Yang Bingyi, the 81-year-old owner of Dintaifung, Taiwan's most popular dumpling restaurant, is one of them. As Shanghai-style xiaolong bao and shrimp-and-pork dumplings arrive, Yang, bushy white eyebrows waggling, tells me how he arrived from northern Shaanxi Province after the war as a young soldier with no education and nothing to his name. He worked for a Taiwanese oil trader for a couple of years, then set up a dumpling shop. I had long dreamed about the dumplings I used to eat after Chinese class on Taipei's East Peace Road. They cost a dollar for twenty, and dipped in Szechuan hot sauce, soy sauce, and strips of ginger, were the best thing I ever ate. Yang's restaurant, a simple joint with linoleum tables and hour-long lines of customers waiting on the street outside for tables, does my memories justice. His son, Warren, is expanding, with branches already in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and fifteen in mainland China; all have been instant hits. He tells me that the franchises in China are the toughest to manage: "They just don't work as hard," he says.

Yang isn't alone in his move. Taiwan is one of the largest investors in the mainland, with as much as $10 billion in direct and indirect investments in 2007. High-tech companies from Apple to Sony subcontract to Taiwanese firms, which in turn manufacture everything from iPods to GPS systems in thousands of factories along China's booming coast. So many factories have moved to China, in fact, that Taiwan—like the United States—is worried about rising unemployment and a hollowing out of its economy. "To stay ahead, Taiwan has to go into services and develop its own brands," Stan Shih, who founded Taiwan's most famous computer brand, Acer, tells me later that day. Since his semi-retirement a few years ago, Shih has traveled around Taiwan and concluded that there's a huge opportunity to develop high-end tourism. He thinks Taiwan's biggest selling points are nature (the mountains and hot springs) and its unpackaged traditional culture.

So after my dumpling fest, I decide to get out of town, see some of the surroundings, and seek some traditional spiritual edification at the Dharma Drum Monastery, one of Taiwan's best-known Buddhist institutions. During my student travels long ago, I was dazzled by Taiwan's wild Taoist festivals, with shamans in trances and thousands of villagers carrying temple gods through the streets, whipped violently back and forth by the spirits that presumably possessed them. Taiwan's temples are generally ornate, elaborately carved with fluorescent-colored dragons, lucky fish, and Taoist sages. I once spent the night at a Buddhist monastery, where I was consumed by the mysticism, which was heightened by the thick incense smoke billowing from the temple's entrance.

My taxi starts climbing a small mountain to Dharma Drum, an hour from Taipei, near the northern coast, and I wonder if we might have made a wrong turn: a large, sleek building emerges from the mist. The monastery, built only three years ago, has no colorful filigree. Its simple, elegant lines and bronze, granite, and cherrywood are more refined Amanresorts than Chinatown kitsch. Sherry Lin, a former accountant who gave up her career to study Buddhism, welcomes me and gives me a tour: displays of Buddhist relics, a wishing tree where I hang some paper messages for my children, and the Grand Buddha Hall, where daily chanting sessions occur.