Recently, I finally watched in its entirety, a Taiwanese movie called 那些年 ,我们一起追的女孩 (Nàxiē nián, wǒmen yīqǐ zhuī de nǚhái) – literally translated as “In those years, the girl we all chased after”. Me and my dad often watch Chinese movies together as our bonding session and lately, we’ve been tuned in to Chinese Star Movies a lot (Ch94 – for Sky Cable subscribers). Once as I was coming home from work, I got a glimpse of this movie and immediately recognized the ending song, which I had heard on TV before or when I went to KTV with family or friends back in China. I initially never thought it was part of a movie, I thought it was a music video for a really famous song, so I encouraged my dad to watch out for it so we could watch it together. Last night I was finally able to watch the entire thing, from start to finish, and it was such a lovely and heart-warming movie.
<DISCLAIMER: SPOILERS AHEAD>
The story begins with a guy who is getting ready to attend a wedding with his friends. After their short dialogue, the story pans back to 10 years ago in the year 1994, when the characters are still in their senior high school years. We meet the main character, a high school guy called Ko-teng, and his group of friends who all have their own *ahem*unique*ahem nicknames and quirks. Ko-teng and his friends are not the studious type of students who pay attention in class or get good grades, and they in fact find their own unique ways of entertaining themselves during boring lessons….like masturbating. But one thing they all have in common, except for our main character, is that they like the class honor student Shen Chia-yi, a pretty and friendly and studious girl who dislikes Ko-teng because of his personality towards studying. So when Ko-teng and his friends get found out for jerking off during class, the teacher decides to move Ko-teng to the seat in front of Chia-yi, in the hopes that her good demeanor and responsible attitude would somehow rub off on him. The two remain somewhat apathetic towards the other, though Chia-yi sometimes tells off Ko-teng for not bothering to study at all, and Ko-teng telling off Chia-yi for looking down on people who aren’t as smart as her. They stay like this until one day, Chia-yi forgets her English textbook and almost gets caught by the teacher for not having brought it, until Ko-teng passes off his book to her and takes the blame instead.
Chia-yi starts seeing a different side to Ko-teng, whom she initially thought cared about no one except his group of friends. She starts encouraging him to study harder by making practice exams for him to review, and then correcting it herself and giving him pointers on how to do better. Later on, Chia-yi persuades Ko-teng to stay with her after classes so they could review the lessons more, eventually resulting in Ko-teng getting better grades in the midterm exams. Ko-teng and Chia-yi eventually enter into a bet where the loser of the next midterm exams (basically the one who scores lower than the other), will have to do what the other wants. Ko-teng, though he tries his hardest, isn’t able to surpass Chia-yi; but Chia-yi surprises him by still pushing through with the bet by wearing a ponytail (which was his arrangement for her had she lost). From then on, Ko-teng realizes that he has fallen in love with Chia-yi as well. Ko-teng and his friends, as well as Chia-yi and her best friend Chia-wei, become close as the weeks go by…up until the end of their school days.