A Baseball Star for All Taiwanese: The Chien-Ming Wang Documentary

A yet-to-be-released baseball film about Chien-Ming Wang, the legendary Taiwanese pitcher for the New York Yankees from 2005 to 2009, has stirred up nostalgia and pride in the Taiwanese community in New York. It has also allowed Taiwanese who hold opposing political views to put their disputes aside in the name of sports, at least temporarily.

“No matter you’re born in Taiwan or in the US, no matter your party or your political inclination, Chien-Ming’s film created a strong connection for all of us,” Eason Wu, the president of the Taiwanese American Association in New York and a leader within the pro-independence circles of Taiwanese in the US, said about the small-scale screening of the documentary “Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story” in the East Village, New York on July 29. “That’s the time you see a lot of people you’ve never seen.”

“Some Taiwanese in the US are very ideological. If you talk to some of them, within five minutes, they will push the conversation into political discussion,” said Rich L. Wang, a Taiwanese baseball fan for more than 30 years currently working for New York City’s urban planning department, and went to the East Village screening as well. “But (they) can easily avoid all those potential confrontations in the theatre. I saw my friends with different opinions showed up to the film. Yes, they all showed up.”

In 2005, the film’s director Frank W. Chen took a bus from Rhode Island down to the old Yankee Stadium and saw the Taiwanese pitcher on the mound. Chen, who was working on his graduate degree in architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, was almost in tears.

After winning 19 games each season in both 2006 and 2007, Wang was dubbed “the pride of Taiwan” and became a role model in the Taiwanese community in the United States. In 2007, Wang was honored “Time 100” by Time Magazine for his achievements, and his star power to give people from Taiwan something to bond over. The magazine said, “whenever he pitched, Taiwan ditched its political woes to cheer him…no matter that the fan shouting alongside is mandarin or mendicant, from the mainland or local born, a great-great-grandma with bound feet or a bare-bottomed tot, the voices are one.”

The two-year period was when thousands of overseas Taiwanese were captivated by baseball, and Chen, the director, was one of them.

“He is the representative of diligence, which reflects back to how we see ourselves from the humble blue collar in the 1970s and 1980s, and step-by-step [to now]. People see themselves in Chien-Ming,” Chen, 37, said.

According to Chen, whenever Wang was pitching, hundreds of Taiwanese supporters, whether diehard baseball fans or not, would go to the ballpark, holding up Taiwanese flags at the top of the bleachers. Rich Wang, who went to almost every Yankee home game when Chien-Ming was on the roster, recalled that people from conflicting political groups “sat next to each other and communicated with baseball” in the seat section assigned to Taiwanese fans by the Yankees.

Borcheng Hsu, 41, used to collect ticket requests from the Taiwanese community and negotiate deals with the Yankees. Sometimes more than 150 people asked to see Wang when they found he was in the lineup either a day before or on game day. The requests were gathered through email back in those days, instead of a Facebook group as is done nowadays. Hsu’s effort brought the community several buy-one-get-one-free deals then.

“Some kind of hormone gets released when the Taiwanese watch, because whenever Wang pitches, he always wins,” Hsu said.

For the elder generation, Wang’s success was a continuation of the Taiwanese dominance in the Little League Baseball World Series dating back to 1969. Sponsored by the Chinese Nationalist Party run authoritarian government in Taiwan, elite youngsters won the Little League Baseball world champion for Taiwan 17 times from 1969 to 1996, with two five-peats, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Baseball was imported to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era (another movie about baseball in Japanese ruled Taiwan, Kano, was well-received when it was released in 2014). Different parties in Taiwan, no matter their political inclination, have used Taiwan’s exceptional baseball performance on the world stage as global recognition to drum up morale in Taiwan. Taiwanese officials relied even more on sports after Taiwan’s diplomatic failure in 1971, when Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations, according to Professor Andrew Morris, the author of “Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan.” Dozens of countries cut official ties with Taiwan and recognized mainland China instead.

 For almost a century, baseball has been considered the national sport in Taiwan, and first-generation immigrants arrived in the United States with an ingrained passion for baseball.

As the president of Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York, Eric Y. Ng, who referred himself as an anti Taiwan-independence Chinese from Taiwan, was eager to show off the six baseballs signed by the young world champions of the Little League World Series from Taiwan on the bookshelf in his office. Ng, 69, remembered exact dates in the 1970s when the young teams won the world championship in Williamsport and warmly received by his association.

Eric Y. Ng’s collection of baseballs (by Wufei Yu)

“I obsessively watched  ABC Channel 7 to follow the Yankees and the Mets with friends in the community. There’s no ESPN back then,” said Ng, who moved to United States in 1970. Even though Mr. Ng admitted he and most of his friends are not crazy about baseball anymore, baseball and the Little League is still an important collective memory, especially for the older folks from Taiwan.

“The Taiwanese would never hesitate to show off Taiwan whenever they go to games,” Hsu said. But he admitted there are now less opportunities, as the Taiwanese youngsters haven’t reached the final stage in Williamsport for five years. Without a convincing player in Major League Baseball like Chien-Ming Wang, people are not playing or watching as much.

Taiwanese fans no longer gather in restaurants  around Chinatown for a Yankee’s win-or-go-home Wild Card Game. Sports bars for live ball games opened by Taiwanese owners around New York City are shutting down, according to George King, 36, the owner of a Taiwanese restaurant in Bayside, New York. He used to run a sports bar at the same location.  

Even the baseball or softball leagues in New York and New Jersey are shrinking. Alex Lee, 52, joined the baseball tournament organized by Taiwanese association in Princeton, New Jersey back in high school. He missed bonding over the community formed on the ball field. But when he took over the tournament ten years ago, less people were playing on a daily basis and it was getting harder for him to gather teams to sustain the dying event. “Last two years we didn’t have enough team to do the tournament. We will try one more time next year, or probably it’s not going to happen anymore,” Lee said.  

The pressure of everyday life and making ends meet in New York City is driving people away from participating in baseball games, according to several interviewed Taiwanese.

Wang’s two-year prime time was the “good old days” for the Taiwanese people in the Big Apple. “Sports is like an equalizer that brings people together even if you hate each other outside of the arena. Back then everyone rallied around Chien-Ming even you were not into sports,” said Brian Yang, the producer of the documentary, who has made several films telling Asian athletic stories, such as “Linsanity” featuring NBA basketball star Jeremy Lin.

Directed by Frank W. Chen, the baseball documentary “Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story” will be on screen in New York City on Oct. 26.

On Oct. 1, the documentary, Chen’s maiden work, was nominated as one of the five candidates of the Best Documentary Award in the November Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, the premier movie showcase in Taiwan.

“Whenever there’s Chien-Ming, people want to root for him. And that’s when the Taiwanese agree,” director Chen said.

(Feature photo of Chien-Ming Wang by Keith Allison from Wikicommons, CC BY-SA 2.0)