Tainan is the city where Raymond Hou (Raymond) attended National Cheng Kung University between 2012 and 2018. Raymond was born in Taipei. Before he turned eighteen, family circumstances led him to move frequently around the greater Taipei area: he lived in six places, including Minquan East Road, Zhonghe, Yuanshan, Gongguan, Tamsui, and Sanxia, spending fewer than three years in each on average. By contrast, he stayed in Tainan for six consecutive years and said, “At that time, one quarter of my life was in Tainan.” In his narrative, Tainan is not merely the location of his university enrollment. It is where he escaped exam-oriented education and began to grow into himself. He has said many times that he likes Tainan more than Taipei.
The Texture of Six Years of Life
Raymond describes his memories of Tainan mainly through everyday sensory details: golden sunlight, cycling through old alleys, eating ba-wan beside a large tree, and small shops rarely seen in a major city, such as leather-goods makers, fluffy shaved ice shops, wooden clog stores, and tea shops that package tea by hand. In a 2020 article, he summarized the city’s attraction in three connected realizations: only after arriving in Tainan did he understand the vitality of a city; old does not necessarily mean outdated; and he understood what a “city beauty revolution” could be.1
These six years were not a smooth university experience. Raymond needed to work to pay tuition and living expenses and could not handle the engineering college’s overloaded schedule. He changed majors from chemical engineering to Industrial and Information Management, then to NCKU’s first interdisciplinary undeclared program. In the end, he completed 184 credits, paid full tuition for about six semesters, and graduated in 2018.2 In his reflections, frustration with his studies coexists with his enjoyment of the city.
City Wanderer and the Start of Off-Campus Action
Tainan was the setting where Raymond began off-campus projects and took the right to act back into his own hands. Around 2015, inspired by independent travel in India, he returned to Tainan, brought the “City Wanderer” activity there, and organized its first edition. It continued through its fifth and sixth editions, and someone later established a related studio. Around the same time, he also organized N Power Workshop, Co-Creation Era, iGEM, company visits, and other projects. These were “not taught in the classroom or written in textbooks,” but were the source of what he called “finding my own initiative and sense of control.” Tainan was also where he began writing online in his second year and came into conflict with the university system’s values; see Six Years at National Cheng Kung University: Changing Majors Twice and Extending Graduation for context.
The “City Beauty Revolution”: A Way of Seeing Cities
Raymond borrowed the concept of the “beauty revolution” from He Fan’s Variables to organize his preferences for Tainan into a way of observing cities. He argues that a vibrant city is more like a traditional market: there is human warmth and order behind the apparent mess. By contrast, he thinks rows of similar luxury shops and chain brands in Taipei’s East District are “too orderly,” making it difficult to feel vitality. He attributes Tainan’s character to an open-source, networked ecosystem. When everyone can become a node and every way of life can form a community, even an unremarkable alley can become home to a warm shop through community effects. This bottom-up view of cities runs through his later positions on Super Individual and content creation.
In the same article, he recommended three small shops that had inspired him, without paid promotion: Lovi’s alleyway handmade ice-cream shop, Bar Mozaiku, and Juewan Ramen. He described Juewan Ramen as a place he would go to eat a bowl of noodles and calm down after encountering a setback, a breakup, or a disaster.
The Kaixuan Road Fire and Leaving
On March 17, 2019, a neighbor’s fire affected Raymond’s home on Kaixuan Road in Tainan. The black smoke contained carcinogenic volatile organic compounds and forced him to move out. He cleaned the site and searched for a new home that day, standing for twenty-two hours.3 In July of the same year, he left Tainan and returned to Taipei. He originally planned to write a city analysis of Tainan as a farewell but set it aside when he went to Beijing for work soon afterward. He did not complete it until he returned to Taiwan during the pandemic in 2020. In the article, he admitted that looking back over those words “tasted different now, with a little scent of Beijing mixed in.”
Significance
In Raymond’s account, Tainan gave him a sense of belonging that his birthplace, Taipei, had not. He cites Yeh Shih-tao’s words—“Tainan is a place suitable for people to dream, work, fall in love, marry, and live leisurely”—as a note about the city in his mind. Six years of delayed graduation, changing majors, and off-campus experiments, together with his observations of the city’s vitality, formed an early version of his belief that “there is more than one way to be.” This later extended into his ideas about Career Development and Growth Mindset. Taipei, the city he contrasts with Tainan, has a separate entry: Taipei.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “The Bustle of Taipei and the Character of Tainan: A Beauty Revolution Brought by Urbanization?” WordPress article, 2020-04-03. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Reflections on Six Years at NCKU: 184 Credits, Two Major Changes, an Accounting at Age Twenty-Four,” public Facebook post, 2019-04-18. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “A Firsthand Account of the Kaixuan Road Fire in Tainan—Are You Conan? Why Do Disasters Follow Me Everywhere?” public Facebook post, 2019-03-17. View original ↩