Over forty years ago, my father, who was nearly 60 at the time, took my nine-year-old self to Tainan for the first time. That was the first and only time that we went on a journey round Taiwan together. Starting out from Yuli, we traveled to Taitung, then round the Southern Cross-Island Highway to Pingtung, then Kaohsiung, arriving in Tainan two days after we set out. The thing about Tainan that made the biggest impression on me was the trees. Holding my hand, my father led me round Tainan Park. Within Taiwan, Tainan is the city where people and trees live most in harmony with each other, and this has always been the case.

Tainan is also the place where I encountered history for the first time. My father led me up onto the ramparts of Anping Fort (the historic fort in Tainan built by the Dutch in the 17th century). It seemed to me that the location of this fort next to the sea was somehow also a conjuncture of time and history. I made a sketch of one of the ancient cannons in the fort on the inside cover page of my diary – the only sketch from this time that I still have in my possession. Nearly ten years later, I came back to Tainan again. That was in 1975, in August; I had just managed to scrape into National Taiwan Academy of Arts after failing the university entrance examination twice in a row. I traveled to Tainan with a classmate of mine from senior high school who had also been accepted into the Western Painting Section at the National Taiwan Academy of Arts, and who wanted to visit the city where his parents had come from originally. I heard all about the terrible childhood he had endured; his father died young, and the relatives started fighting over the inheritance. Bullied and threatened to give up the property she had inherited from his father, his mother (who only had the status of concubine, not wife), ended up leaving Tainan and moving to Hualien, because she had remarried (to a professional soldier born in Mainland China) was afraid something bad might happen to her second husband. This was why, although his identity card listed his “native place” as Henan Province in China, like his step-father, he actually spoke Mandarin Chinese with a pronounced Tainan accent. We talked all night, sitting by the fountain in front of Tainan Railway Station, until the sun came up the next day.

A year later, I finally passed the joint university entrance examination on the third attempt, and was accepted into Chinese Culture University. We went different ways, and I never saw him again. After another six or seven years had passed, I came back to Tainan again. It was in the summer of 1983, just after I had completed my compulsory military service. I had just met the woman who is now my wife, and the first long journey we made together was to Tainan. We went to visit a friend from Yuli whose mother was from Tainan. He had just graduated from National Cheng Kung University, and was happy to show us the big banyan tree on the University campus, which I thought I remembered seeing from my first visit as a boy. Standing in Tainan Park I sang a song for my future wife, for the first time ever. We three young people drove around the city, the three of us sharing one motorcycle, stopping as the mood took us, and eventually went to have a look at Hutoupei Reservoir. The next time I saw that big banyan tree was more than a decade later. During the interval, I had lived overseas, got married, and my father had passed away. Another five years on, in the summer of 1998, I had my first solo exhibition in the New Phase Art Space gallery (now InArt Space) in Tainan. It seems like only yesterday, but when I came back to Tainan for another solo exhibition this year, 12 years had elapsed in the meantime. The growth of a tree is a kind of steadfastness, a sort of commitment. Steadfastness in facing up to the wind and rain. Commitment to the sunlight, and to the soil. Life is like this, and so are ideals. –Tzu-chi Yeh. (Memories of Tainan)