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 Café 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 Brontës 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