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...

Yuan Lin, Arrival at my Aunt's House (12/19/10)

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.

I spy with my little eye two motherfuckin' refrigerators.

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.)

Taoyuan Internat'l --> Yuan Lin (12/19/10)

The combination of canned coffee, a 14-hour flight, and anxiety about meeting relatives after 20 years abroad has me wired.

But first, I've got to tart myself up a little. Out comes the make-up bag and a quiver full of brushes. I would say, "Vanity, thy name is woman," if I didn't know the. actual. quote.

My capacity for an understated cat-eye on a moving vehicle--with potted eyeliner no less--is astounding.

...

We're fewer than 20 minutes away from the airport and out my window a woman trudging in bare feet through a muddy field, and look! The sunny, marigold shingled eaves of the temples, flicking saucily over more unremarkable structures, corrugated steel and tiled buildings. Egrets, Egyptian walking through...dare I say it? Emerald and Jade rice fields.

OH, HAI, a double-decker bus, just like mine.

There's some kind of automated air freshener, intermittently emitting a curious, fruity tang that hits you at the back of the throat.

Omnipresent 7-11s, red and white striped police cars, construction site after construction site, riddled with steel girders and backhoes. The bus sinks to a stop, the air brakes hissing.



And...where is it here? I tap the passenger in front of me and say, brokenly, "zhe4di3 shi4 na2di3?"--essentially, "here is where?" Eloquent, ain't it?

It's the stop before mine, Changhua--the city I lived in when I was 10.

Onwards and downwards, to Yuan Lin. Off the bus, a quick, awkward call to my uncle to say that I've arrived, then make myself and my hiking bag comfortable in the outdoor waiting area. An older man asks me, in my admittedly low-cut tank top, "bei3 gua2 a4?" In Taiwanese, "not cold?" When I'm slow to respond, in Mandarin, "bu2 hui4 neng3?" I shake my head no.

Then, my aunt, who I don't really recognize, but sort of intuit as my aunt, walks up, saying tentatively, "Are you from America?" I say yes, and address her by her title, "Yi2 Ma1"--Aunt Just Above My Mom In Age (basically), and then "home."

Vending Machine Encounter (Taoyuan Internat'l, 12/19/10)

Before I settle down to await my bus, I decide I want to purchase an authentic Taiwanese drink out of an authentic Taiwanese vending machine using my authentic Taiwanese (not Jamaican) money.

The mission: to acquire a beverage from this machine.

I'm trying to purchase one of the drinks in the top row, the not-Coke and the not-Minute Maid. Carefully scrutinizing the coins in my hand, I confirm that they are all NTD (Xin1 Tai2 Bi4, or Tai2 Bi4, f'short), carefully drop them in, and press the appropriate big plastic button.

No dice.

The machine is a cold, taciturn beast; maybe lip-reading, possibly contemplating my murder, she is my personal HAL.

I try again. And again. Make my way back to my seat. Then pop up again when I see another Taiwanese-American (don't ask me how I know) amble up to HAL 2010. Lo and behold, he's able to make the thing work.

What. the. fuck.

And finally, it hits me. Those red Xs and green checks? They mean something. A secret, binary code whose implication was hitherto concealed to me.

[sigh]

Of course, my longed-for libation is sold out, and I settle for another local favorite: coffee in a can.



I'll have you know that this 36 FRANCS 1909 Heavy Latte is the real deal. According to the can, "COFFEE IS REAL GOOD WHEN YOU DRINK IT, IT GIVES YOU TIME TO THINK. IT'S A LOT MORE THAN JUST A DRINK, IT'S SOMETHING HAPPENING. IT GIVES YOU TIME, BUT NOT ACTUAL HOURS OR MINUTES, BUT A CHANCE TO BE, LIKE BE YOURSELF, AND HAVE A SECOND CUP."

But lest we simply chalk this up to the less than eloquent English-speak so ubiquitous in Asian countries, the quote is attributed to Oakland's very own...Gertrude Stein.



Oh, Trudie.

SFO --> TPE (Taoyuan Internat'l) (12/17/10)

10:35 pm. En route to Taiwan. Flippin' my shit in SFO, passing the time watching HBO's In Treatment, trying to cry discreetly into my sweatshirt over a kid asking Gabriel Byrne to take him in, away from his divorcing parents, puzzling over my anxiety, nay, tremulous guilt, about leaving my two...

cats.

"Paging for passenger...Lee Lee...Lee?" As in, full name. Full stop. Li-li Li.

Seriously.

...

It's a double-decker flight, and I'm stuck in the back, and in the middle of the row. Where is the justice? It only occurs to me later, in the waiting area, that I should have insisted that I had a UTI or claustrophobia or something.

Whooping cough. Ebola. Cat scratch fever. A yeast infection.

And the inevitable tropes: a journey to a distant land, a long-awaited homecoming, an overbearing mother, tinny, incessant Christmas music ("Walking in a Winter Wonderland), the panting misery of a grinchy anti-hero(ine).

One of my ex-students, now a sophomore in college, had dismissed China Airlines as "ghetto." And...it is. A lavender nightmare, the pale purple...purple on purple, purple blankets and periwinkle pillows.

My brain's already starting to scramble with the constant, disorienting input of Chinese over the P.A. system. I think maybe this partial fluency is worse than incompetence. I'm unable to let the words wash like sounds, and my ear's constantly searching for meaning between the words and phrases I don't know.

Then there's the anticipatory fear of the blowout with my mother--the battle royal inevitable like the tide, like death and taxes--compounded with anxiety about meeting relatives and their expectations.

And did you know that, according to Peter Jon Lindberg, only 28% of Americans possess passports? This seems to me an absurdly small number.

...

My mom sent me an email earlier, making the following request: "Could you buy only one bottle of 'XO' liquid for me on THE DUTY FREE SHOP ON THE PLANE if possible."

And I don't know if this is particular to East Asian travel, and I believe it can be linked to Chinese/Korean/Japanese traditions of gift-giving and hospitality gifts, but there are the trolleys of duty-free wares, one for cosmetics (化妝品 = hua4 zuang1 ping3) and perfumes (香水 = xiang1 sui3), another for cigarettes, and a third for various liquors.

The Taiwanese etiquette is not quite as rigorous as they are for other cultures, I think--my friend's sister got a chastising call to her mom when she left her wallet in the cab to her aunt's house in Korea and was thus unable to bring a gift--but I've got to make a good impression, and so XO it is. I flag down the flight attendant; alas, the XO "liquid" has sold out, and I settle for Matisse whisky because it's somewhat comparable in price.

And we all know that's the most important thing--its monetary value.

***

Disembark, and scurry to the labyrinthine, winding lines to get past immigration. Luck of the draw, I get to stand in front of two douchey Taiwanese boys who are attending college in New York, and I'm serendipitously regaled with one DB's loud assertions of how many black friends he has and the other DB's cautioning him against dropping the soap in the shower.

What?

I did not know that black men and anal rape was a cultural convention, and far be it for me to disabuse these two experts.

And I dunno what it is, my massive hiking bag, a change in elevation, extreme jet-lag, or a panic attack, but I'm shuffling along, light-headed and in a cold sweat, about to pass out as I stumble up to Ho Hsin's long-haul bus counter. I purchase a ticket, the agent gracious in his response to my rusty Mandarin, and I gratefully accept his offer of water...



then deposit my stuff in the waiting area to make a phone call to my aunt and uncle to tell them I've arrived in Taipei.

But it doesn't work.

Why?

Because, in an unforeseen turn of events, the Jamaican J is not accepted in public pay phones in the Republic of China.

Left: Jamaican J, right: New Taiwan Dollar

This is fucking untenable.