The many ways of speaking as ‘I’: Wuna Wu’s first-person documentaries from Taiwan Tze-lan Deborah Sang Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA ABSTRACT Touted as a representative of the ‘Me’ generation of documentary makers in twenty-first-century Taiwan, Wuna Wu has appeared as both filmmaker and social actor in her documentaries. Even when the ostensible subject matter of the film is not Wu, she has often inserted herself into the story and the frame. This raises questions of why she elects to be visible to the documentary viewer, what her visibility and performativity in front of the camera allows her to achieve, and what she gains by using a first-person voiceover narration. This essay examines Wu’s first-person positioning in three prize-winning documentaries: Happy or Not (2002), Farewell 1999 (2003) and Let’s Fall in Love (2008) and argues that she has experimented with a wide variety of first-person positionings, ranging from that which renders her vulnerable to that which self- empowers. Her diverse first-person approaches underscore the question of documentary ethics, the importance of mediation for self-identity, and the opportunities for building sociality and community through documentary. Her first-person films bring out the interconnectedness between self and other, providing a window on the residual effects, in modern Taiwan, of the Confucian concept of the self as relationally defined. KEYWORDS Taiwanese women’s documentary; documentary ethics; gender & sexuality; subjectivity; Confucianism; globalization Touted as a representative of the ‘Me’ generation of documentary makers in twenty-first- century Taiwan (Wen 2008; Kuo 2012; Berry 2018), Wuna Wu has appeared as both filmmaker and a social actor in several of her documentaries. Even when the ostensible subject matter of the film is not Wu, she has often inserted herself into the story and the frame. This raises a number of questions: If Wu could have chosen to stay behind the camera or perhaps excised the visual traces of her presence at the filming location through editing, why did she elect to be visible to the documentary viewer? What do her visibility and performativity in front of the camera allow her to achieve? And what does she gain by using the first-person voice, rather than a disembodied third-person in voiceover narration? This essay examines Wu’s first-person positioning in three of her most acclaimed docu- mentaries: Happy or Not (2002), Farewell 1999 (2003) and Let’s Fall in Love (2008a). The first two won prestigious Taipei Film Festival awards whereas the last succeeded in gaining a commercial release in theatres, a feat achieved by only a tiny minority of Taiwanese © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Tze-lan Deborah Sang tzelan@msu.edu Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA STUDIES IN DOCUMENTARY FILM 2020, VOL. 14, NO. 1, 63–80 https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2020.1720093