The Making of an Ordinary Woman | Xinying Railway Landscape Park — Two People Being Wretched Separately

She has found out she is pregnant, she has heard the heartbeat, and instead of clarity it has left her more lost than before. Chen Jia-ling drifts to this park alone and sits watching other people's mothers with other people's children. Then Tsai Yung-sen turns up, sitting apart, miserable about something of his own. The Tainan City filming map prints the caption plainly: she sits there heartbroken, and runs into him being heartbroken nearby.

It is a good place to be sad in, because it is enormous and mostly empty. Three hectares of the old Xinying sugar works, opened as a park in December 2020, with the sugar-railway track fan left in the ground and grassed over — a dozen parallel narrow-gauge lines running side by side with turf grown up between the sleepers, and pale concrete walkways cut straight across them at right angles.

A live level crossing with working barriers still sits on Xinjin Road at the park's edge, with a white pedestrian overbridge arcing above it. Along the north side the old Taiwan Sugar sheds stand with their long green barrel-vault roofs. This is the only sugar railway in Taiwan whose line runs into a national railway station.

Free. Tainan's tourism site lists it as open around the clock; other listings say nine to five. Bikes for hire at the station for the cycle path that runs out of it.

Go and sit on one of the benches facing the track fan. A dozen rails run away from you in parallel and none of them go anywhere any more. She could not have picked a better place to feel stuck in.

Location data: Tainan City Government tourism and the official filming location map. Photo courtesy of Tainan City Tourism Bureau.