Someday or One Day | Kainan University — The Stairs Where He Said It Out Loud

He studied his way in. Li Zi-wei, now living inside Wang Quan-sheng's body and his name, worked out which university Huang Yu-hsuan would attend and got himself admitted to it, so that on the first day of term he could stand in front of her and ask for directions like a stranger. Later, on a flight of campus stairs, he tells her he likes her.

The stairs are not incidental. This campus is built on the Luzhu upland, so it is genuinely stepped — outdoor flights and ramps linking terraces, rather than a flat quad with buildings around it. There was nowhere level to put the scene. The confession happens on stairs because the hill decided it would.

Everything else about the place is deliberately unremarkable. Late-nineties and 2000s Taiwanese campus construction: tiled facades, covered walkways, painted steel handrails, the visual register of every ordinary university in the country. That is right for what the scene is. A man who has lived several lives is trying to build one plain one, and the setting agrees to be plain with him.

The chronology is worth being careful about. This is the modern strand but it is not 2019 — it is a flashback to their student years, somewhere in the early 2010s. No official source pins the year, so do not trust anyone who gives you one.

This is a working university with no visitor programme. Stay in the outdoor areas, keep out of teaching buildings, and do not photograph students. Weekends and holidays are the considerate time to come.

Find any of the long outdoor flights and climb one. Halfway up you are above the roofline of the building below and you can see the airport plain running north. He picked this life on purpose. It is worth looking at what he picked.

Location data: Kainan University, Luzhu District, Taoyuan. Original broadcast 17 November 2019 on CTV.