Located at the southern part of Taipei and close to National Taiwan University (NTU), Wenzhou Street, was first developed during the later Japanese-ruled period of time. It used to be the dormitory area for Japanese faculty in Taipei Imperial University (current National Taiwan University), and was named Wenzhou Street since 1947. It intersects both Roosevelt Road and Tingzhou Road. The former was channeled out for military purpose during World War II while the latter was reconstructed from Wan-Kin railway area that connected Wanhua and Hsintien. The triangle area formed by these three streets is the so-called Wen-Ro-Ting area, which is the most distinctive and conflicting part in Taipei.
Next door to National Taiwan University (NTU) and not so far from National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), most people here are school faculty, staff, and students. It might be the most dense part for bookstores in Taipei, and it’s easy to run into a nice café or bar when you turn the corner in the alleys. There is a café run by Hong Kongese, a flea market by Vietnamese Frenchman, and a superb breakfast store with soybean milk and twisted dough-strips. Across Wenzhou Street is the biggest stadium in southern Taipei, which is the gym and playground in NTU. There are numerous sporting goods stores, and Tai-Yi Milk King is the best choice to chill-out for those who love sports. Wen-Ro-Ting area is also one of the rare places that the noise of bicycle bells could covers that of car horns. At the end of the day’s classes, the bicycles that pour out of the NTU campus gallop ahead like a powerful army to Wenzhou Street. They look for restaurants to eat, cafés to study and write papers, copy shops to make photocopy for textbooks out of print, or, they just hang around with lovers and classmates. The students laugh, play and make fun of each other, which is like an urban bicycle guerilla. There are numerous restaurants due to students abroad from all over the world who stay here with short-term tenancy. At the end of Wenzhou Street is Kungkuan night market with Taiwanese local atmosphere of greasiness and uproar. Once you turn the corner into Wenzhou Street, however, it becomes serene and gentle. It swings between the two moods naturally without any middle ground that shapes one of the characters of Taiwan.
The mood of conflict in Wenzhou Street is also shown through religion. From Wenzhou Street all the way down to Xinsheng South Road across Daan Forest Park, there are plenty of congregations including Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Taoist and Buddhist. Some of them dwell in pigeonholes among apartments and buildings while the others run their affairs in single houses. Some of them seclude and cultivate themselves that people rarely know where they live in solitude; meanwhile, some of them hold markets, classes and forums in the weekends and interact with the neighborhood closely.
Besides various congregations, Wen-Ro-Ting area also realizes toleration in Taiwan through reconciliation of the conflicts. There are Gin-Gin bookstore and Fembooks Bookstore that have had great impact on the homosexual rights movement; Witchhouse, the place where many independent singers have started their career; Taiuan-e-Tiam, a store in the pursuit of Taiwan-centered spirit. Various subcultural communities can have voices here and every kind of issues can be discussed. Sometimes, a certain claim might have a conflict with the residents in the neighborhood. For example, the neighbors would complain the noise from the store, or some of them still act against the homosexual or feel afraid of them. However, there is always a way to solve the problems. It’s like a laboratory glassware here for dwelling possibilities that all kinds of development and expansion are allowed, which also makes a tighter connection with the intellectual education in the colleges.
It is strange that even though Wenzhou Street was named after places in the Mainland China, there are some old Japanese structures hidden in the alleys that haven’t torn off during urban renewal. Although there are not many senior people living here anymore and not to mention those who remember the history, we fortunately have books and schools that give us strength to face the reality from the history. When you tread the streets and alleys, don’t be hurry for shopping or dining. In those days, how many brilliant and indignant young intellectuals who got beaten up sang folk songs here. They chitchatted and goofed around with snipes and beers in their hands that had ignited the revolution with ferocious passion. As a matter of fact, we was colonized by Japan, and NTU was the base of operation for Japan to head south, so there were many special flowers and fruits from Southeast Asia in the campus for research, and the departments founded in the beginning were about agriculture and forestry. As a matter of fact, there was assimilation policy in Japan, which Taiwan was developed as part of the body of Japan. Taipei Imperial University, a duplicate of Tokyo Imperial University, is still our top one institution. We can see the cultural complications between Taiwan and Japan, China and the western world through the traces in Wen-Ro-Ting area. Everything is just like an unfinished naked poem.
