Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

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SUBJECT: FASHION DESIGNERS (90%); ART & ARTISTS (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (89%); PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS (78%); FASHION & APPAREL (78%); SCULPTURE (74%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (74%); EXHIBITIONS (72%); CONFERENCES & CONVENTIONS (72%); MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS (69%); FASHION SHOWS (78%)
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LOAD-DATE: March 23, 2008
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PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

947 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
March 23, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

B-Boys and B-Girls
BYLINE: By BAZ DREISINGER.

Baz Dreisinger, an assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is the author of the forthcoming ''Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture.''

SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 26
LENGTH: 948 words
SOMEBODY SCREAM!

Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power.

By Marcus Reeves.

320 pp. Faber & Faber. $25.

Where do music genres go when they age? To the groves of academe. And so hip-hop, hugging 30, sits confidently alongside jazz and rock 'n' roll in the academy, subject of college courses and scholarly scrutiny. It's been a navel-gazing genre from the get-go, chronicled and dissected since its childhood in the 1980s. But in recent years, as the hip-hop-history industry has thrived like never before, highbrow words spent on the culture have seemed as copious as the platinum on P. Diddy's wrist.

Perhaps that's because writing about hip-hop affords critics and scholars an opportunity to cast a wide net; this self-consciously capitalist genre is American culture writ large -- a brasher, bolder, ruder edition of the Horatio Alger myth. Reading it as part and parcel of American social and political history is a way of legitimizing a culture long derided, and the bar for this brand of analysis was set high by Jeff Chang's ''Can't Stop Won't Stop'' (2005), a definitive history of the hip-hop generation. Close on Chang's heels (and treading many of his paths) comes the journalist Marcus Reeves with a sweeping, painstakingly thorough, not especially original history of hip-hop, told through the stories of a dozen celebrated acts and their sociopolitical contexts.

''Somebody Scream! Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power'' is eminently readable and occasionally riveting. Its selection of artists is sound yet predictable. (Instead of scrutinizing the usual suspects -- Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G., et al. -- why not explore major stars over whom fewer gallons of erudite ink have been spilled?) The book, which ends with Eminem, begins in 1971, when black power was ''crumbling'' in real life but was reborn on television. The debut of ''Soul Train,'' Reeves argues, ''provided a national stage for black urban youth culture,'' thus sowing the seeds for hip-hop culture: ''a hard-rock vessel carrying the hopes, anger, disappointments, attitude and history of post-black-power America.''

Hip-hop histories always have the same trajectory: from rags to riches, from America's bastard child to, as Reeves puts it, ''America's new rock 'n' roll.'' This trajectory allows writers to wax nostalgic about ''back in the day,'' when hip-hop was humble, all the while smirking over how far their baby has come. Reeves also does this, so his book sometimes reads like a litany of ever-escalating hip-hop ''firsts'' -- first commercial single (the Sugarhill Gang's ''Rapper's Delight''); first album (''Kurtis Blow''); first double album (Tupac's ''All Eyez on Me''); first act with a sneaker endorsement deal (Run-D.M.C., with Adidas); first Grammy winners (D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince); first Saturday-morning cartoon (M.C. Hammer's ''Hammerman''). Here, too, are less triumphant firsts: first federal court to find an album obscene (Federal District Court in Fort Lauderdale, ruling on 2 Live Crew's ''As Nasty as They Wanna Be'' in 1990); first Imus-esque controversy over rap lyrics (Tipper Gore versus Russell Simmons, in the mid-'80s) -- affirming that all current debates about hip-hop and America's youth are recycled.

Reeves loves context. His meticulous historicizing works in the case of hip-hop's well-documented inception during the mid-'70s: poverty and urban decay in places like the Bronx produced ''an environment that had become comparable to the one in 'Lord of the Flies,' where children stranded on an island with no adult guidance create a new, brutal social order of their own.'' Hip-hop was therapy, after-school program and part-time job rolled into one. Reeves's historicizing works, too, in the case of gangsta rap, a product of Reagan's America: the cutting of social welfare programs led to steep inclines in black poverty rates, which led to crack, thriving gang economies -- and N.W.A., superstar gangsta rappers straight outta Compton. So the rawest hip-hop became the most commercial: ''Words and street jargon usually reserved for the corner or barbershops or neighborhood bars or tenement hallways -- tucked in cozy spaces within black life -- had a pop soundtrack and hit parade.''

But Reeves might keep in mind that correlation is not causation -- or even relation. Take Jay-Z: in the days before having your own clothing line and record label was de rigueur for a rapper, this Brooklyn-born M.C. and entrepreneur indeed represented ''the changing face of the corporate/cultural paradigm.'' But does he really have anything to do with the slavery reparations movement? Likewise, it's insulting to 9/11 victims and Amadou Diallo to read about them in light of the rapper DMX. Is his club single ''Party Up'' (''Y'all gonna make me lose my mind up in here -- up in here!'') really ''a universal anthem for anyone young or old who was fed up with ignorance or ill treatment''? Sometimes a hot beat is just a hot beat.

Ultimately, Reeves deserves credit for breadth, though sometimes it's at the expense of depth. Among the rich issues that go unexplored is the one alluded to in his subtitle, which implies that hip-hop reverberates with echoes of the black power movement. This is a contentious claim. Is hip-hop a torchbearer of civil rights or black power -- and should it be? ''Woe be it unto a community that has to rely on rappers for political leadership,'' the pioneering producer Bill Stephney stated in a 1987 Howard University forum. What is the criterion by which a rapper ''has risen to his leadership? He can flow?'' A question worthy of a book in itself.
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SUBJECT: RAP MUSIC (92%); HIP HOP CULTURE (91%); MUSIC (90%); BOOK REVIEWS (90%); MUSIC GENRES (90%); POP & ROCK (89%); WRITERS & WRITING (88%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (78%); YOUTH MARKET (74%); JAZZ & BLUES (73%); JOURNALISM (69%)
PERSON: SEAN (DIDDY) COMBS (56%)
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TITLE: Somebody Scream! (Book)>; Somebody Scream! (Book)>
LOAD-DATE: March 23, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
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March 23, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

last days of taipei
BYLINE: By Douglas McGray
SECTION: Section MM; Column 0; T: Travel Magazine; Pg. 126
LENGTH: 4171 words
there is nothing particularly Taiwanese about the Astoria Cafe. That's what made it special when Archibald Chien opened the place over a half century ago, on the west side of Taipei, the old downtown. The bakery sold fresh bread and homemade cakes downstairs. Upstairs, Chien served dark, bitter coffee, Italian style. Well, not really Italian. ''French,'' he told me. ''Swiss,'' he said, picking up a plate of perfect little cakes. Then he laughed. The coffee, the pastries and the cakes -- actually, all Russian. ''But we could not call anything Russian.'' Just about everything gets political in Taipei. Even dessert.

History in Taiwan's capital has unfolded like a foreign-affairs soap opera. In the 1500s, mainland Chinese, mostly from Fujian Province, began to move here to farm. But the newcomers clashed with the locals, dozens of tribes with their own languages and cultures. Then, in the 17th century, the Dutch moved in. Then a Chinese faction, hostile to the new Qing dynasty that ruled the mainland, threw them out. Then the Qing army conquered the Chinese in Taiwan and put the island up for sale. When they couldn't find a buyer, they kept it until 1895, when Japan seized the land -- and things got really complicated.

It's more than history to Chien. He explained that he spoke Taiwanese as a young boy, in the 1930s. (Taiwanese is related to the local tongue of Fujian Province; just how closely related is, you guessed it, political.) But Chien had to give up Taiwanese for Japanese during elementary school -- when imperial Japan was trying to scrub the island clean of native and Chinese influences. When China reclaimed Taiwan after World War II, Japanese was banned, so as a young man Chien got to work on the new national language, Mandarin Chinese.

Chien founded the Astoria in 1949 with a few Russian guys who had left the Soviet Union. That same year, Communists seized control of mainland China and General Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists fled to Taiwan. They took over Taipei and installed a thuggish government, nearly as hard-line in its anti-Maoism as the Communists in Beijing were anti-bourgeois. Mysterious men started showing up at the cafe, watching Chien's Russian partners and tracking who came and went -- especially the writers.

Business boomed for a while. Taiwan bet early on high-tech manufacturing, and by the 1970s the island was gadget maker to the world. Businessmen would come to the cafe with their portable radios and listen to the stock market report while sipping coffee. Gradually, though, the neighborhood outside, with its narrow avenues, tiled facades and crowds of street vendors, lost its importance as office towers, shopping malls, restaurants and foreign boutiques sprouted from the city's new glass-and-steel east side. Then came the international hotels with their elegant cafes. Pretty soon, you could get a good cup of coffee and a Western-style pastry anywhere in the city.

The morning I met Chien, except for the two of us and Chien's daughter, the Astoria Cafe was empty.

Taipei these days is both cosmopolitan and mellow, thanks to three decades of prosperity that have benefited largely the middle class. (I used to associate the sound of Mandarin with the bumping, every-man-for-himself chaos of China's big cities -- not anymore.) But there are echoes everywhere of the turmoil that shaped the city, and signs of an uncertain future. Which makes now a pretty interesting time to explore.

Chu T'ien-hsin and her sister are a bit like the Brontes of Taiwan. They're big-time novelists and short-story writers. (Taipei's dailies publish literary supplements, so highbrow short stories reach an unusually large audience.) I wanted to talk to Chu about her novella ''The Old Capital,'' which came out in English last year.

We met at Spot-Taipei Film House, a cinema, bookstore and cafe in a white colonial mansion on busy Zhongshan North Road. This was the United States government's consulate in Taipei until the Carter administration normalized relations with China and left Taiwan. The old house was empty for more than two decades until a few years ago, when Hou Hsiao-hsien, the respected Taiwanese filmmaker, led an effort to transform the place. (He actually showed up at our table to say hello -- Chu's sister, T'ien-wen, writes most of his screenplays.)

Chu has a sweet, round face, inquisitive eyes and perfect posture. ''The Old Capital'' was her critical hit here. It tells the story of a Taiwanese woman who returns to Taipei from abroad and struggles to find the city of her youth in a modern, alien place. As the narrator walks around the city, she retreats into her head.

Chu weighs down every memory with details -- bus stops, house numbers, songs on the radio, species of flora. ''There were chrysanthemums and osmanthus'' if your father came from mainland China, she writes of the gardens in her character's childhood neighborhood, ''or hibiscuses and tree orchids (if your father was local Taiwanese) or wisterias and arhat pines (if your ancestors had spoken Japanese).''

''The Old Capital'' is crowded with horticulture. I asked Chu why. When the Japanese came, she said, they planted flame trees, cherry trees, azaleas and eucalyptus all around Taipei. Later, the Chinese nationalists chopped many of these down and planted banyan trees and king palms. When locals chafed at the way a small gang of mainlanders ran Taipei, officials began planting native camphor trees. In less than a generation, camphor-lined streets have become the picture of modern Taipei. The stout, twisting laurels grow quickly, like so much else here.

In any boomtown, things vanish and other things take their place. But something more has happened in Taipei. ''It's just one government erasing the history of another,'' Chu said. She's no impartial observer; she feels a deep connection to mainland China, something many here reject, and she's blunt about it. But she's definitely right about this: Taipei's story seems to get rewritten, and rewritten, and rewritten.

I asked Chu where I might find a place in Taipei that's lived through a few drafts -- keeping in mind that there isn't much Old Taipei. This city of nearly three million was home to just 176,521 people in 1920 and 335,397 at the end of World War II. ''In China, their grandmas' shoes are older than our oldest buildings,'' a prominent publisher and creative entrepreneur, Irmin Pao, said a couple days later when I visited him at his studio.

Chu suggested the city's leafy southern quarter near National Taiwan University and told me to look for a cluster of old Japanese-era houses. So I caught a subway and walked toward a maze of streets behind the university. I stopped to get my bearings in front of a tall apartment building, its window boxes and wrought-iron balconies bursting with flowers. The whole street smelled of flowers. It occurred to me: If the land these houses sit on is unchanged since the Japanese era, then the trees ought to lead me to them.

I wandered down Taishun Street. Classes were out for the day. College kids filled the block, the boys in American-style jeans, loose T-shirts and polos, the girls in short skirts. Taishun Street is lined with cheap restaurants and snack counters and drink vendors selling about a million varieties of tea: candy sweet, herbal, bitter, hot, cold, black, white, green. The side streets are crooked and lovely and lined with bookstores, cafes with tiny round tables and names like L'Apres-Midi and Cafe Bastille, and boutiques selling Japanese street fashion. I walked into a record shop built in the gap between two buildings, so narrow that my shoulders almost brushed the walls. There are no sidewalks, and you have to dodge the occasional buzzing scooter, but it was peaceful, and for a while, I forgot my mission.

Trees; right.

I sipped at a cold tea (opaque brown, sweet and tart, with a spoonful of brown jelly in it) and peered down each side street. Then I spotted a different kind of green, and headed for it. Soon I was surrounded by thick trees, and birds, so many they drowned out the sounds of the city. This was it. I could barely see the houses behind their high brick walls and rain-forest-thick yards, but the rooflines were unmistakable -- dark, curved tiles and shallow angles, just like in Kyoto.

A few days later, I returned to the neighborhood to meet another novelist, Luo Yichin, and look for ghosts of Chiang's nationalist China. Luo lives nearby, and hangs out at Cafe Bastille. He is stocky, with thinning hair and a big, boisterous laugh. His stories are difficult, critics told me, but popular. We grabbed some lunch -- plates of clams, chewy greens and a Shanghai-style Chinese soup that Luo first translated hesitantly as ''once fresh'' but revised, less convincingly, to ''very delicious'': thick chunks of ham, fatty pork and crisp potatoes in a briny white broth. Then we headed west, to something called a red envelope club.

It was dark inside. A thin cloud of smoke settled on the ceiling around a disco ball. We found seats by the stage. All around us, old men sipped tea from paper cups; a bunch of them had nodded off. Onstage, a woman, not quite middle-aged but not young either, slinked around in a red sequined dress with a plunging neckline, singing an old Mandarin torch song. When she finished, the house lights came up, and a few old men shuffled to the stage with red envelopes, small bills stuffed inside.

Most of the men around us were in the army, Luo explained. Chiang showed up in a small city with 600,000 Chinese soldiers, most of them single or permanently separated from their families; it made for a skewed dating scene. ''Most of the songs are about homesickness,'' Luo said.

There used to be lots of red envelope clubs in the city; now there are just a handful. The generation that remembers these melodies, and the mainland, and the war, and the fight for Beijing, and the flight to Taipei -- it's dying. A song ended; the lights came up again. A few more men shuffled to the stage.

Taipei's shiny east side is home to the world's tallest building, Taipei 101. But Chiang Kai-shek's memorial casts a longer shadow. It sits in the middle of a sprawling walled garden, towering over a severe plaza that spans several city blocks.

Like the camphor trees, a lot of the postcard attractions in Taipei hold political meaning that's lost on most visitors. Take Lungshan Temple. Built in 1738, it's one of the largest temples in Taiwan -- an explosion of bright color and intricate sculpture. It's also where, in 1986, a crowd of activists first publicly called for an end to martial law. Or there's the National Palace Museum, set back in the steep, green mountains that

rise at the northern edge of the city. When it fled the mainland, Chiang's army brought along the world's most significant collection of Chinese art, which fills the museum's galleries. ''I was always fascinated by that decision,'' Irmin Pao, the publisher, told me. ''They've lost the battle, they're trying to get out of China, bullets are flying, and someone has to pack all those vases. It's very Indiana Jones,'' he joked. ''For that reason alone, China will never let us be independent.''

Here at Chiang's memorial, students from all over Taiwan gathered in 1990 to demand democratic reforms, including popular elections for the presidency. They called themselves the Wild Lily movement. Early last year, the central government took Chiang Kai-shek's name off his memorial. Now it's the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. The new sign, marked with a lily, went up just before I got to Taipei. Politicians were still bickering about it.

The memorial's collection is a cult-of-personality shrine, assembled in the days when Chiang's party, the Kuomintang, ran the government. It has displays like the Late President Chiang's Everlasting Contributions to the Entire World. Cases full of medals. Chiang's black, rapper-fabulous Cadillacs. And his favorite slippers. (''He loved to wear these shoes when he was pacing during the war against Japan.'')

A new exhibit called ''Bye-bye, Chiang Kai-shek!'' told a different story. There was a tally of suspected political criminals from 1949 to 1952, more than 240,000 names. A list of more than 1,500 prisoners sent to re-education camps. Photos of men and women who disappeared during Taiwan's so-called White Terror. Death sentences, written in Chiang's signature red pen.

It's hard to believe a national museum would put two competing versions of history on display, side by side, and make no attempt to reconcile them. But it's fitting. Consider Taiwan's parliament, riven by two warring parties and bitterly divided over Chiang's legacy and Taiwan's ties to the mainland. A couple years ago, one legislator grabbed a rival's proposal to allow direct flights between Taiwan and China, shoved it in her mouth and chewed it up, setting off a brawl. An actual brawl. Legislators have thrown food at one another and drawn blood (actual blood) on the parliament floor.

My translator, Julia, and I walked out and descended the steps to the plaza. For all the conflict inside, it was a peaceful spot. Couples walked with young children. Teenagers improvised a game of badminton. An imposing wall quieted the noise of rush hour traffic. There had been talk in recent weeks of tearing it down and planting trees in its place.

It was starting to get dark. ''Hungry?'' Julia asked. We hailed a taxi and headed for one of Taipei's famous night markets, where vendors pack a maze of streets and alleys when the sun sets. Wandering, we dug into a pile of floury, handmade noodles, followed by pig's-blood cake covered with crushed peanuts and cilantro; fried buns stuffed with bitter greens; pungent soup with slivers of fresh ginger and whole pigs' feet; big hunks of melon, just in season; and heaping bowls of sweet, slippery douhua -- chilled tofu pudding with azuki beans, mung beans and boiled peanuts.

I was struck by how many people in Taipei wondered aloud about the future -- whether the city would continue to change for the better. It boiled down to this: Ten years ago, iPods would have been made in Taiwan. Today they're made in China.

''Everything is drawn to China,'' Pao said. ''It's like this big magnet.'' But it's hard to tell what that will mean for Taiwan in the long run. ''I think people notice Taipei because of China,'' he continued. ''A few years ago, you would never have taken this trip.''

There was a new teen movie out, called ''Exit No. 6,'' about my next stop: Exit 6 at Ximen Station, in Ximending on the city's west side.

It was Friday night, and I was meeting Michelle Yeh, a 31-year-old film producer whose debut, a gay dating comedy called ''Formula 17,'' hit

No. 1 at the box office. Yeh is tall, with a heart-shaped face and black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wore a baggy black T-shirt, black jeans and white Adidas Superstars.

We ambled down the middle of the street. Pushcart vendors sold corn on the cob, sweet pork sausages and Taipei's famous ''stinky tofu.'' Somewhere high above us, the stars had come out, but at street level, it was Vegas bright. It seemed like every third or fourth building was a movie theater; the rest were restaurants, arcades and cheap shops (like the concisely named Real Hip Hop Doobiest 911 Street Style International).

Yeh's a west side person, she told me; east side people, ''they're more posh.'' I'm with her. The east side is nice. It's the place to go if you want to buy something expensive from Tokyo or get a frappuccino. But it's a bit anonymous. Nothing like Dihua Street, on the west side, with its eccentric stone buildings and shops filled with curiosities (like an opulent old chandelier lit by fluorescent tubes). Not to mention the astoundingly good beef noodle soup place on Taoyuan Street, known simply as Tao Yuan Jie Niu Rou Mian, or the Beef Noodles on Taoyuan Street.

Like so many creative types in Taipei, Yeh spends a lot of time in China these days. When we met, she was in the middle of shooting a movie on the mainland. China's 1.3 billion people are an enticing audience, and working on both sides of the Taiwan Strait might be a way to survive Hollywood's invasion. (In Ximending, American films must have outnumbered Taiwanese 10 to 1, maybe 20 to 1.)

But she worried that ''whatever cultural influence Taipei had has been usurped by cities in China.'' A few days earlier, the artist Chen Chieh-jen told me that a European curator had solicited his work for a show, thinking he was from China; when the curator learned that Chen lives in Taiwan, he took back the invitation. Many Taiwanese artists and curators have moved to Shanghai, where foreign cash has flooded local galleries.

Working in China, however, can mean cultural compromises. ''A lot of subject matter can't be filmed,'' Yeh explained. I asked what kind.

''Um -- Falun Gong. Or ghosts -- in the end, there has to be a scientific explanation, or the character has to have been imagining it all. Also, nothing too political. Or homosexual.''

Yeh said Hong Kong movies have changed, become more Chinese. Whole themes have disappeared. And it's not just movies. ''Hong Kong lost its culture,'' she insisted. She could imagine the same thing happening to Taipei. ''What makes Taiwan special is going to become more and more marginalized. It is going to be less and less important for young people.''

We ducked down an alley, barely wide enough for two people to pass. The shop awnings almost touched overhead, and strings of tiny lights and colored balls dangled between them, a kind of canopy. It felt a bit like walking through the forest, except the wildlife was getting its nails done and the buzz of tattoo guns stood in for crickets and bird song.

''Are you hungry?'' Yeh asked. I answered, ''Here? Always.'' She led me to a tiny restaurant with dim, fluorescent lighting and white walls. It was called King Garden Pork Chops. (I like a restaurant name that tells you what's good. Like Swan Meat City, across town.) A cook sat at an empty table, chopping pork off the bone with a heavy cleaver. He took our order.

''I love this place!'' Yeh said, clapping her hands. ''My parents went here when they were dating.'' The food came almost instantly: bowls of thin yellow broth with clear noodles, cabbage and crispy fried pork. It was cheap, greasy and delicious. Two teenagers next to us ordered steaming pork and rice; they left their headphones on and ate in silence.

The pork chops will probably still be here in 10 years. But the rest of the city, the economy, the culture, it's hard to know what will become of it. Democratic Progressive Party leaders have talked up continued independence from China in recent years, but they lost big at the polls this winter to the more conciliatory Kuomintang. ''Everything here is political to some extent,'' Yeh said. ''When the government changes, the whole country changes. We're highly influenced by who's in charge.''

On my last day in the city, I visited Chow Yu, a trim, quiet 60-something man who runs Wistaria Tea House near Da'an Forest Park. The Taiwan-born director Ang Lee shot part of ''Eat Drink Man Woman'' here. It's a creaky, Japanese-style building nearly a century old, with a garden that blends elements of traditional Japan (bamboo, koi pond) and Taiwan (soft ferns). The busy six-lane street just beyond the garden wall used to be a river, Chow said. As a boy, he'd cross it every day to go to school, on a narrow wooden bridge. The air would be full of dragonflies.

Wistaria Tea House was under renovation, so we sat at Chow's smaller Vine House on a quiet, crooked alley nearby. It's pretty and homey, with dark slate floors, mismatched tables and austere paintings and drawings by Chow's artist friends. We took a seat near a window, and Chow set his sliver-thin Japanese cellphone between us. I wondered if it was made in Taiwan.

His father, he said, had been a government official, then a professor who translated Friedrich Hayek, the free-market economist and philosopher, into Chinese. (Hayek's books were banned on the mainland.) During his dad's university days, the house became an important salon. When Chow inherited the place, he turned it into a teahouse -- not out of any love for tea, but because he kept hosting plays and concerts and readings and realized he ought to sell something. ''All night, the door was open,'' Chow recalled. ''We'd drink and talk. It was very romantic, very bohemian.''

Lately, the tea has started to take on greater meaning for him. Old tea, especially. He's been collecting it and serving it on special occasions. Some of his teas are almost 100 years old. He went to the basement and came back with a small canister of pu-erh tea, grown in Taiwan and picked in the early 1950s. He got a tiny clay teapot smaller than a tennis ball and a pair of shallow black cups. ''We drink old tea to recall our old times,'' he said, adding hot water to a pinch of long, dark leaves, ''and to connect with history and memory. There is a certain bitterness that recalls time past. You can renew yourself, and look at history with a clearer mind.''

Old tea is hard to store. It takes on moisture, soaks up flavors of other teas stored nearby. ''The first few brews show the imperfections most prominently,'' Chow said as I took a sip. It smelled earthy and tasted woody, a little bitter. A sip almost drained the cup. ''Toward the end, only the essence remains,'' he said, refilling my cup again, and again. Each time, it tasted grassier, softer.

''You can taste the time,'' he said. ''It's the same for people. If they can overcome the darker parts of their history, they can move on to a better place.''

Essentials Taipei

HOTELS: Among the best of the city's big hotels are the Grand Formosa Regent (011-886-2-2523-8000; regent hotels.com; doubles from about $340), the Grand Hyatt (011-886-2-2720-1234; grand.hyatt.com; doubles from $270), Shangri-La's Far Eastern Plaza Hotel (011-886-2-2378-8888; shangri-la.com; doubles from $262), the Sherwood (011-886-2-2718-1188; sherwood.com.tw; doubles from $316) and the Westin (011-886-2-8770-6565; westin.com; doubles from $325). If you prefer boutique hotels, there are the two Les Suites properties (epoquehotels.com; doubles from $179) or the less expensive Ambience (ambiencehotel.com.tw; doubles from $86). A luxe hot-springs inn outside the center in Beitou is Villa 32 (011-886-2-6611-8888; villa32.com; use of hot springs from $47 for four hours; Western-style doubles from $546).

RESTAURANTS, CAFES AND BARS: Street food is a real highlight; don't miss eating at one of the night markets, such as Shihlin. For a variety of stylish modern restaurants, wander the streets and alleys just north of the Zhongxiao Dunhua metro stop and east of Dunhua South Road. Head to Yongkang Street for ramen, Vietnamese and Taiwanese food and mango ice, Fuxing Street for Taiwanese porridge, and Taoyuan Street for renowned beef noodles. Din Tai Fung Famed Shanghai-style dumplings. Xinyi Road, Section 2, No. 194; 011-886-2-2321-8927. Lian Xiang Zhai Vegetarian buffet, a Taipei specialty. Changchun Road, No. 353; 011-886-2-2547-4788. The Phoenix One of the last remaining red envelope clubs. Xining South Road, No. 159, fifth floor. Shao Shao Ke Shaanxi Province-style food. Renai Road, Section 2, Lane 41, No. 15; 011-886-2-2351-7148. Taiwan Beer Bar Lively beer garden. Bade Road, Section 2, No. 85; 011-886-2-2771-9131. Wistaria Tea House For traditional tea and desserts and just hanging out. Xinsheng South Road, Section 3, Lane 16, No. 1; 011-886-2-2363-7375.

SIGHTS AND ACTIVITIES: Be sure to pick up the free Taipei Tourist Map. Dihua Street has interesting buildings and markets; the streets around National Taiwan University have good shops and cafes. For cinema and night life, head to Ximending, especially Wuchang Street. For a taste of bohemian life, stroll Treasure Hill, a former military base turned squatter and artist community. Among the major attractions, it's worth visiting both the former Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, now the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall (Chungshan South Road, No. 21; 011-886-2-2343-1100), and Lungshan Temple (Kuangchou Street, No. 211; 011-886-2-2302-5162). I.T. Park Important gallery of contemporary art. Yitong Street, No. 41, second and third floors; 011-886-2-2507-7243. National Palace Museum Legendary collection of Chinese art. Chihshan South Road, Section 2, No. 221; 011-886-2-2881-2021. Spot-Taipei Film House Cool cinema-bookstore-cafe. Zhongshan North Road, Section 2, No. 18; 011-886-2-2511-7786. Taipei 101 Includes a big shopping mall and observatories on the 89th and 91st floors (tickets can be purchased on the mall's fifth floor). Xinyi Road, Section 5, No. 7. VT ArtSalon Art gallery and bar-lounge, on the same block as I.T. Park. Yitong Street, No. 47, B1; 011-886-2-2516-1060.