Filmmaker Chen Kun-hou was both colleague and mentor for Hou in the early 1980s. He served as cinematographer for most of Hou’s first features, and Hou in turn co-wrote the screenplay for Growing Up, Chen’s most important contribution to the emergence of the Taiwanese New Wave. Like so much of Hou’s early work, the film is a coming-of-age tale about a boy in 1950s Taiwan. The sentimentality of the plot’s nostalgic appeal is complicated by the film’s careful attention to the tensions between the native Taiwanese and the recently arrived mainlanders. Working on the screenplay with the original novel’s author Chu Tien-wen, Hou began one of the most important artistic partnerships of his career; Chu has contributed to the screenplays of almost all of Hou’s subsequent films.