Idea of distinct food (and identity) looms large
– Wrapping bamboo leaves around a nugget of sticky rice, cooking instructor Ivy Chen tries to replicate the recipe of a Taiwanese-style dumpling – a distinct cuisine integral to the democratic island’s identity.
She has spent nearly a quarter-century championing Taiwan’s cuisine and teaching recipes to tourists and sometimes locals, explaining how a dish that originated from across the strait in China has transformed into a Taiwanese staple.
The idea of a distinctly Taiwanese identity is looming large in the minds of some voters as the island prepares to go to the polls tomorrow to elect a new president and choose the path of relations with Beijing over the next four years.
“I am made in Taiwan. I was born here, I grew up here, I know all the authentic flavours, I know the traditions,” Chen, 66, said from her Taipei kitchen.
Her latest cookbook, Made in Taiwan, seeks to show that “Taiwanese cuisine stands on its own”, detailing recipes ubiquitous across the island such as the pork-belly buns and stinky tofu sold in Taipei’s night markets.
“The very act of being Taiwanese is a constant fight against unrelenting Chinese state attempts to obliterate our identity,” Chen’s co-author Clarissa Wei wrote in the book’s introduction.
“Our food isn’t a subset of Chinese food because Taiwan isn’t a part of China.”
Their staunch declaration of Taiwanese identity is in line with how the majority of the island feel – a clear separation from China, even as it claims Taiwan as part of its territory.
After the Communist Party gained control in China in 1949, the nationalists fled to Taiwan, leading to a political standoff.
But as the island moved from autocracy to democracy by the 1990s, sentiments of the population – which had initially been educated under a Chinese-first curriculum – began shifting within a more Taiwan-centric environment.
Taiwan’s older generations see the “unification of China as inevitable”, said Liu Wen, an expert on history and ethnology at Academia Sinica. “They respond to China’s encroachment and the military exercises in a passive
way because they believe that eventually... Taiwan and China will be united.”
This mindset is fading among younger generations.
In 1992, around a quarter of the population identified as Chinese. But less than three percent now feel that way, according to polling from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University for the past three years.
Comedian Kylie Wang, who runs a popular news podcast, described herself as “without question” Taiwanese. “I’m born here and I love my country, so I’m Taiwanese. My identity is Taiwanese,” the 38-year-old said.
Chen, who was born in 1957 during the authoritarian nationalist-led regime, said this was not always the case.
“Taiwanese food was considered second-grade food and the nationalistic government boosted Chinese food as the proper, high-quality food.”
This coincided with a push for people to speak only Mandarin Chinese in public. This subverted other languages on the island – home to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples and descendants of Dutch and Japanese colonial rule and not just newer immigrants from China. –