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Living history

By Catherine Shu
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Oct 10, 2009, Page 16

Taiwan Storyland Address: B2, 50, Zhongxiao W Rd, Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市忠孝西路一段50號B2) Open: 10:30am to 8:30pm Telephone: (02) 2388-7158 X801 On the Net: www.taiwanstoryland.com.tw; www.wretch.cc/blog/taiwanstory. For information about Franky Wu’s Taichung restaurant Banana New Paradise, visit www.vernaldew.com.tw

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Located across the street from Taipei Train Station, KMall is an unremarkable shopping center. But underneath the usual assortment of gadget stores, boutiques and restaurants lies a time portal that takes visitors back 40 years in Taiwan’s history. A neighborhood has been recreated block-by-block in the mall’s 1,500-ping basement, right down to potholes in the roads and sparrows roosting on an electric wire. In Taiwan Storyland (台灣故事館), it is perpetually dusk on an evening in 1965.

Founded in November 2005 by Franky Wu (吳傳治), an entrepreneur and memorabilia collector, Taiwan Storyland bills itself as a “historical experience,” where visitors can get a more intimate feel for the past than they would in a traditional museum. Taiwan Storyland is meant to represent an imaginary neighborhood located in what is now Taipei’s Zhongzheng District (中正區). Streets are lined with shop windows, all filled with genuine articles gathered by Wu over the course of 20 years. A corner store sells old-fashioned candy and toys, restaurants serve noodles and shaved ice, and a movie theater screens classic films twice a day.

“If you want to see art, you go to the National Palace Museum,” says deputy general manager Alford Tseng (曾干育). “But if you want to see how everyday people lived, you come here.” Tseng estimates that Taiwan Storyland receives an average of 25,000 visitors per month and that 75 percent of guests are Taiwanese, with the remainder mostly from Hong Kong, Macau and Japan.

“Visitors from Hong Kong are curious because it seems very foreign to them. On the other hand, Japanese guests think it’s different and familiar at the same time,” says Tseng, referring to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. The colonial period’s influence on Taiwanese architecture is evident in many of the buildings recreated in Taiwan Storyland.

Founder Wu sold Taiwan Storyland to its current managers in 2007 (he still owns many of the items inside), but continues to operate Banana New Paradise (香蕉新樂園), a theme restaurant in Taichung that also pays homage to 1960s Taiwan in exacting detail.

Wu’s passion for vintage memorabilia started when he was a schoolboy. His family could not afford reference books for his high school art classes, so he visited a secondhand bookstore.

“While I was flipping through old books and periodicals, I kept finding things that people had left between the pages. There were old advertisements, photos, programs. I became very curious about those things,” says Wu.

As an adult, Wu visited buildings that were about to be demolished in his native Taichung and purchased their contents. Eventually, he began to focus on collecting items from the 1960s, when he was a small child.

Wu set Taiwan Storyland in 1965 because the year is not only his birth year, but also, from his perspective, a pivotal point in Taiwan’s social history.

“I grew up in a village in Taichung where Taiwanese people, Hakka people, Shanghainese people and other people from China all lived together. There wasn’t a sense of separation or even a political divide among us. We spoke different dialects, but we had no problem communicating,” says Wu. “At that time, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s goal was to defeat the Communist Party, but as villagers, our goal was to get along.”

Taiwan Storyland is fueled by nostalgia, but its view of history isn’t completely rose tinted. A large wooden sign near the classroom admonishes students to speak Mandarin instead of Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) or Hakka (說國語不要說方言), a government policy at the time. Other KMT propaganda and slogans are pasted or painted onto walls, fences and even barrels in front of the puppet theater.

“When younger people see those signs, I think their reaction is ‘wow, were things really that over the top?’” says Wu. “They’ve studied Taiwanese history in their classes, but seeing those signs up close really gives them a sense of what our lives were like.”

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