Though fears of avian flu still haunt the traditional pet bird shops along Heping West Road in Taipei, business is improving, especially among the young
By Jules Quartly
Two high school girls cooed over a yellow canary and asked the storeowner how to look after it. They cupped the bird in their hands and petted his tiny head. They wanted to know if they could keep it in a bedroom, how to train it to sit on their shoulders and whether he would grow much bigger. They bought bamboo cages, food and tucked their birds in boxes to take home. It appeared to be business as usual on Taipei’s “Bird Street,” as fears of avian flu subside.

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By Ho Yi
Wellington Wang (王度) is a professional collector who, at 69, has established himself as something of a cultural celebrity. Warm, generous and free-spoken, he easily wins over his interlocutors with a childlike simplicity and his fascinating stories, drawing on his experience building up a collection of Chinese antiques numbering over 50 thousands pieces.

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The world for young children is still raw, an acid bath of strange sights, smells and sounds, and it can take time to get used to it
By Benedict Carey
Almost every parent of young children has heard an anguished cry or two (or 200) something like:

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FICTION
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This new collection from Columbia University Press of very short fiction was recently translated from Chinese and includes Taiwanese authors such as Ku Ling
By Bradley Winterton
Introduced in the late 1970s, "short-shorts" have become a major literary phenomenon in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. As an antidote to supersizing and overdose, opting for economy over verbosity, the popularity of the short-short has gradually overtaken that of more conventional fiction.

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`Other People's Property' is a flimsy contribution to the ever-thickening ranks of hip-hop scholarship on white fans of the genre
By Adam Mansbach
Sadly for Jason Tanz, the lasting contribution of Other People's Property to the ever-thickening ranks of hip-hop scholarship is destined to be one word. Even more unfortunately, that word is "Wegro," and Tanz is its inventor.

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