Two Dishes But To One Table

Weeknight Beach Trip , 2000

This is Fall 2000 at Nan Li Ao Beach, near Hsin Chu Taiwan.  We're standing on a 14 foot tall dike.
Pictured: Heather and David McLeod.  David is the greatest biology teacher ever.  They’re both back in Kansas now, both working on their PhD’s, he in Herpatology, she in Civil Engineering.They taught me my first phrase in Mandarin Boo Yow Shi Gua, Shie-Shie, ("I don't want any watermelon, thank you")

Taiwan doesn’t have too many beaches since the Taiwanese mostly don’t know how to swim.  They have a mythical relationship to the sea, knowing somewhere in the back of their subconscious that the goddess (Guan Een?) protected their ancestors when the family originally came over from the mainland.  Having been lucky enough to survive that crossing they now figure they’ll be and damned if they’re going to tempt fate and go near something as dangerous as the ocean again.
I went here a dozen times alone.  If I took the bus, I felt proud that I knew the way.  If I used my Vespa I had the thrill of passing and being passed on a winding road with many blind curves and swampy bogs along the edge.  If I rode my bike, I got a epic bout with dehydration and the sun: 1hr 45min each way, plus whatever hours you spent in the sun while actually at the beach.  I remember peddling with a big "coolie hat" but the string didn't really hold it on in the wind of a bike ride.

Each trip was great.  On sunny days you could go a half mile south past the tank traps and share the entire horizon with nothing but a couple of soldiers in towers, staring at the waves for Chinese invaders that, knock on wood, have so far never materialized. 
[But amphibious assault is so passé in 2008 anyway.  The latest prediction on how Beijing could do it, I read in Janes Defense, was that the real invasion would come via commercial airliners landing thousands of armed soldiers in commandeered 747s.  But the same source predicted the invasion would come in late 2006, so what do they know.]

I went to Nan Li Ao Beach once around midnight and waded out to my waist to look at the tide while I talked to my mom in the dark on my cell phone.  
Once I sat on the broken concrete beneath the breakwall and listened to the entire Play album by Moby while I stirred the sea lice with a piece of driftwood. 

Beachcombing here usually yielded a lot of bobbing motorcycle helmets and jettisoned flip flop sandels. 

Local teens would drive out here to neck.  What’s funny, is that they arrived via scooter and more than once I saw them making out while sitting on the parked scooter. 

Fresh Noodle Soup

There’s a man on Eldridge Street who charges $4 for fresh pulled noodles. 
Here is the chef in action:

And here is the payoff, fresh neo rho mien (beef noodle soup).  I found it to be a great relief: finally, good beef noodle soup in New York!  The dough was good, the marinated sliced beef was good, the spices in the broth (40? really?) were good.
   

I’m not sure why the place isn’t mobbed.  Even in New York these pulled noodle places  (“la mien”) are rare. The menu at Golden Dragon is extensive, especially for a tiny storefront.  If you crave Chinese breakfast food they do congee, they do yams.  Churros, fried radish loaf, scallion omelets, they’re all here.   The dinner menu includes many delicacies which I won’t name here but they are things that you would think unavailable outside of China. The interior is spartan (folding chairs, linoleum tables). 

The menu at Golden Dragon enshirines beef noodle soup as one of the four cornerstones of Chinese northern cuisine, which it calls "Four Most Favorite Foods of China:  Lanzhou Hand-made noodles, Xi'an Lamb soup, Shanki Knife-Cut noodles, and Tianjin Goubuli buns".

The menu further poetically notes that the key to good beef noodle soup is to remember the four colors:
    CLEAR broth
    WHITE flour
    RED hot chili oil
    GREEN fresh parsley & garlic bolt

You can find Golden Dragon (“Chin Long”) at 7 Eldridge Street, a few steps east from the cheap buses under the bridge in Manhattan’s Chinatown.  Open til 2 AM seven days a week.   

Chicken Bacon

Three years I lived there in Asia and it takes a friend here in New York to explain to me that the Taiwan delicacy known as chicken-butt is not actually a skewer full of bird anuses but, rather, the fatty flesh at the base of the chicken's vestigial tail. "In Hungary we call it the King's Custard. It's delicious."

Coursing Wind

The following is from a descriptive label on a bag of stuff I purchased in Chinatown. It’s a pretty poetic description. Can you tell what the product is?
"Coursing wind and clearing heat, resolving toxin and disinhibiting throat, transforming turbidity with aroma." Regardless of what the product is, aint the poetry grand? I wonder who translated it.

My dream job is to be an editor for another person’s translation work. Someone could do the tedious initial work and I would polish the final product. I would take their pidgin poetry and remove all their words’ absurdity but none of the meaning. Can I get paid for that? I wouldn’t even need to be credited, I just want to play with the words. This is what an expat dreams about when living in Taiwan for three years.

Frogs on Allen Street

My barber let me tag along with him and his friends for food and drinks.   It happened because during a recent haircut (a complete McGyver look – definitely a bad one) he said to me that if I’m so interested in Malaysian food, why don’t I stop asking him questions about it and just come out and try some sometime.  I took his phone number.  I  called him up this week.  “Hey, good to hear from you.  Tomorrow’s my day off.  Let me call you right back.” 

He organized an outing; 24 hours later I found myself sitting at a table with Johnny, his friend, and three Chinese women who all looked a bit out of my league.  We ordered plate after plate of Asian dishes I would have never known to order on my own:

Goose tongues [YA! ShR].
Frogs [TieN GEE]
Ocean snails. [SHR LoW]
Geoducks. […]

Johnny & Co. liked geoducks so much that they got some first as sashimi on a big iced tray and then later more came as tempura on a bed of sliced jalapeno peppers.  I got so lost in enjoying the meal and company that I failed to foresee that the two guys were going to do a stealth tab and secretly settle the $140 dinner check by themselves, refusing all protests by anyone else.  Once any Asian host is physically holding the bill you must capitulate, resistance is futile.  Woe unto any Westerner who thinks he can successfully plunk down a couple of twenties after being hosted by Chinese friends.

Then we were off to a completely unmarked karaoke bar.  The street door for the bar just said “Taxes.  Stationary.”.  Once upstairs I enthusiastically  represented with the mic on behalf of my race, singing both “My Way” and “Words” though balking at a second Bee Gees song (“World”?  Is that a song?)  Unlike in Taiwan, “Anarchy in the UK” was not a choice.  My request later for a third song, one I actually could probably sing enjoyably (“Please, Mr. Postman”) was stymied, probably as punishment for my insincere renditions of the previous two numbers, We had done “Words” as a duet, me and Johnny, where I interjected improvised lyrics to enhance Johnny’s singing of the actual song (I love karaoke with two microphones!), kind of like Flavor Flav doing Elvis trying to scat sing.   It was pretty good but the audience seemed embarrassed or maybe even irritated, so I can understand why my request chit for the Motown song disappeared into some black hole in the song queue. 

On a more academic note, the way they organized the laminated song catalog was styled after a Chinese dictionary, which I found really funny.  Any song with a one word title was in the first chapter, two word song titles had their own chapter, etc.   

The best thing about the karaoke place was that I managed to pick up the entire tab.  I started out just slipping off to pee but once I was back there I realized (with some excitement) that I was strategically situated to settle the check for Table #7 with the waitress.  So I did.  Awesome!

Rolling home on the L train, a little drunk and very full, I sleepily reflected on how surprising it was that something called goose tongue could have a bone in it.  My meal was a pretty good biology lesson, featuring at least two types of meat that I had only previously encountered in 8th grade in a dissection tray.. 

For future reference, the restaurant was the often overlooked Congee Village on Allen St, south of DeLancey.  Don’t laugh!  The fare is authentic, the cocktails are as cheap as government cheese (where else in Manhattan can you get a $4 Cosmopolitan?), and everything is very white-people friendly, from the menus to the portion size to the warmth of the décor, while at the same time being devoid of white people, a feature that an International Hag appreciates since we bizarrely try to tell ourselves that we fit in (leading to the familiar, if silly, phenomenon of ignoring another white guy if you see him in, say, an Istanbul bazaar, since he embarrasses you as a mirror of what you really look like, tramping through Asia).

The secret Karaoke place is up a stairway, one door west of the NW corner of Canal Street and Orchard, just north of the Manhattan Bridge ramp. 

Drinking tea in the Gong Fu style

The Japanese tea ceremony is famous in the West among Asiophiles but it is an anachronism, imported to that island nation in roughly the 13th Century and now 700 years out of style in the Forbidden City.  The famous Japanese Tea Ceremony is embarrasingly passe on the continent, China having moved beyond that fashion about the time that Chaucer was writing the Summoner's Tale.  Tea culture in China evolved in later dynasties to embrace what is called Gong Fu style.   Perhaps you would like some Gong Fu style tea right now!

How to do tea Gong Fu style: place enough leaves in the pot to cover the bottom.  The water should be less than boiling, maybe 96 degrees C.  Historically there were a lot of arguments on best water temperature and who was best at judging it.  A man could be known for being a good judge of hot water the way Miles Davis might be a good judge of just how long to hold a note.   

Anyway, back to your kitchen counter: cover the leaves with the hot water and immediately pour the water off again, discarding it.  Add hot water again, steep for about a minute, pour it into cups and enjoy.  A succession of one minute steepings can be enjoyed in this way, each tasting different as various proportions of more soluble and less soluble substances are extracted from the leaf into the water.  Some people will repeat this cycle until they have drunk six or seven batches of tea, all from the same leaves.   By that point the leaves must be discarded and the process begun again. 

By the way, don't do this with black tea.  Chinese people think black tea is ridiculous.  It's like the wine character in 'Sideways' being asked to drink Merlot.

Some equipment is needed for your Gong Fu tea extravaganza.   Both the cups and the pot are very small (shot glass size) to allow for much repetition, much physical interaction between the server and the served, and much careful inspection of the successive, changing aliquots of the lovely tea.  Did I mention the porcelain cap?  Your cup will normally have a small porcelin lid.  You're supposed to remove this and smell it like it's a wine cork and you're a wine snob. The cap ( or sometimes a  spoon) is smelled once, waved in the air, and then re-smelled.  The smell will be different before and after waving the smelling cup/spoon.

Of course the Gong Fu style is not mandatory; some tea is consumed more casually than this.  Office workers In Taiwan often have just a mug on their desk.  The mug will be large (400 mL), attractively decorated (no Garfield characters), and have a ceramic strainer nested inside to hold the loose tea leaves.  Also common around offices is the brutal, communal, stainless steel kettle, big enough to boil corn in that all ten workers will pour from throughout the day.  That’s just to get  caffeine.  No sublime beauty is expected from the tea-jumbotron.  The tea in those seems to frequently be flavored, perhaps Jasmine.  There’s nothing subtle or nice about the flavor of a big pot of tea that’s sitting there for an hour or more.

Happily, those with the time and inclination stick with the Gong Fu style, no matter what class the person is from.  Even poor people in a culture can do something with style if it is important to them, right down to purchasing the somewhat elaborate collection of utensils for tea drinking.  Just as a ghetto person in America can own a really big TV or stereo, a simple peasant in Taiwan can own a pretty fancy tea set up.  Gangs of unsavory taxi drivers will gather near a garage to complain about their day, clustered around an elegant tea service set featuring a knurled knotty slotted teak tray, an iron water kettle, and nice cups.  Or further out in the country, clans of yam farmers sit outside in their cut off shorts and cracked blue vinyl sandals, chatting in the dust at the side of the road, tossing back endless rounds of the world’s finest tea.   

It’s great to see something sophisticated and old permeating a society, top to bottom.   

Da and Chuang

One neat thing about Chinese characters is that they come in wildly differing fonts.    For example here are three typefaces for the character chuang (“middle”).

Archaic chuang

Normal chuang

Grasshand chuang

That grasshand style, with lines worthy of Georgia O’Keefe, was invented in China around 1000 A.D.. by an extremely sophisticated civilization.  I am brought up short when I realize that at about the same time my ancestors in Europe were digging in the mud like some dark ages scene from the Holy Grail (“Dennis, there’s some lovely filth down here!”)

Another basic Chinese character is da (“big”).  It looks a bit like a man holding his arms straight out.  I picture this letter depicts someone’s dad telling a fishing story.

Normal da

Swanky da

The swanky version of da looks like an R Crumb character, specifically the bewildering truckin' T-Shirt character, seemingly ubiquitous in my youth.  The swanky da greeted me daily for a long time because when I was teaching in Taiwan I spent several years living across from a rooftop billboard that had the swanky da on it and so every day at breakfast I looked out at the billboard and said to myself “Dude, Keep On Truckin’”.

Huh? Chinese Want to Sound Like Chen Shuei Bien??

In spite of the tense feelings across the Taiwan Strait it is allegedly becoming fashionable for Beijingers to speak Mandarin with a Fujian (Taiwan) accent.  In the February 24, 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books, Perry Link writes about a warning memo issued to TV stations: 

“Last April 30 the hosts of television news programs throughout China were warned that they should not appear with orange hair, tight pants, or partially nude (and that they should stick to) standard Mandarin and avoid the increasingly popular southern accents or English words like ‘cool’. . .  Southern accent is a euphemism for a Taiwan accent.”

No Use for a towel now

I have to report an odd habit I picked up in three years of Taiwan living:  I never dry my hands after washing them.   In Taiwan you learn that they dry by themselves in the air as you walk out of the room.  You learn this by neccesity because bathrooms there make no provision for the drying of hands, your left to choose between your trousers and the air.  What the bathrooms DO have is a wastepaper basket near the toilet for depositing your soiled toilet paper. After you use the toilet paper in Taiwan you're supposed to throw it in the wastebasket.  Is this something to do with clogging the plumbing?  Or is there an agricultural reason?  Farms do use straight up household sewage to help flood the rice paddy so maybe they don't want t.p. in their rice fields.   Those rice fields by the way are beautiful.  We foreigners sometimes disparaged HsinChu City as ugly but looking back on it, how ugly can a place be if it takes vacant spaces between buildings and plants them as rice paddies?  And how beautiful those paddies are, bright fluorescent green in the sun and with egrets stalking around, focused like a student at the S.A.T. , stabbing the mud for mollusks.  In the ardent egrets burns an optimism  like a man with a scratch off ticket dreaming of that really big prize--a fist-sized Taiwan snail.

=============
UPDATE: Both Josh Leu and Albert Wu (NEHS, '01) concurred with this notion of towels as superfluous once you have lived in Taiwan.  This comforted me to know I am not the only crazy one.

Initial Impressions of Taiwan

I discovered several months of Taiwan snapshots by a fellow named Roger.  When I was in that faraway land  I took too  few photos.  Thankfully, Roger's selection is very representative of the little things I marveled at in day to day life there but never documented.  The problem with living for a few years overseas is that if you don't record your impressions of a foreign place in the first few months  you later become too inured to care or notice.  The stuff you should be taking pictures of actually becomes totally invisible to you.   So again, thanks, Roger.