Most memorable of experiences
“For Taiwanese over 40, their memories of leaving home—whether to study, to perform their military service, or to work—are almost all connected to trains,” observes Hsiao Chu-chen.
Hsiao, the director of documentaries such as The Red Leaf Legend and Grandma’s Hairpin, has turned her focus to trains over the last four years. Originally, she had wanted to shoot a documentary about the round-the-island railway as a way of explaining Taiwan. “Many cities and towns in Taiwan grew up around their train stations, which is something that has never been adequately explored.” But because that topic was too broad, she decided to put her focus on “the changing South Link Line.”
Hsiao also teaches about Taiwanese film at National Tsing Hua University, and she has studied how trains appear in New Taiwanese Cinema. “In the early memories of ordinary people in Taiwan, trains play an important role.”
Trains link places to each other, and they can take you around the island. “But there’s more to it than that: Taiwan’s small area doesn’t mean that we have a better understanding of its varied locales and a greater familiarity with the stories connected to each place,” says Hsiao, expressing her concerns. As a director of documentaries, she has a deep knowledge of stories about Taiwanese localities, but in the process of shooting footage about the South Link Line, she discovered that even she knew little about the localities along it, such as local indigenous communities, and communities created by the resettlement of refugees from islands off the coast of Zhejiang that came under Chinese Communist control in 1955.
She was deeply moved by something that one of the tunnel engineers told her. “The short eight kilometers of the Zhongyang Tunnel required eight years of tunneling,” Hsiao recounts him saying. “Now that you can zip through it in just a few minutes, you don’t realize what we went through back then.” She thus made it her mission to make a record of such stories and to uncover more of them. “With stories, connections are made,” says Hsiao with much emotion. “For instance, I now feel a connection to the South Link Line.”
One student heard her expounding on this topic and told her, “Teacher, the next time I ride through the Zhongyang Tunnel, I definitely won’t doze off. I’ll do my best to take a good look.” “Yet it’s total darkness within the tunnel,” Hsiao notes, smiling, “so I don’t know what she’ll be able to see!” Still, understanding stories about places forges connections between people and the local scenery, bringing people closer to the land.
Lacking air conditioning, these blue trains relied on aging ceiling-mounted fans for air circulation.