In 1982, the omnibus film In Our Time announced the emergence of a young generation of Taiwanese filmmakers who were not interested in working within the tradition of sentimental genre films produced by the island’s studio system. The following year, The Sandwich Man, another omnibus film,made the same point even more emphatically by focusing on the lives of Taiwan’s working poor—comprised of three episodes adapted from stories by Huang Chungming, whose fiction was in the Seventies one of the first articulations of a contemporary Taiwanese culture distinct from mainland China. Hou’s opening episode sets a tone of closely observed everyday existence. The film’s impact—including its explicit protest of US and Japanese influence on Taiwan—was so profound that pressure by conservative forces to have the film re-edited was successfully resisted.