Taroko Gorge, with its towering cliffs and vividly colored river, gives Ever Wong and Rick Woo a setting for spontaneous movement and conversation during the island tour. The place later returns in Xavier Yeh’s mural and sketches, where its meeting waters become an image of cultural identity, connection, and the memories formed during the summer.

Landscape and the Tour

During the breakneck Tour Down South, Ever and Rick share a seat at the back of Bus A, one of eleven luxury buses carrying the Chien Tan group around Taiwan. The route passes elevated highways, city skylines, farmland, greenhouses, dikes, waterways, and mountains before the bus drops them between Taroko Gorge’s high cliffs. Emerald moss covers the rock walls, while the river below shifts through aquamarine, turquoise, and sapphire.

Ever and Rick race ahead together. Ever’s feet dance and leap over the rocks as Rick lopes beside her; the landscape feels almost otherworldly, yet unmistakably real. Against the fast-moving tour and its organized caravan, the gorge offers a moment of unhurried attention to the terrain and to each other.

A Place for Conversation

At the gorge, Rick proposes a rapid-fire game focused on Ever, asking her to answer only and calling it an “Everything there is to Ever Wong, lightning round.” The invitation opens an unusually sustained exchange: Ever describes the conversation as a dam opening, with the two talking nonstop. The scene connects the physical passage of the river through rock with a new ease between the pair, without turning that ease into a settled declaration.

The Gorge in Xavier’s Art

Taroko Gorge returns later in Xavier’s mural, which he and Sophie Ha raise as the stage backdrop. Among images of Chien Tan—the National Palace Museum’s five interlocked gates, an incense-smoking golden urn, dancers beneath strobe lights, and Sun Moon Lake—the mural depicts the gorge as a Y-shaped confluence: blue water flowing into gray. Asian American children populate the blue stream, while black-haired families of all ages fill the gray one.

Xavier explains that the image is an analogy for the group. Ever reads the currents as people cutting their own path through rock before joining a larger river of life. The gorge’s branching waters thus carry both difference and convergence: separate experiences remain visible even as they enter a shared flow. Ever finds the image moving, an artwork that breaks her heart and mends it again.

Recollection and Meaning

Xavier’s smaller sketches preserve Taroko Gorge as a personal memory as well as a metaphor. One shows Ever and Rick seated together on an orange rock there; others place them against the night market and at the edge of Kenting National Forest, stick fighting while Ever laughs. These scenes gather the intimacy of the gorge encounter into a visual record of the summer.

The gorge’s significance therefore develops through recurrence. First it is a real, difficult-to-believe landscape where Ever and Rick move freely and talk; later it becomes part of Xavier’s account of how individual paths can meet without erasing their differences. Its river supplies the mural with a structure for belonging, while the sketches preserve the specific companionship that grew beside it.