To get to know Chinatown, grab your headphones

Like a cardsharp practicing her best sleight of hand, New York's Chinatown can fool you. Certain stretches of Mott Street and East Broadway in lower Manhattan produce an atmosphere available in few American cities: The smells, the crowds, the ambient Cantonese language are all uncanny replicas of the real thing.

Having recently lived in China, I am curious to visit the Western Hemisphere's largest Chinatown - Tong ngin gai to locals - to compare notes. It has been about 10 years since my last venture to the renowned ethnic enclave, and, this time, I am looking for a richer experience. What, I want to know, is the workaday Chinatown like?

I find help from an unusual source: A new CD audio guide called Soundwalk promises a hipper version of the tried-and-true walking tour, using a winking narration style, music samples, and snippets of interviews to lead listeners down alleyways and through unmarked doors in search of a neighborhood's pulse. The Chinatown 2004 CD seems worth a try, so I pop it into my Walkman and head to the corner of Eldridge and Canal streets.

Here, at the tiny but well-trafficked Cup and Saucer luncheonette, I tune in to the guide's narrator, Jami Gong, a Chinatown-born stand-up comedian.

"These are my streets," he whispers. "I will bring you into places you are not supposed to go."

He's as good as his word. Within the first block, I am introduced to a bona fide sweatshop concealed behind a turquoise wall, where Mr. Gong says his mother works for $2 an hour. Then comes one of New York's oldest synagogues, reflecting the area's complex ethnic roots.

Next there's an employment agency for "fresh off the boat" immigrants from China's Fujian Province. The Fujianese have arrived in New York in record numbers in recent years, challenging the longtime foothold the Cantonese have had here and in many other Chinatowns.

Immigrants have always settled along these narrow streets, Gong tells me. The Irish, the Italians, European Jews, and now the Chinese. In the early 19th century, this neighborhood was known as Five Points, the notorious slum portrayed with bloodthirsty zeal in the film "Gangs of New York."

I follow Gong's voice under Manhattan Bridge, through a small shopping arcade and onto East Broadway, the commercial heart of Chinatown. This is where residents bank and shop and exchange news with neighbors: at herbal shops advertising help for "male vitality"; markets displaying the pungent, spiky durian fruit; and at busy bridal salons.

The sidewalks are dense with people and, very much like walking in downtown Shanghai, moving forward is best done in a mincing shuffle.

The small map accompanying my CD guides me across the Bowery, to Doyers Street, more of a shadowy alley that bends in a sharp right turn. Here lies a Chinatown institution. The Nam Wah Tea Parlor, sitting unprepossessingly at the street's right angle, advertises itself as "The First Dim Sum Parlor in Chinatown, Since 1920."

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