A Small Umbrella, cool chips, Hokkien songs: Musings from a Taiwan jaunt

In semiconductors, umbrellas and pop culture, Taiwan has punched above its weight.

- Ho Ai Li Assistant Foreign Editor

On the big screen, Michael Douglas walks out onto a city street in the rain but has difficulty opening his umbrella.

His fumbling with the brolly draws the fateful attention of Glenn Close in this pivotal scene from the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction.

“Made in Taiwan!”, the Douglas character says of the umbrella in exasperation.

The irony was not lost on me or others inside a Taipei cinema hall recently. We were watching A Chip Odyssey, a 2025 Taiwan documentary charting the rise of the island’s semiconductor industry, and it had featured this throwback movie scene.

From being the butt of a joke in a 1980s Hollywood movie, “Made in Taiwan” or “Made by Taiwan” has long become a byword for excellence in manufacturing products from laptops and smart health devices to cooling textiles used for World Cup football jerseys.

Over the last few decades, the island has moved up the value chain from umbrellas to semiconductors, which are used in objects ranging from coffee machines to phones to drones.

Even if its umbrellas did not always get celebrity endorsements, Taiwan was “the world’s supreme umbrella manufacturer” from the 1960s and through the 1980s, to quote Taiwan's Panorama magazine. At its peak, the island made three out of four umbrellas worldwide.

The island also produces songs for export, occasionally an umbrella song - think A Small Umbrella (1982), a popular Taiwanese (or Hokkien to Singaporeans) song, whose lovey-dovey lyrics were cited by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong at this year’s National Day Rally. Together with Hong Kong, Taiwan was a prime exporter of Chinese pop culture to Sinophone communities across the globe in the postwar decades when China was still closed to the world.

A trip to Taiwan in July reminded me again how far above its weight the island of 23 million people has punched, when it comes to chips, brollies and popular culture.