New Bloom Magazine
Date: May 31, 2019 
By Brian Hioe

VALERIE SOE’S Love Boat: Taiwan details the history of an institution well-known among diasporic Taiwanese and particularly Taiwanese-Americans—the Love Boat, officially known as the Overseas Compatriot Youth Formosa Study Tour. Despite how widely known the program is, Love Boat: Taiwanis likely the first attempt to historically document the program.

The tour program, which exists in a scaled-down form even today, provided a monthlong tour of Taiwan for individuals of Taiwanese or Chinese descent born outside of Taiwan or China from 1967 onward. The program was begun by the KMT government during authoritarian times as a way of bolstering cultural claims of being the rightful representative of China, as a means of building what we would term today soft power among young diasporic Taiwanese or Chinese. However, the tour acquired its name of Love Boat because of the culture of hook-ups, dating, and wild partying which developed out of participants in the program.

Indeed, director Valerie Soe was herself a participant in the program, hence her interest in revisiting the program many years later. Soe’s documentary benefits not only from her firsthand experiences at Love Boat, with Soe featuring in the film herself, but a wide range of interviews with Love Boat participants—all the way back to a surviving participant of the first generation of Love Boat, and to as recently as participants in Love Boat in 2013, when a public incident caused by students led to a scaling down of the program.
[FULL  STORY]