General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

He Never Gives Up (汪洋中的一条船)

He Never Gives Up (汪洋中的一条船) is a 1978 Taiwanese biographical drama film directed by Lee Hsing (李行) and produced by Central Pictures (中影), adapted from the autobiography of Zheng Fengxi (郑丰喜), a writer born with deformed lower legs who crawled as a child, studied his way to a university degree, married, and became a rural schoolteacher.¹^•² The film premiered on 26 July 1978, runs 110 minutes in color and Mandarin, and won five awards at the 15th Golden Horse Awards, including Best Picture.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	汪洋中的一条船; English title He Never Gives Up¹
Director / screenwriter	Lee Hsing (李行); screenplay Chang Yung-hsiang (张永祥)¹
Release	Premiered 26 July 1978 in Taiwan; 110 minutes, color, Mandarin¹
Source	Zheng Fengxi's autobiography, originally published as 汪洋中的破船 in 1973 and later retitled 汪洋中的一条船³
Lead cast	Chin Han (秦汉) as adult Zheng Fengxi, Joan Lin (林凤娇) as Wu Jizhao, child star Ou Di (欧弟) as young Zheng⁴
Golden Horse Awards (1978)	Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Cinematography¹
Box office	Exceeded NT$40 million in Taiwan in its release year⁵

Spoilers

Story and style

The film narrates Zheng Fengxi's painful childhood, his determination to study, his university education, his courtship of and marriage to Wu Jizhao over family resistance, and the couple's return to rural teaching work.⁴^•⁹ A critical account in Wenshan Review places the film in the tradition of Taiwan's healthy realism, in which a protagonist's compensation for each disability drives the narrative and the emotional force comes from striving against adversity.¹² A mainland Chinese survey describes its structure as intercutting time periods around dramatic set pieces, using flashback to move between Zheng's hardship-filled childhood and his adult life with Wu.¹³ The romance differs from the era's standard love melodramas in that the attraction turns on inner character rather than appearance.¹⁰

The source book and its subject

The film adapts the autobiography of Zheng Fengxi, born in 1944 (Republic of China year 33) in Kouhu Township, Yunlin County, with lower limbs so twisted that he could not stand and moved by crawling.² His memoir, first published on 10 October 1973 by the Hung-tou Bookstore in Chiayi under the title 汪洋中的破船 ("A Broken Boat in a Vast Ocean"), describes his upbringing and struggle in the form of essay-like recollections.³ The title was changed to 汪洋中的一条船 ("A Boat in a Vast Ocean"); a scholarly account attributes the renaming to Chiang Ching-kuo.⁶ The book became a phenomenon in Taiwan, selling over one million copies, and was for years a standard read among elementary and middle school students.⁷^•⁸

Zheng's life followed the arc the film dramatizes: he worked part-time jobs through his schooling, won attention with an essay contest entry, completed a university education, married his classmate Wu Jizhao (吴继钊), taught in his home region, and was honored as a model youth before dying of liver cancer.⁶^•⁹

Production

Central Pictures saw the book's reach among schoolchildren as a guarantee of a large future film audience, and Lee Hsing, returning to the healthy realism (健康写实) style he had helped define, took the project on.⁸ The production posed technical problems unusual for the studio of the time: studio-set storm and gale sequences, lifelike set construction, and actors performing in prosthetic limbs.¹⁰ In one duck-herding scene shot in winter, the child actor Ou Di had his lower legs bound together, walked on his knees, and stood in cold water through wind and rain.¹¹ A Central News Agency photograph from 7 April 1978 shows the crew at the Shilin studio shooting a scene in which Zheng, caught in a typhoon, is rescued by his wife.⁷

Casting paired two of the era's biggest stars with a newcomer. Chin Han, then at the height of his popularity, played the adult Zheng; Joan Lin played his wife Wu Jizhao; and the child Zheng was played by Ou Di, a young performer found at a night market who was willing to endure the physical demands of the role.⁴^•¹⁰ The supporting cast included Ko Hsiang-ting as Zheng's father, Tsui Fu-sheng as Wu's father, Lang Hsiung as Hsu Chin-chang, and Chen Kuo-chun as Zheng's grandfather.¹

Reception and awards

At the 15th Golden Horse Awards in 1978 the film took Best Picture, Best Director (Lee Hsing), Best Screenplay (Chang Yung-hsiang), Best Actor (Chin Han), and Best Cinematography (Chen Kun-hou), and it was also named an excellent educational film by the Ministry of Education and received a Golden Torch award from the Republic of China branch of the International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisual (OCIC).¹ At the 25th Asian Film Festival in 1979 it won Best Director, the award for the most outstanding actress (Joan Lin), and the award for the most moving actor in a tragedy (Chin Han).¹ The film was the biggest winner of that year's Golden Horse ceremony and drew an exceptionally high box office.¹⁴

A record run for its director. With this film, The Story of a Small Town (1979), and Good Morning, Taipei (1980), Lee Hsing won the Golden Horse Award for Best Picture three years in a row, a streak the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute describes as unbroken in Taiwanese film history, and it marked the peak of his career.⁴

Later circulation

The story returned to television as a Public Television Service drama series with Weng Chia-ming as the adult Zheng Fengxi and Hsiao Pin-pin as the adolescent Zheng.¹⁵ A digital restoration was screened in the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute's 2022 retrospective honoring Lee Hsing after his death.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1970s › Released 1975 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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