My mom's been at church--thanks, ma, it's nice to know your fake god is more important than greeting your daughter--and we roll up to meet her at the door. I haven't seen her in a year now, and our last parting was less than friendly (think sobbing, breathless call to my friend Laura to come pick me up after my mother slapped me. Oh, yes, I was 28 at the time).
I've been expecting things to be fraught--dreading, really--but also hoping against hope that my mom'll be too preoccupied with her relatives (my releatives, too?) to mutilate my self-esteem. This is a good start, seeing her laughing with her sister, the same kind of open-mouthed, eye-crinkling, silent laugh, and then her way of loving me, which is to present me with the fruit she's bought. As she said in her email to me, "the fruit called shi jia, very sweet, grey green skin, i remember you like so much."
This is it:
In English, it's called a "sugar-apple." Basically, it's fucking delicious, and at 29, I still remember eating it, the taste of it, when I was 10. More on its awesomeness later.
And this, a dragon fruit--an underwhelming, over-hyped curiosity, in my opinion, but, hey, different strokes:
A tour, then. We enter the house through the garage, a couple of steps piled with outdoor shoes, then through two doors, one screen, then stop to put on house slippers. The first room is the living room, leather chairs (how they do that during the semi-tropical summers, I don't know), glass cabinets holding unopened bottles of liquor (host gifts), a t.v., and next to that, a pyramid of motorcycle helmets.
Through the living room, and past a set of stairs, and more slippers, a neat line of them traipsing upstairs. Then a long room, a catch-all holding giant winter melons and other fruit and dried, flat cakes, something that looks like a Razor scooter, books, dried goods of unknown provenance.
And the kitchen/dining room, and the mainstay of all Taiwanese households, the round table topped with a Lazy Susan.
Because Taiwan is an eating culture, and a family-oriented one, and to facilitate the eating, well, what better than a Lazy Susan to bypass the annoying wait that comes after "please pass the butter"? (And the anal rape. See, Last Tango in Paris.)
A giant wok and a range hood for the inevitable stir-fry smoke:
And if there's anywhere I can lay blame or give credit for my relentlessly...let's just say it..."foodie" ways, the need to try (possess?) the next flavor, texture, dish, the inordinate amounts of money beyond my meager teacher's salary...well, I can lay it at tables like these, where I grew up eating congee with thousand year old eggs and frog legs, sucking the fat out of shrimp heads, the chicken liver reserved for me, and fuxin' with pork belly since before I could chew.
It's where I can feel grateful (and a more than a little judgy) when friends sneer at mushrooms or tapioca balls or are allergic to seafood.
(Well, okay, tables like these and my entitled douchebaggery, my bourgeois, capitalist social milieu, the competitive one-upsmanship, the wannabe Anthony Bourdainian life, equating travel experience with moral character...basically, this lite. That, too.)
