Abstract
At the beginning of the New Taiwan Cinema, Taiwanese fiction served as raw material for the New Cinema directors, with its focus on social reality and critical perspective. As a prominent Nativist writer, Huang Chunming had several of his short stories adapted for the screen and was deeply involved with filmmaking at the time. This paper examines Huang’s short story ＂The Taste of Apples＂ and its adaptation as a short film of the same title, arguing that while turning the story into a film, the director Wan Ren had well understood the media specificities of fiction and film and therefore produced an adapted film that was faithful to the original and artful in terms of visual presentation and film language. In addition, comparing the adapted film and the original text, this paper suggests Huang’s ＂The Taste of Apples＂ be reread as self-deconstructed as the story labels the American financial support of Taiwan as false and dishonest at the same time that the protagonist’s family was truly benefitting from the support, and thereby participating in the trajectory of modernity.