The Ancestral Home (12/20/10)

I. am. not. playin'--take it in the face, Jet Lag--I'm up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; today we visit the rural township of Jia4xi3, where my mom was raised (by wolves). I guess technically, it's not either my nor my mother's ancestral home, since we "belong" to her husband's/my father's side of the family now.

Culturally-speaking.

Patriarchally-speaking.

I don't know what dispensations are made if you're separated/estranged from said husband/father.

Maybe we belong nowhere. It's still a place where a woman's happiness and social status is largely dependent on how many children she has (and by "children," we mean "sons"), and the extended family unit, so where does my mom belong? No husband, a daughter who lives--by choice and necessity--nearly three thousand miles from her, and lost in America.

And me? I'm estranged from my pops, part pigheadedness and long-standing resentment for abandoning me to a mother who over the years became increasingly unhinged. I remember him shouting at my mom in our tiny, one-bedroom apartment that he had no 后代, hou4 dai4, no descendants. Thanks, dad. Twenty-nine, and I haven't seen him since I was sixteen, and this is what I remember of him.

Fun times. What did we have for breakfast?

Typical Taiwanese fare:

Tien2 dou4 jiang1, sweet soy milk, warm;


mien4 xien4 in Mandarin and mi3 sua3, basically "noodle threads," a gloppy noodle soup that tastes a lot better than it looks, brought home from the market in a tin;





two types of da4bing3, translation, "big cookie," ([grin]), slightly sweet, eggy (as I recall), spongy, and chewy;


starfruit--note the shape. It's usually actually star-shaped, but these are chopped up;


and the leftover offal with pickled et cetera from last night.

Then we're off to Jia4xi3, my yi2zhang4--"the non-blood uncle married to my aunt" driving us past Daoist and/or Buddhist temples. I don't know the difference, but the internets tells us that Daoist temples tend to be colorful, so I'm presuming that these ones are Daoist, although the internets also tells us that Daoism has a more or less syncretic relationship to Buddhism.

(P.S. The "d" of Dao is uttered with a softer d sound, with the tongue flattening a little more across the roof of the mouth than the "d" of den, dick, and dog, the combination of which has the makings of a very NSFW Youtube vid. No, I wouldn't. Yes, I would. No, really, I wouldn't. But maybe.)




Stunning, ain't they? Like, not stunning in terms of a Rothko or Taylor Kitsch, but there's something so exuberant, so insistent about the color and sheer quantity of carvings.


Who is that lady praying to? It ain't Jesus H. Christ, that's for gotdamn sure.

And then, at last. My mom used to transport us on a motor scooter from my paternal grandparents' place, where dutiful daughters-in-law go to be tortured, in 花坛, or Hua4tan3, meaning "flower bed" (ain't that pretty?) to visit my maternal grandparents. I have memories--or maybe just memories of photographs, more like--of when I was a toddler, strapped to her back or standing between her legs.

We drive into the courtyard to be greeted by relatives--I don't catch the exact nature of the kinship. The center of the compound, as you walk in, houses the family shrine, and into I go, maybe trampling on all sorts of religious etiquette, with my camera, but no one seems to be horrified, so...I think I'm in the clear.




Trying to imagine the decades of 拜拜, bai4bai4, or worship/prayer/"bowing with palms together" this room has seen.


Apparently, the back of this document has the names of all the fam dating back for generations. You get your name written in it after you die, and I believe there's a space on it for women, too, though I imagine only women "belonging" to the family, that is, not women who marry out. Alas, the document is only opened on auspicious days as determined by a fortuneteller, and today, it ain't that.

It seems the left wing of the compound is abandoned now, but in the room where my grandparents used to sleep on a raised, hard platform--you know, straight out of like, The Good Earth, is their photograph, and--


for fuck's sake:


photos of me that my mom had given 'em, of me as a toddler and then a grade schooler--top two and bottom on the left, top and bottom on the right. It's eerie and heartbreaking and soul-warming all at the same time. I grew up so isolated from any sense of family aside from my vicariously diagnosed, borderline personality disordered mother, and so what understanding of the concept of family I've constructed for myself is beyond fucked. Never before the sense that people came before you, and that people care about each other just because they share DNA. (Is okay; I'm in therapy.)

This is the outside of the house:


That main door to the right of the car is the door to the family shrine--which is consistent with the belief that the main door is reserved for the gods to enter, since ancestors are essentially family gods.

It looks kinda decent, don't it?

In actuality:


Look, a toil-er, or is it show-let? I'm pretty sure people bathed right next to the toilet. What the feezy? Thass old school ghetto.

How to Get Upstairs in Taiwanese Home

Step 1: Remove outdoor shoes and neatly line them up on the stairs outside.



Step 2: Upon entering the house, change into downstairs house slippers kept just past the door.



Step 3: Remove downstairs house slippers and place at the bottom of the stairs. Change into upstairs house slippers kept on the left-hand side of the stairs.



Step 4: Proceed upstairs.

Gastonomic Homecoming: A Gallery, Cont'd (12/19/10)

On the way back to the house, we run across a "ba4 wan3" place--Taiwanese for "meat circle" (mm, meat circle). The outside is some glutinous stuff, sorta like mochi, but slipperier, the inside is pork and shitake and bamboo shoots, topped with a sweet-ish sauce and garnished with cilantro. I'm used to having it just steamed, but here, they steam first, then toss it into a wok full of oil. And it supposedly originated in the...Qing Dynasty.



Yeah, that's right, bitches, my culture's older than yourn.

And my mama, she actually lets me have one, despite her already near-constant haranguing about my weight. And about my refusal to bundle up (the average low for winter in Taiwan is 68 degrees). And my refusal to wear a face mask, against the pollution.

[wah wah]

Time we get back, it's...dinner time. And, so:

Lo4 ba4--Taiwanese stewed ground pork (with shallots, shitake) usually ladled over rice, which then makes it lo4 ba4 bng1.


And two kinds of fishies:

I think this is butterfish.

But this, I don't know what it is:


And four kinds of vegetables:

Self-explanatory.


Sauteed yam greens.


Uh...I dunno.


Don't know what this either. Some kind of salty, preserved-y, smoky, musty deliciousness.

And fried eggs for the kids. Look how fuckin' orange that yoke is, meaning old school organic, this chicken's been free-rangin', eating a real diet, as opposed to U.S. cages the size of an A4 sheet of copy paper, eating GM foods, blah blah, soapbox, high horse.




Drizzled with a black bean soy sauce.

Despite the fact that I can't remember the last time I've slept, I decide to take my cousin Patrick up on his offer to go to the Yuan Lin Night Market. These places are typical to medium-sized to major cities in Taiwan, and happen on a daily (er, nightly) basis. There tends to be a prevalence of students because of the low cost of the street food (not that food is necessarily that expensive anyway), and I imagine the fact that it's happening in the evening helps to beat the incessant, tropical heat of the day. I have this one distinct memory of clutching a bag of hard-boiled quail eggs, made Chinese tea leaf style, the fluorescent lights and bugs circling them, and crowds milling around food stalls, and my small self, nine years old, in the middle of it. And my mom telling me to stop eating all of them. [grin] It never changes.

And, voila, the Yuan Lin Night Market:

At first, it appears as though it's your average American Chinatown, p.m. style.

But then, you look closer and find

racks of offal--


chicken heart,


kidney,


and liver,


chopped and tossed with pickled mustard root and plastic baggied--


takoyaki, Japanese squid fried in balls of dough,


hot sugar cane and ginger drinks,


and lemonade passionfruit juice...and...and...and...

By the time we've made our meager round, I'm quickly flagging, so despite my greedy gazing at oyster omelettes, also popular in Malaysia, and the takoyaki, and o-a-mi-sua, an oyster, rice noodle with fried garlic/shallots, I'm down for the count, full from dinner, tired from the flight. Patrick promises that we'll go to another night market in a neighboring town, with the famous takoyaki.

Before we go, he buys a bag of roasted chestnuts for his mom. They come with this nifty little plastic gadget that helps you peel 'em. Ingenious:

Honorifics

So my mom has/had seven older siblings (not including the ones who died during infancy), more or less--the eldest died recently.

Anyway, the practice is that if you're younger than someone, you just call them by their titles, not their names--which is a bit of a relief for me, since I can barely remember my own Chinese name. Whereas if you're the older person in the interaction, you typically address the younger by name.

But is it as simple as "Aunt" and Uncle"? Oh, no--you have to differentiate by birth order and marriage as well.

So, my mom's older sister is "San1 Yi2 Ma1"--third aunt--and her husband is "San1 Yi2 Zhang4"--essentially, "third uncle by marriage."

The sister above her is "Er4 Yi2 Ma1"--second aunt--and her husband is "Er4 Yi2 Zhang4."

The eldest (now dead) is "Da4 Yi2 Ma1"--"big" aunt, and so on.

I have created the following chart for your understanding:

Mind, it is boggled.

I think in practice, I'm "allowed" to address my mom's sister, regardless of birth order, "just" yi2 ma1, I think the numbers are for differentiation mostly. But never call her jiu4 ma1, which also means aunt, but specifically the woman who has married my mom's brother.

tl;dr: it's fuckin' complicated, y'all.

Gastonomic Homecoming: A Gallery (12/19/10)

Forthwith:

A sweet, dessert-y soup with red bean and, I think, Chinese sorghum.



And the long anticipated sugar-apple:



Which is peeled like so:



Revealing a partially segmented fruit--what springs to mind is persimmon, sort of:



And what does it taste like? Slippery like persimmons, slightly grainy like a pear, and like it's cuz, the cherimoya, what Mark Twain called "the most delicious fruit known to men." Which doesn't help. Okay, it's been described as "banana, pineapple, papaya, peach, and strawberry" or "commercial bubblegum." In fruit form.

Really, what it is is fireworks in your mouth, and then, when you've drawn the fruit off the seed with your tongue, the black seeds, which resemble lychee seeds, but smaller.



And then your mom tells you to stop being such a fat fuck and save the rest for later:



So that you can have room for boiled goose--rich, salty, gamey, smokey, all dark meat like duck:



And meet your first cousins, once removed, whose names are Moe, Larry, and Curly:



Ain't they cute? (And still--not interested in having kids, biological imperative be damned.)

And then after a note-taking session where I am informed what titles to call my aunts and uncles and older cousins, we're off, through the market and a "steakhouse" to visit another cousin.

My aunt's house. Note the four stories--to fit three generations under one roof.




Delicious, chewy, moist cakes in preparation, I think, for the Winter Solstice Festival. I didn't have the energy/appetite to get one, post-jet-lag malaise and all.


I do not know what these are called or what they're made of. I think they're also Winter Solstice foods--with the common thread being chewy, gooey, gelatinous, choking hazard foods. Also: delicious.


We stop at a dou4hua1 counter--it's tofu pudding, super-silky tofu in a ginger-flavored simple syrup, served warm.


The black bits are tapioca balls. Mm, deerishus soft tofu.

And finally, we arrive at the restaurant my cousin manages.



These types of steakhouses are popular in Taiwan. Basically, you go in and order whatever cut of meat you want, sirloin, tenderloin, and a sauce to go with it, and you also get access to an all-you-can-eat-buffet with 95% Chinese-y dishes. For something around eleven bucks.

I have this:

Dong1gua1tsa3--winter melon tea. This is like drinking liquid caramel. Butterbeer ain't got nothin' on winter melon tea.

I sit and cogitate while my mom chats with my cousin, who's closer in age to her than me, when suddenly, Su2 Zhen1 bolts out the door, returning with a bag...



filled with...

two boxes of freshly roasted, still-steaming sweet potatoes. [squint] O-kay.

To be continued...