General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Green, Green Grass of Home (在那河畔青草青)

The Green, Green Grass of Home (在那河畔青草青; Zai na he pan qing cao qing) is a 1982 Taiwanese drama directed and written by Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), about a substitute teacher from Taipei who comes to the rural village of Neiwan, falls in love with a fellow teacher, and leads a campaign to stop the poisoning and electrofishing of the local river¹^•². It was Hou's third feature and the last of his early romantic comedies, and it earned him his first Golden Horse Award nomination for Best Director³^•¹.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Hou Hsiao-hsien, his third feature⁴
Release	Taiwan, 1982; 91 minutes, color, Mandarin¹
Principal cast	Kenny Bee (鍾鎮濤) as Lu Da-nian, Jiang Ling (江玲) and Chen Meifeng⁴^•²
Setting	Neiwan, Hsinchu; the whole film was shot there⁵
Golden Horse Awards	Nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Child Star; Hou's first Best Director nomination¹
Central plot device	The "Love the River, Protect the Fish" (愛川護魚) campaign against poisoning and electric-rod fishing²
Production	Tung Tai Film Company; photographed by Chen Kun-hou⁴^•⁶

Spoilers

Story

Lu Da-nian (盧大年), played by Kenny Bee, comes to Neiwan to substitute for his sister, who is about to go abroad, and boards in the house of Chen Su-yun (陳素雲), the primary school's music teacher, played by Chen Meifeng. Da-nian takes charge of class 4-Zhong, where he must manage a trio of celebrated troublemakers, the "Three Musketeers", while also paying attention to Zhou Xing-wang (周興旺), a withdrawn student whose parents are divorced². Da-nian and Su-yun, who spend their days together, gradually fall in love².

In Neiwan, catching fish by poisoning and by electric shock is treated as a crime. Da-nian resolves to end these methods, which damage the river's ecology, and launches an "Love the River, Protect the Fish" campaign at the Neiwan primary school that spreads through the district². The conflict strikes Zhou Xing-wang's family directly: his father Zhou Wen does electric fishing on the side, and the boy, mocked by classmates, runs away from home. After Da-nian and Su-yun help Zhou Wen bring his son back, the father comes to understand the importance of the campaign, and the whole township turns out for its fundraising drive².

The Golden Horse festival program notes that although the nominal leads are the two teachers in love, the children's school, family, and outdoor life are the film's most vivid part, and that Hou handles the conflict between livelihood and environmental protection without preachiness, through the awkward friction between father and son¹.

Origins and production

The idea came from a newspaper story about river protection (保川護魚), a choice of subject that shows Hou's tendency, already visible at this stage, to move cinema closer to everyday life¹. The film was shot entirely in Neiwan in Hsinchu County, preserving a complete record of the town's streets and countryside as they looked at the time⁵. The Neiwan branch railway, in the film still the town's link to the outside cities and today a tourist attraction, appears in the story¹.

The English title is borrowed from a Tom Jones song⁷. The cast combines established stars with non-professionals: Kenny Bee, the Hong Kong singer, appears for the third time under Hou's direction, and Jiang Ling was then a newly popular idol singer⁷^•⁸. Hou's habit of directing child performers for naturalness rather than acting, and of mixing professional and amateur players, was already part of his method⁸.

Place in Hou's career

The film closes the run of three romantic comedies Hou made within the commercial studio system: Cute Girl (1980), Cheerful Wind (1981), and this film⁷. It repeats a pattern from the earlier pictures, in which a protagonist leaves the city, embraces nature, and finds love in the new setting, but the weight of the film has shifted from the star leads toward the river, the children, and rural life⁸^•⁹. The film scholar David Bordwell, writing in Figures Traced in Light (2005), described it as blending an episodic romance with children's family problems and river pollution, and compared it favorably with Yasujiro Ozu's lyrical comedies of the 1930s; he also noted that Hou had enjoyed improvising scenes with children and other nonprofessionals, and that the young lovers do not unite in conventional ways at the end¹⁰.

The film appeared at the moment when the shoddy "social realism" pictures trafficking in sex and violence had exhausted Taiwan's traditional film industry, and in the same year as the four-director omnibus In Our Time, with which the Taiwan New Cinema movement is usually said to have begun¹¹^•¹². Its episodic structure and openness to local color have led some critics to see it as a harbinger of the New Cinema¹⁰. The United Daily News chose it as Best Drama Picture of 1982¹².

City and country

A recurring critical reading concerns how the film constructs the contrast between city and country. The village on screen is open rural space of rice paddies, bamboo groves, and streams, and urban elements enter mostly invisibly, carried in by chance arrivals: the guitar-carrying substitute teacher on the train from Taipei, a frail transfer student sent to the country for her health, and Da-nian's flashy Taipei girlfriend, whose car and bright clothes strike the village school as jarring intrusions¹¹. The principal himself introduces Da-nian by stressing his high education and the waste of his giving up study abroad to serve in the countryside, a speech that marks the perceived cultural gap between the two settings¹¹.

The river campaign carries the same tension. One critic reads Da-nian's zeal for protecting the river as the projection of a city dweller's longing for nature, colliding with a family's need to make a living¹¹. Small details of the children's family situations, a brother running a coal mine, a father working at the Asia Cement factory, others driving trucks or farming, quietly register the industrial expansion into the countryside and the drift of rural labor to the cities¹¹.

Reception and restoration

Later assessments have been mixed in emphasis but consistent in seeing the film as a turning point. Time Out found much of it cloying but noted clear signs of the mature Hou in the long-take staging and the handling of child actors¹³. The Los Angeles Times, reviewing a 1990 screening, called it an obviously commercial work in a more fulsome popular style than Hou later used, made with complete command of pop filmmaking¹⁴. James Udden, author of No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien (2009), identified the film as the breakthrough in Hou's direction of children, a method of giving actors situations and moods rather than precise dialogue that Hou later extended to every performer¹⁰.

The Royal Belgian Film Archive (CINEMATEK) restored the film along with Cute Girl and The Boys from Fengkuei for a 2015 Hou retrospective, and it has since circulated in restoration on DCP⁸^•¹. In the United Kingdom, Eureka released it on Blu-ray in the Early Hou Hsiao-Hsien: Three Films 1980–1983 set in its Masters of Cinema series¹⁵.

References

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