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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'”