"Goodbye, Darling" was an example of seventies "Healthy Realism" but with an unprecedented frankness. It starts with the ingenuous moral: "People lie Ah-lang are a thing of the past, just like pedicabs and illegal buildings." If the film tries not to indulge Ah-lang with a single redeeming quality, his is a compelling figure nonetheless: a symbol of blind, frusterated protest against a society in which he has no place. In hsi ovstinate truculence lises a certain dignity, that of a wild beast. Is he to blame if he is not domesticable? If his habitat is disappearing along with the pedicabs and illegal buildings of a modernizing Taiwan?