20 years old

As the world falls apart, how can we continue to love?
Do you remember your twenties?
Is growing up painful because society is insincere, or because we are too attached?

The growing pains are like being branded with a hot iron.
Youth is like a flower, and after a chaotic stampede and an unidentifiable storm,
The stem breaks, the petals fall, and all that's left is to calculate how quickly it will rot.


In the late 1980s, the Tiananmen Square incident and the fall of the Berlin Wall brought an end to the Cold War. The winds of democracy reached Taiwan, specifically Taipei, which was experiencing rapid development. At this time, the people of Taipei were grappling with the conflicts, contradictions, and nostalgia left behind by mainlanders on this land. Amidst society's accelerated entry into modernity, a sense of confusion and pursuit arose from the old giving way to the new. The local identity of this generation of young people diverged and broke away from the then-ruling elite, thus, the story of "Twenty Years Old" unfolds...

However, when concepts like "futurization" and "internationalization" became the goals for education and the youth of that era, yet these slogans gradually turned into empty rhetoric in the tug-of-war of generational shifts, becoming tools that tore people apart during the process of growing up, where should the twenty-somethings of this group go?

"I clearly know where I want to go, what kind of person I want to become, but I am powerless."

In April, the fringetree blossoms brightly. "Is she dead?" someone urgently asked.
"She's dead." "The newspaper said she swallowed potassium cyanide." Lai Shui-yin's life stopped in the early summer of that year.
Yueqing never mentioned it, as if she was detached and unable to participate in her classmates' discussions. She sifted through her memories with Shui-yin.
She was a beautiful girl, with eyebrows like mountains and small, cute, upturned red lips. She worked at the university newspaper, focusing on social issues.
She fell in love with a senior who was passionate and actively involved in student movements but became entangled in a love triangle, unable to extricate herself.
Thus, when rumors spread, she was reduced to a thoughtless female body in the mouths of gossiping people...

"To live is the rarest thing in the world; most people just exist."

Tom once said goodbye to Yueqing in college and also simply told her what he wanted to say in front of her.
Then he flashed a brilliant smile, waved, as if saying goodbye, and then immediately threw himself out the window.
He survived and lived life the way he wanted.
He stood up and became part of the social movement. Full of ideals, he started working at the monthly magazine "China Political Forum."
But he was never on time for meetings, habitually left without a word, and borrowed money from Yueqing on every sudden appearance.
His life was like a movie, full of things he wanted to accomplish, and cocktail therapy.
He often called Yueqing in the middle of the night, and all she wished for him was happiness...

"We always think the world isn't good enough, but perhaps, it's just that we are never good enough for the world."

The news was constantly reporting the indictment of the president's entire family. Zheng Li-wen, as one of the political aides, also did not escape indictment.
The senior who once worried about the country and the people, who participated in social movements for grand ideals and ambitions,
now could only hide in his mistress's home, crying bitterly in front of Yueqing.
What he couldn't bear was not just the overwhelming media reports, but also a love he truly had,
but sacrificed under the seemingly successful facade of shouting slogans.
He stayed, he formed a family according to societal expectations, and held a respectable title,
but he never again felt the excitement of being twenty years old...

The freedom we see is not light at all, but very heavy.
Truly free people are great because they bear the consequences of their choices; they are brave, and thus free.

"Even if one understands early that youth is a miracle of life, a brief privilege, can it reverse the impermanence of fate and escape the cruelty of the world? I think not." — Hu Ching-fang

The story centers on Yueqing, connecting this group of twenty-somethings. They believed they would be different from their parents; they would go to many places, meet many people, and do things they were proud of. In the end, they were much like their parents, working, earning money, eating, and sleeping. Is this what it means to live? Yueqing was never the protagonist, or not just the protagonist; she developed another storyline around these people. From the perspective of an observer, she directly confronted humanity's pursuit of fame, wealth, class, and desire, constantly highlighting every painful knot in the process of growing up, which could only be truly understood after youth had passed.