan, which is an adaptation of the mainlander writer Pai Hsien-yung’s canonical literary work of the same name in 1971. It examines how Tsao turns Pai Hsien-yung’s China-centric, nostalgic literary work into a TV drama that is aligned with contemporary Taiwanese values, in a bid to seek ethnic reconciliation between Taiwanese and mainlanders.