Summer was the first person I talked to when I started my research for this book. It was July 2009. In her email, she said she was familiar with Da’an District in Taipei and would like to meet me in that neighbourhood. Somewhere near the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University would be ideal, she added. So we met at a coffee shop a few blocks away from the high school. She told me she had planned to once again visit the high school campus after our interview ‘because that's the place Blue Gate Crossing was filmed and set’.

Produced and later on released by Arclight Films in September 2002, Blue Gate Crossing (Yee Chih-yen) tells the story of Kerou, Yuezhen, and Shihao. All three characters go to the Affiliated Senior High School of NTNU in Da’an District. Tomboyish Kerou is secretly in love with her best friend Yuezhen. Yuezhen, for her part, has a crush on the school hunk Shihao. Obsessive and desperate, Yuezhen asks Kerou to convey love messages on her behalf. The personable Shihao, however, becomes attracted to Kerou. Thereafter, all three high-schoolers live through an eventful summer, each falling victim to their immature love triangle.

Summer's encounter with this bittersweet queer romance film was accidental but life-changing. When Blue Gate Crossing first hit the big screen, she had just started secondary school in Hualien, a county on the eastern coast of Taiwan, and had never before been bothered about the uneven distribution of locally made films. She had her first glimpse at clips from the film when she saw on television a music video with the pop singer Cheer Chen, whose record company Rock Record Co., Ltd. was in a cross-industry alliance with Arclight Films. The images appealed to her. She recalled in our 2009 interview and on several later occasions how a line spoken by the character Yuezhen of Shihao had attracted her attention via the music video and ever since became a line she would occasionally quote in her daily life. Summer bought the film's tie-in novel, read it repeatedly and intensively.