A screenwriter's cradle
Half a century ago, long before Jiu-fen's current incarnation as a tourist destination, it was nonetheless remarkably similar in character to how it is today, with crowds jostling each other shoulder to shoulder in the alleys, and nightly dance parties. Wu was six years old when he first experienced the magic of the silver screen, and this was at the Shengping Theater.
In Wu's film A Borrowed Life, largely based on his own childhood experiences, the emotionally repressed, non-communicative father shows his affection for his brilliant son by taking him to Jiufen to see movies. "My Japanese friends are totally knocked out when I tell them how many of the Japanese films of that era I saw as a kid," says Wu.
Wu's father was originally from Chiayi. Harboring vague dreams of gold prospecting in his youth, he headed up north, alone, carrying a small pack, and ended up in Dacukeng, a backwater district on the outskirts of Jiufen. Starting out by working odd jobs at an ore crushing plant, Wu at age 19 volunteered to become the adopted son of a couple who had lost their child; he soon married a local woman, raising five children, and spent nearly 30 years working deep inside dark, dank, dangerous mines, eking out a living by sweat and toil.
Back then there was only one road out of the village. It took over 40 minutes to walk to either Houdong or Jiufen, with no streetlamps or houses by the roadside; only a gloomy "wandering ghost temple" and the occasional wild animal. But to the people of Dacukeng, the consumer paradise of Jiufen was "not far at all." After a hard day's work, it was a trivial matter to round up a group of friends and walk over to Jiufen.
There was a little secret between father and son back in those years, and a similar scenario is shown in A Borrowed Life. Wu's father would take his son to Jiufen, telling his wife they were going to catch a movie, but his real aim was to go drinking and gambling with his buddies. So when they got to Jiufen, he would send young Wu Nien-jen to the cinema, go out drinking, and come back later to pick him up. The elder Wu would then listen to his son recount the plot as they walked home under the moonlight, so he could pass his wife's "spot checks." "Perhaps my ability to write screenplays is connected to my frequent storytelling as a child," says Wu.
The restored Shengping Theater in Jiufen.