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 Café 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 Café 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.