Taipei

Taipei is more than the backdrop to Ever’s summer: its streets, family compounds, park paths, historic architecture, and theater give distinct form to the pressures and possibilities that shape her relationships and her growing commitment to dance. The city can feel at once imposing and unexpectedly intimate. A typhoon sends rain across it as students gather inside Chien Tan; in Tianmu, wealth opens onto an expansive mansion; in a bamboo-lined park, Rick runs from troubles he cannot yet explain; and at Lin An Tai, the city offers him a secret place to think. At the National Theater, the spaces that have framed private uncertainty give way to a public stage.

City and Setting

The evidence presents Taipei through a series of sharply differentiated settings rather than as a single, uniform city. A typhoon rages north of the city, bringing showers and gusts that blow Ever through the lobby doors of Chien Tan on a Thursday evening. She has paper lanterns with her for Sophie’s weekend, due to begin the next afternoon. Inside, students play Go and mah-jong, while Mei-Hwa plays Taiwanese Aboriginal pop from David’s laptop and tries to introduce other students to her collection. The weather presses against a lively interior scene of games and music, placing the city’s storm season alongside the social world of the summer program.

Tianmu, by contrast, appears through wealth and controlled grandeur. Sophie’s residence stands in what the narration identifies as one of Taipei’s most expensive neighborhoods. Guards swing open wrought-iron gates onto a wide driveway, and the grounds include stone walls, rosebushes said to have been imported from England, blue-gray flagstones, and English grass. Beyond them rises a two-story, white-stucco mansion with green shutters. The carefully maintained landscape and guarded entrance make the scale of Sophie’s family home unmistakable, while the scene also shows how quickly Sophie’s excitement at arriving overtakes Ever’s attempts to speak with her.

Parks and Private Space

Tianmu Park offers a different register of the city: open paths and shared movement rather than gates and a mansion. Fifteen minutes after leaving Aunty Claire’s, Ever finds Rick running along a bamboo-lined path as dusk falls. The sky is violet streaked with pink clouds, camphor trees scent the air, and men and women nearby gather for tai chi. Against this communal, measured activity, Rick’s soaked gray shirt and determined pace make his run seem like an effort to outrun unnamed troubles. The scene links the park with the vulnerability beneath his reputation as Boy Wonder without yet explaining what those troubles are.

Rick later leads Ever to Lin An Tai, a place he identifies as the former residence of the Lin family, who lived there in the 1700s. He tells her he came there as a child and has returned to think; it is, he says, a secret place. The built environment gives that refuge its particular character. Carved-wood doors open onto a courtyard with a jagged rock labyrinth, redbrick arched bridges laid over gray stone, curving white walls, and window openings shaped like flowers, pomegranates, clouds, and butterflies. A long, low brick mansion stands across the courtyard, with smaller buildings to one side and families walking on the grassy knoll. Rick’s childhood memory of the place as a Chinese Narnia contrasts with Ever’s surprise that she did not know it was there. For her, its beauty makes her want to dance; for Rick, it is a private setting where he can think.

The visit also takes place amid unresolved feelings. Rick thanks Ever for looking after Sophie and says he is glad that she and Xavier were there. Ever’s response is bodily and immediate: at Xavier’s name, her stomach tightens, and she steps past Rick into the complex rather than answering. The historic grounds thus hold both a shared moment of discovery and the emotional complication carried into it.

Public Stages

The National Theater brings another kind of visibility to Taipei. Before the show, Sophie pushes through a slit in the backdrop curtain with her clipboard, dressed in slacks and a short-sleeved white blouse, and urges the group to move because guests will arrive in two hours. The theater is already active: Spencer and Benji wheel in dragon drums, and Ever’s dancers move about in gem-colored dresses—emerald, sapphire, and topaz—with their costumes ready.

From the center of the stage, Ever sees the wings as distant, while six spotlights form double halos overhead. A stage manager in black calls instructions from the technician’s box, and Sophie has arranged for the entire show to be filmed. Those concrete details turn the theater into more than a venue: it is a place where preparation, collaboration, and scrutiny converge, and where Ever’s dance is made visible to an audience and a camera. Across the novel’s Taipei settings, this public stage stands apart from Rick’s secluded refuge and the Zhang residence’s guarded privacy, giving the city’s final performance a distinct place in the story’s movement from personal conflict toward expression.