4 ideas
A middle-aged Taipei woman goes to Kyoto to meet an old school friend, who never shows up. Back in Taipei she is mistaken for a Japanese tourist, and she walks her own city with a Japanese-era map, matching colonial place names and buildings to the streets that replaced them. Her guide to home is a map drawn by the former occupier. Her own memories and the city's history keep failing to line up, and she ends lost and unsure where she belongs.
Each regime that governs a city renames its streets, tears down or reuses its buildings, and puts its own story on top of the one before. The earlier layers are not fully removed; they survive as fragments that only an informed walker can read. So a city's physical layout records political succession, and reading it means digging through layers rather than taking in one continuous past.
When the landmarks tied to someone's memories are demolished or renamed, those memories lose their outside anchors and start to feel unreliable, even made up. A political project of forgetting therefore reaches past official history and damages private recollection. People are left strangers in their own hometown.
Instead of asking where someone was born or which group they belong to, ask whose memories a place officially recognizes and whose it treats as foreign. Seen this way, a waishengren (mainlander) woman raised in Taiwan becomes an outsider. That happens not through any change in her own life but through a new national narrative that decides her past does not belong to the island's story. Belonging turns out to be a grant from the dominant memory politics, not a fact about a person's history.