Many events that are not visualized in the film are represented through the trace of writing. The most important instances are Hinomi's diary and the intertitles for Wen-ching's communication with other characters, however, the film is replete with examples. Hou Hsiao-hsien's ambition in articulating the origin of the narration of Taiwan is best exemplified in the intertitles, where writing exists as the mythical and effective tropes constituting the genealogy of the nation. That this is accomplished through a character incapable of speech and hearing is one of the film's finer ironies.
Hinomi's writing is "heard" through her diegetic voice-over, which highlights femininity by forming a different voice for the history. It can be argued that women in Hou's films represent structuring signifiers for articulating domesticity and Oedipal anxiety. Hou's archetypical image of women has them cooking or folding clothes, as in the frame blowup above from Summer at Grandpa's. Nevertheless, a question arises from this kind of scrutiny: beyond the feminist cultural critique of women's subordination and marginality in Hou's filmic world, how can a spectator position her/himself at those moments of female narration in A Time to Live and A Time to Die, Daughters of the Nile, and most prominently, City of Sadness, where a woman's writing and her voice have been positioned as the most important narrative agency throughout the entire film.
These questions will be explored in more details in three separate parts: