She was raised in a tiny gold-mining town in Taiwan. Now it’s become a tourist trap — and she’s fighting for the soul of the place.

I found my interview location quickly, mostly because Jiufen is so small that it’s hard to get really lost.

It’s also precisely because Jiufen is so small that the millions of tourists — primarily daytrippers — making their way through its tiny alleyways each year overwhelm the 1,600 residents living here. In 2023, the tourist zone where Jiufen is located welcomed nearly 4 million visitors.

Most would be headed for Jiufen, a historic gold-mining town known for its striking likeness to the set of Oscar-winning Japanese animation “Spirited Away.”

Mickey Tseng, 36, paused and searched for her words when I asked her what she thought about the changes in the quiet mountain town where she grew up with her grandparents. She, like many others who hail from Jiufen, spent her childhood chasing after frogs, cooking sweet potatoes in the mud, and frolicking by the rivers.

“I got really angry with how this place became,” Tseng told me. “I looked at the crowds and asked why they didn’t think to pay attention to culture and heritage.”

It’s not hard to see Jiufen’s allure, especially at dusk, when red lanterns cast a glow on old shopfronts and teahouses that seem to have stood still in time. Or after a shower lifts to leave a mist that stretches into the sea.

But, like tourist hot spots from Venice and Barcelona to Kyoto, Jiufen is now more about vibes than history. Reviews throw up predictable descriptions: magical, crowded, tourist trap.

The fading gold-mining town

Visitors to the town typically head to Jiufen Old Street, a narrow winding street with shops on both sides hawking anything from tea and Taiwanese snacks to generic tourist junk.

Many travelers also duck into the teahouses located in and around the street.

Residents — some of whom have lived in the area for generations — try to avoid being around Jiufen Old Street during the day, Tseng said. There’s nothing they could possibly want from here.

“The shops in the old street used to cater to residents’ daily needs like groceries, food, clothes, and shoes but as the number of residents dwindled, they all closed one by one,” said Tseng, referring to scenes from a Jiufen whose glory days were already over when she was born.

Now, the shops in town are mostly geared toward tourists. Many residents make their way down the mountain for their grocery runs. The elderly wait for their kids to visit with their weekly hauls.

On the old street today, there is just one OG shop selling braised pork buns, said Tseng. It was closed when I was in the area, but the owners of the shop used to cater all the events around Jiufen from weddings to other celebrations, she added.

The shop now mainly caters to tourists.

Tseng’s Jiufen

Born in 1988, Tseng spent her formative years in this tiny Jiufen where everyone knew everyone else.

Her mother’s family has been living in the area for six generations, she said. They were farmers before gold was discovered the area, sparking a rush that her grandfather, Tseng Shui-Chih, joined around 1949 at the age of 14.

Like other gold miners of the time, he set up home in Jiufen, an area that’s made up of three parallel streets and one intersecting street.

When the gold rush took hold, as many as 50,000 people lived in Jiufen at one point.

But the gold mines shut by 1971 and the town fell into decline. The town’s population tanked and the young people — like Tseng’s mother — left to seek work elsewhere.

Tseng was born in Taipei. She was sent to live with her grandparents a week later while her parents continued working at a garment factory in the capital. Tseng spent her elementary school and college years away from Jiufen, but was always back during her term breaks.

As Tseng grew up, she saw the town change from a sleepy town to a tourist hot spot after the Taiwanese movie “A City of Sadness” was filmed in the area. The 1989 film went on to win numerous international awards — including the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion prize — creating a wave of new businesses, notably teahousees, in Jiufen.

In 2001, Japanese auteur Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” set off an even bigger wave of sightseeing frenzy.

Miyazaki has categorically denied that the mountain town was his inspiration for the animation’s set, but it hasn’t stopped travelers from coming in droves.

With visitors far outnumbering residents, social spaces for the local community have shrunk significantly. Today, residents tend to emerge from their homes only when tourists leave.

Locals like to stroll in the quiet of night, chatting with one another, said Tseng. But it’s far from the Jiufen of the past.

Now shops close around 7 p.m., which Tseng said is “shocking” —because Jiufen used to be a town that never sleeps.

“What do you think miners used to do after work?” Tseng asked.

It turns out the hard workers did what all hard workers do: eat, drink, be merry, and — in this case — gamble too: “It was like Las Vegas,” she said.

Since most shops on the old shopping street used to be run by residents who lived in the same spaces, they would also keep them open late into the night, Tseng said.

In the 1990s, following the hype from “A City of Sadness,” teahouses in Jiufen even operated into the wee hours of the morning to serve local tourists unwinding over the weekends. Tseng knows — because she used to work in one.

Today, it can get eerily silent at night in Jiufen after the daytrippers leave — which is a different sort of charm in itself. However, it’s just not the soul of Tseng’s hometown.

Launching a night tour business

Tseng now hopes to revive some of the nocturnal buzz by running a night tour after daytrippers leave. It’s a business as much as a salve for her own existential anxiety.

“As things I remember started disappearing, I began to doubt myself. I started to doubt if something I remember really existed in the first place,” Tseng said. “I had to do something.”

She charges 400 New Taiwan Dollars, or $12.30, per person for the tour and can see as many as 25 people for each tour. A minimum of five people are required to form an English tour.

The tour starts at the house she shares with her grandmother and uncle, which is also home to a gold ore museum. Founded by Grandpa Tseng, who died in 2012, the museum was what brought Tseng home in the same year.

Before returning to Jiufen, Tseng spent her first two years after college in a few unrelated jobs. She taught Chinese in London, and worked two retail jobs in Taipei.

Tseng’s private museum is simple, with displays of metal ores and tools. At the entrance stands a mining cart with Grandpa Tseng’s gear and tools. She charges 120 New Taiwan Dollars per visitor and requires a group of at least 10 people for the museum tour.

Tseng doesn’t appear to have figured out how to scale up her operations. She markets the tours mainly via local guesthouses. She said she wasn’t even receiving a salary in her first decade back in Jiufen, but is driven by a deeper calling.

During her tour, she tells stories about what the town used to be.

“If a place doesn’t have memories and culture, the place will disappear. Jiufen wouldn’t be Jiufen anymore,” she said.

Recently, Tseng also started manning a barbershop after its longtime owner, Miyoko Yang, died at the age of 80. It’s not just for heritage but to keep the only barbershop in the neighborhood in service.

Reimagining authenticity amid over-tourism

Like all tourist hot spots, Jiufen residents have a love-hate relationship with the travelers who line up its stairs and clamor into shops.

Visitors have taken over their daily spaces, but tourism has also rejuvenated the town and provided residents with commercial opportunities from running guesthouses to renting out their homes as shop spaces.

“The lives of residents have been impacted but without sightseeing, this place would not survive,” said Tseng. “There were no other industries after mining, and that was why it fell into decline. Tourism gave Jiufen a second life.”

Tseng is hoping to present a more genuine Jiufen to visitors and to inspire businesses in the area to imagine a future where commercial opportunities can align with the area’s heritage.

It’s a delicate balance.

“‘Authenticity’ to local residents is quite different from what tourists expect,” Kevin Cheong, an adjunct lecturer at the Singapore Management University and a project consultant to the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, told me.

To local residents of the place, authenticity is about retaining traditional ways of life, forms of worship, rites, rituals, and customs. In other words, it’s so that they can go about their everyday lives, so the tourist doesn’t exist, explained Cheong.

“However, to tourists, ‘authenticity’ is like a show performance where the place is on stage delivering a ‘song-and-dance’ and they pay for such an experience,” he said.

Tseng admitted she has considered escaping the tourist trap that is home many times. But she is not looking to leave now that she’s so entwined with the local community.

Besides, she can’t, the Jiufen local said half-seriously.

“I go to the temple every year over the new year to ask about my career and if it’s right for me to continue staying here, if there’s a future for me here,” Tseng said, referring to a traditional practice of drawing a divination lot in answer to a question or request.

The Earth God that oversees Jiufen has instructed Tseng to stay put — every single year: “He is telling me, ‘don’t rush, be patient.'”