The first scene of Someday or One Day opens with the Wu Bai song “Last Dance.” Wu Bai’s deep, entrancing voice with its downhome Taiwanese accent seems to symbolize the Taiwanese imagery in the drama.

Authentic Taiwanese flavor

Someday or One Day tells the story of the female protagonist Huang Yuxuan, who has lost her beloved boyfriend. She somehow travels back in time and becomes Chen Yunru, who looks exactly like Huang but has a completely different personality. She meets a man who looks identical to her dead boyfriend, and they embark on a story of youth marked by love and friendship. The drama also includes a mystery subplot with a search for a murderer.

During the drama’s incubation period, the creative team consciously inserted special features of Taiwanese culture into the work in order to strengthen viewers’ sense of identification with the show. For example, the audio tape that appears throughout the drama deliberately features popular album tracks rather than major hits. In particular, Wu Bai’s voice is especially distinctive. “When we were writing Someday or One Day, we aimed to create a very Taiwanese work that the audience would recognize at first listen, at first sight,” says scriptwriter Chien Chifeng.

It was the same thinking that underlay the choice of Tainan as the main setting for the drama. Chien says that compared to other cities, Tainan has a distinctively Taiwanese ambience, with characterful old houses shaping the back-street culture of this former capital city. For example, the drama’s “32 Records” shop and Chen Yunru’s home are all set in these back streets, and the temple that was inadvertently included adds to its Taiwanese character.

Tainan’s back streets are like a museum of daily life, displaying an enchanting urban lifestyle in everything from walls and plants to decorative window lattices.

Entering Tainan time

Hsieh Shih-yuan, director-general of the Tainan City Cultural Affairs Bureau and an expert in history and in dietary culture, explains Tainan’s back-street culture: “Tainan has inherited the layout of the provincial capital that it was in the Qing Dynasty, preserving the patchwork of neighborhoods from different eras of the past. Tainan’s back streets are not always straight or wide, and you won’t see a lot of houses built to a standard pattern, but rather houses that were constructed to fit the space available in their back-street locations.” In Hsieh’s eyes, what one sees in the back-street culture is the attitude that Tainan people have brought to building their own home lives. Aspects such as the choice of decorative metal window lattices or the plants around the doorways reflect people’s perseverence in and identification with a certain lifestyle.

Many visitors to Tainan pack their itineraries with dining out as they aim to sample as many local delicacies as possible. Hsieh, who relocated to Tainan many years ago, says with a laugh: “That really puts visitors in a tough spot!” In Tainan, you should slow yourself down in accord with the city’s rhythm of life, which has not been determined by modern industrial society. “It is this slower pace that has enabled me to discover how life in Tainan is different from elsewhere.”

Tainan, long a destination for migrants from many places, reveals aesthetics from different eras in its architecture.

The district of Anping

Someday or One Day is set partly in Tainan in the year 1998. There is a sequence in which the male lead Li Ziwei, then a high-school student, happens to run into the female lead Huang Yuxuan, who at the time is only six years old and has lost her way. “There’s a tall, white building with a pointed red roof, and there’s the sea.” The little girl describes a tower near her grandmother’s home to the older boy, and Li deduces that it must be in Anping, where Fort Zeelandia, built by the Dutch in the 17th century, is located. As Li carries Huang on his bike in search of her grandmother’s home, they spend some time enjoying a cool drink in front of Kaitai Tianhou Temple (a.k.a. Anping Mazu Temple), and also make honeycomb toffee and play night-market pinball for a while. The atmosphere of food and fun has made many viewers curious to explore Anping for themselves.

We ask music producer Hsieh Ming-yu, who grew up in Anping, to be our guide. “Taiwan during the Age of Discovery was really an exciting place,” he says, standing in front of Fort Zeelandia. In the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company established a trading post at Anping, and began ­building the fort (which was originally called Fort Orange but was later renamed Zeelandia) in 1624. The Dutch remained there until 1662 when they were ousted by Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), who established himself as ruler of Taiwan and changed the name of the area to Anping. He moved into the structure and it therefore became known to local residents as the “King’s Fort.”

After multiple changes of regime in Taiwan, all that remained of Fort Zeelandia was some tumbledown brick walls. The Fort Zeelandia that we see today was rebuilt under Japanese rule. It was later renovated by the Tainan City Government, which built a steep tented roof on the lookout tower and painted the tower walls white. Hsieh Ming-yu says that if you want to see brick walls from the Dutch era, you should look carefully at the private homes surrounding the fort and perhaps you will discover something very surprising: In structures built during the Dutch era the bricks are held together not by cement mortar, but instead by a mortar made of oyster-shell ash mixed with glutinous rice slurry and sugar syrup. The shell ash, a form of quicklime, was made by crushing oyster shells and calcining them into powder in a kiln. Hence one can see white oyster-shell ash in the joints of brick walls from that period. Moreover, if you see a brick wall in Anping made with bricks of different thicknesses, you can be sure that it was built in more than one era.

Four centuries ago the stories of various ethnic groups intersected at Fort Zeelandia.

One can learn something about history by observing the brick walls in Anping. If you notice that a wall has been built with bricks of different thicknesses, that means it was built in more than one era.

Music producer Hsieh Ming-yu, who grew up in Anping, says that walking through the streets of this district is like walking through history.

Religious belief in Anping

Anping was the place where Taiwan first appeared on the stage of international affairs, and immigrants from many places settled here, bringing their religious beliefs with them. Hsieh Ming-yu explains that Anping is the source of Taiwan’s culture of kak-thâu (Taiwanese Hokkien for “settle­ment”). “The most important thing about kak-thâu culture is that everyone worships the same deities and belongs to the same local religious community.” Examples of such deities include Kaizhang Shengwang and Baosheng Dadi (a.k.a. the Baosheng Emperor). When there were disputes between different kak-thâu, Anping’s Kaitai Tianhou Temple would act as mediator to settle them.

The reason that Kaitai Tianhou Temple (“Temple of the Empress of Heaven, Pioneer of Taiwan”), which is dedicated to Mazu (the Empress of Heaven), is so named is because she was the deity whose statue Zheng Chenggong brought with him to Taiwan from Meizhou Island, Mazu’s reputed birthplace, to protect his army.

Hsieh Ming-yu says that the best way to visit Anping is on foot. When friends come to visit, he takes them on a walk though the back streets around the old commercial quarter of Anping and tells them the stories of the temples of every kak-thâu. If you lift your head and look carefully you may also spot statues of the Wind Lion God (Fengshiye) on the eaves of private residences. Early ­residents of Anping believed that if they placed wind-lion statues facing northeast, their wide-open mouths would swallow the northeasterly monsoon winds, thereby protecting local fishermen. Moreover, there is a small hole in the wind lion’s tail which produces a whistling sound whenever the northeasterlies blow, as if telling residents that the monsoon is here and it’s time to catch mullet!

When visiting Anping, be sure to keep an eye out for wind lion statues on the eaves of houses and sword lion mandalas on the doors or walls. They add some interesting color to the area.

One of the locations for Someday or One Day was this peh-thng-kue stand outside Miaoshou Temple in Tainan’s Anping District. The owner says with a laugh that many Korean fans of the drama make a special point of coming here.

Authentic Tainan delicacies

When visiting to Tainan you shouldn’t miss the local cuisine. Thanks to careful field research and exhaustive effort by the Someday or One Day production team, many Tainan delicacies appear in the series. For example, in one scene Li Ziwei buys peh-thng-kue (white sugar cake or “Taiwanese churros”) in front of Anping’s Miaoshou Temple, and the camera shows how they are made by rolling a ball of sticky-rice-flour dough into a spiral, deep-frying it in oil, and then sprinkling it with sugar and peanut powder.

Peh-thng-kue is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, with a texture like mochi rice cakes. Based on his observations of what food means in people’s daily lives, Hsieh Shih-yuan explains, “Peh-thng-kue is symbolic of people willingly surrendering themselves to the pleasures of food.” Peh-thng-kue tastes best when it is fresh-made, so people will line up next to a vendors’ cart and wait for the owner to finish frying each one, then eat it right there where they stand.

Another dish that is a big hit with fans of Someday or One Day is nabeyaki egg noodles. Tainan-born author Mimiko, who specializes in books about culinary culture, says that her personal standard for nabeyaki egg noodles is that they must be cooked in a small metal pot which is then placed in a frame assembled from four pieces of wood and served boiling hot.

Hsieh Shih-yuan says with a smile: “It was only after living in Tainan for a while that I learned to like nabeyaki egg noodles.” He had previously eaten them only in Taipei, and they had simply been noodles with hot-pot ingredients in a soup made from broth powder, which left a poor impression on him. However, he says, “Tainan’s nabeyaki egg noodles are delicious, and even the soup is different.” Vendors still insist on putting in a great deal of effort to make soup stock from authentic ingredients, and one can taste the care that they put in in each mouthful. For example, at the Xianqing Mingpin Wu restaurant, which was used as a location for Someday or One Day, the owner says that she and her family begin making stock at five o’clock each morning using fresh ingredients and skipjack tuna, and the chunks of Spanish mackerel that are served with the noodles are deep-fried in-house from fish bought fresh each day. “My parents’ generation used this approach, and we still use it today,” says the owner with pride.

These are of course not the only locations where Someday or One Day was shot. Other sites include Erliao in Tainan’s Zuozhen District, where a segment was filmed against the backdrop of its well-known sunrise; the Longquan Shaved Ice Shop in Madou District; and a shop selling eel noodles, a dish which really challenges the chef’s skills. Thanks to the reach of the TV drama, these places have attracted many new customers. Just as Hsieh Shih-yuan says: “Tainan has enough to offer that you can visit three times a year.” That is, people can come here often and can even treat it as their second home. “It gives you a chance to breathe.”

So get started on your journey and visit the locations in Tainan where Someday or One Day was filmed!

The locations for Someday or One Day provide a new perspective for tourism in Tainan. The photo shows a noodle shop with distinctive mural decorations, where the drama’s two male leads ate.

In Tainan, every bowl of nabeyaki egg noodles reflects the care that the restaurant owner invests in the soup and ingredients. Xianqing Mingpin Wu, where scenes from Someday or One Day were filmed, is no exception.

The shaved ice shop owned by “Grandma Mo” in Someday or One Day is in fact the Longquan Shaved Ice Shop in Tainan’s Madou District. (photos by Lin Min-hsuan)

The Longquan Shaved Ice Shop has a special place in the hearts of locals, and many of its customers have been eating there since childhood.
(photo by Lin Min-hsuan)