Nostalgic dreams from a poor youth
Taiwan Storyland is designed to reflect Taiwan in 1965. Founder Franky Wu chose this time primarily because that was the year he was born, and so "the feelings and atmosphere of that time are the starting point of my life."
Talking about nostalgia, Wu says the 1960s have a unique attraction; in the 1950s, everyday life was still largely colored by the years of Japanese colonial rule, and in the 1970s concrete housing projects started popping up and the number of cars on the roads began to grow, quickly killing off any old-fashioned feeling. "1965 was a turning point for Taiwan," says Wu. "People were working to shake off the poverty of the war, but still hadn't fully embraced modernity, so that era had a spirit of simplicity and determination."
Wu, in his early 40s, has been a collector of antiques and nostalgia for over 20 years, earning quite a reputation amongst Taiwan's collectors. His attachment to these old things has a special connection to his youth.
Wu's father came to Taiwan from China after the war, and his mother was a local Hakka girl. The family was fairly poor, and lived in the mountains near Taichung, close to a military dependents' village and a Hakka village; this meant that as Wu grew up, he was exposed to a variety of different lifestyles and cultures. When he was young, his mother would often take him down the mountain with her, one end of her shoulder pole carrying bananas, the other end, Franky. He would swing back and forth from the pole as they wound up hill and down dale, each trip taking a good two or three hours. After he grew up, Wu named his company Banana Paradise in remembrance of those times.
During senior high, Wu studied art design at Taichung's Mingtao High School. Because his family couldn't afford expensive specialist design books, Franky had to make do with old newspapers and magazines, unleashing his imagination on them instead. This started his obsession with old objects, and he began collecting all kinds of things--adverts, signs, abandoned farm tools... they all became objects of his obsession.
In 1990, Wu started a small bubble tea store in Fengyuan. He had originally wanted to give the store a tropical feel, but after his wife started nagging him about the number of old odds and ends he had around the house, he decided to store a few of them temporarily in the store as decorations. This one, incidental decision led to the store becoming all the rage in the area, and Wu began to realize there were more people like him around, with a love for the old-fashioned--if someone genuine could tap into that feeling, surely there would be a market for it.
The idea fermented for a decade, until Wu started his first restaurant, Taiwan Banana Paradise, in Fengyuan in 2001. The restaurant was made up like a turn-of-the-century Taichung street, decorated with all kinds of old objects, and became an instant hit. Later, Wu went on to open other nostalgic restaurants, such as Shanghai New Paradise, setting the benchmark for nostalgia-themed restaurants.
In 2001 the National Palace Museum held a conference for regional museums, inviting Taiwan Banana Paradise and Wu along. Although it had started as simply a nostalgic place to dine, the restaurant had become widely acknowledged for its cultural value, boosting Wu's spirits immensely and making him more determined to make a business out of nostalgia.
A tin that once contained an old children's medicine called "Ai Er Cai."