Timothy Tau (born Timothy Tau Hsieh (/ʃeɪ/SHAY); Chinese: 謝韜; pinyin: Xiè Tāo) is a Taiwanese-American writer, engineer, attorney, law professor and filmmaker. Tau won the 2011 HyphenAsian American Writers' Workshop Short Story Contest for his short story, "The Understudy", which was published in the Winter 2011 issue of Hyphen magazine, Issue No. 24, the "Survival Issue." Tau also won Second Prize in the 2010 Playboy College Fiction Contest for his short story, "Land of Origin" (see the October 2010 issue of Playboy magazine). He has also directed a number of short films and music videos that have screened at various film festivals worldwide and on YouTube.
Tau's short story "The Understudy" is a comic-surrealist story about an Asian American actor named Jack Chang struggling in Los Angeles who must deal with the sudden emergence of a mysterious new understudy named Hyde on a production of a play (Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros) he is working on.[1] It is told in the second-person narrative. The story was published in the Winter 2011 Issue of Hyphen magazine and won Grand Prize in the 2011 Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest, sponsored by the Asian American Writers Workshop and the only national Pan-Asian American Writing Competition of its kind.[2][3] Award-winning novelist Porochista Khakpour, one of the judges, called the story a "psychological thriller successfully pulled off in second person -- alone a feat worthy of mention -- and [a] cautionary tale about what happens when you entirely live for and therefore ultimately lose everything but your art. At surface glance, it can make one think 'Chinese thespian Black Swan,' but the wild, brainy, dark and dazzling prose is in a league of its own." MacArthur Fellow and award-winning novelist Yiyun Li said: "Full of vibrating energy, ‘The Understudy’ is an exciting story to read; better, the excitement does not fizz off but makes a reader think afterward."[4] The short story was also listed on the syllabus in the upper-division level English course "Reading and Writing Short Stories" (ENGE 3290) taught by Dr. Suzanne Wong at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.[5]
Tau's short story "Land of Origin" is a love-crime and neo-noir story about a Taiwanese American professional/ex-pat named Dante Wu who lives an empty and jaded life in Los Angeles, and who goes back to Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to get mixed up with betel nut girls (falling in love with one in the process) and a gang known as "The Heavenly Alliance." The story tracks his descent, like the Dante of The Divine Comedy and The Inferno, into the sprawling neon-lit criminal underworld of urban Taiwan. The short story won Second Prize in the 2010 Playboy College Fiction Contest.[6][7][8] It also won Second Place in the inaugural 2015 ScreenCraft Short Story Contest, which was judged by Academy Award winning screenwriter Diana Ossana.[9] The short story is also published at the ScreenCraft website.[10] A feature screenplay adaptation of the short story entitled "Kaohsiung" also was a Quarter-Finalist in the 2017 Fifteenth Annual Zoetrope Screenplay Contest, judged by Francis Ford Coppola.[11]
Tau's experimental short story "For/Most/Of" is a triptych that is published in the 2018 book Chrysanthemum: Voices of the Taiwanese Diaspora.[14] The story is split into three segments that respectively cover: (1) Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 1979 (the beginning of the Kaohsiung Incident or Formosa Incident); (2) Taipei, Taiwan in 2018; and (3) the high-tech hub of Hsinchu, Taiwan in the future year of 2056.[14]
Tau has also written a play entitled "Yellow Shakespeare" and developed it as part of the David Henry Hwang Writer's Institute (DHHWI) at East West Players. The play concerns the discovery of a long-lost Shakespeare play that is the first and only Shakespeare play to feature Asian characters, and is set in the same universe as his short story, "The Understudy," as it revolves around the same fictional theater company from the short story, the Exit Ghost Repertory (the name taken from a stage direction in Hamlet and the title of a novel by Philip Roth). A staged reading of an early version of the play was held at the DHHWI New Works Festival at the David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles.[15][16][17][18][19] In 2013, another reading of the play was staged at the DHHWI New Works Festival.[20][21] In 2013, Tau also held a reading of another play entitled Bros/Hos/Foes at the DHHWI New Works Festival about two Asian American actors from different backgrounds trapped in a timeless space.[22][23][24]
Tau is also a contributing writer to indieWire's The Playlist and writes film reviews[25][26] and news articles[27][28] for the site. He also conducts Q&A interviews at Hyphen magazine with leading Asian American writers, film directors, actors, musicians, and artists and has them discuss their latest projects,[29] and is also a contributing writer to Screen Anarchy (formerly Twitch Film).[30][31] Tau has also taught an Introduction to Screenwriting & TV Writing course at The Writer's Center,[32] which has been featured on DCist.[33]
Tau has also directed several short films under his production company, Firebrand Hand Creative [1]. In 2014, Tau was named as one of "6 Young Asian American Filmmakers Who Are Shattering America's Film Bias" by Mic Magazine.[34]
In 2012, he collaborated with rappers/comedians The Fung Brothers (David and Andrew Fung) and directed, produced and edited a comedy sketch film about Jeremy Lin that The Fung Brothers wrote entitled "The Jeremy Lin Effect 2 (Linsanity)" where an Asian American girl named "Babe" (played by Jessika Van) only attracted to white men (including her boyfriend, Bret, played by Scott Lilly) is suddenly attracted to Asian American men (including a student named "Jeremy", played by Andrew Fung) after seeing clips of Jeremy Lin play.[74] The video went viral and was mentioned on The Washington Post, the Associated Press and Yahoo! Sports,[75] and on Taiwanese News Channel CTV among other news outlets.
In 2013, Tau directed the Los Angeles segment of a music video for a track from Dumbfoundead and Paul Kim entitled "No Turning Back," the song being produced and composed by CHOPS aka Scott "Chops" Jung (formerly of The Mountain Brothers) for his EP project, "Strength in Numbers," which compiles tracks from a number of leading Asian American hip hop, rap and R&B artists.[79][80][81] In addition to Dumbfoundead/Parker and Paul Kim, the music video also starred Jennifer Field and Cindy Bru, and NY-based Director/rap artist JL Jupiter (Jeff Lek) directed the New York segment as well as edited the music video.[82][83]
^Kelvin Han Yee Directed, and the reading starred Elaine Kao as Exit Ghost Manager/Director Audrey Chang, Art Hsu as Truman Lin, an Exit Ghost Actor, Jessika Van as Daphne Lee, another Exit Ghost Actor, Mike Ginn as Marcus Sanada, PhD, a British Academic and Shakespeare Scholar who makes the discovery of the play, Britt Prentice as Martin Cain, an Entertainment Executive, Edward Hong as the Narrator, and with Music by Mike Kobayashi.
^ abTimothy T. Hsieh, A Bridge Between Copyright and Patent Law: Towards a Modern-Day Reapplication of the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act, 28 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 729 (2018), available online at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3029116
^Keye Luke – Special Screenings, News' N Notes, Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, http://www.chssc.org/Publications/NewsNNotes/NNN1410.pdf ("Tau is currently enrolled in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Professional Programs in both Screenwriting and TV Writing.")