Taiwan’s stinky-tofu tastes like heaven but stinks like hell
MY FLIGHT from San Francisco to Taipei was delayed, and painfully so. My eyes were bloodshot, my long, black hair already matted, and I was only a quarter of the way to my destination. Warily, I glanced at my text messages.
Aren’t you going to Taiwan? Did you hear about the phone call?
What luck. Just as I was Taiwan-bound, on a sevenday trip with a group of fellow unwashed-writer types, the 13,000-square-mile dollop of an island where I was headed was suddenly on everyone’s lips.
I raised my eyes to the nearest TV and quickly caught myself up. The news channels were buzzing about a 10-minute chitchat between the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, and Taiwanese President Tsai Ingwen. It wouldn’t seem like much but for the fact that no American president or president-elect had taken a call from Taipei in nearly 40 years. To do so would be an affront to China.
This particular president-elect not only spoke to Taiwan, but he had tweeted all about it.
Spent, I decided to send a few texts, board and sleep for the bulk of the flight. The fellowship that had dispatched me to Taiwan encouraged me to learn about whatever I wanted. And what I wanted to do was eat.
For a tiny place, Taiwan’s novelty-filled food culture has an almost gravitational pull over the American diner. Taiwanese American kids in Southern California snack on fried squid at home-grown night markets; a chef, Eddie Huang, slings bao - doughy buns filled with various meats and vegetables - and Taiwanese sodas in New York and Los Angeles. Bubble tea, a milky, sweet drink laden with gummy tapioca “pearls” the size of marbles, hails from this place, too, though now it’s almost as ubiquitous in such places as Rockville, Maryland.
I was Taiwan-bound for stinky tofu, not for a whiff of international brinkmanship.
It quickly dawned on me that politics and Taiwan’s delicate dance with China pervade everything here, from the conversation to the cuisine.
Everyone we met paused before speaking carefully about Taiwan. Is Taiwan a nation? (No.) Does it have an embassy? (No, not quite.) Is its democratically elected president actually a president? (Er, debatable, but this publication often uses “leader.”)
Beijing and Taipei are, for better or worse, bound, the product of the one-China policy, which recognises the two governments as one - or, rather, recognises only China’s as legitimate.
Which is why, for decades, American presidents have pretended that Taiwan doesn’t exist. And why, for two generations, Taiwan has shuddered under China’s yoke.
Szu-chien Hsu, the gleefully frank head of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, has a notion about why the Trump Call, as it has come to be known here, made Taiwanese hearts (and Tsai’s approval ratings) leap. “We have this feeling,” he says, “that we’ve been forgotten by the world.”
The morning after my arrival, I sat down to a life-affirming Chinese breakfast of sweet black soybeans, the Chinese cruller known as an oil stick, taro bun and approximately four versions of tofu, and I begin to feel more charitable.
Around me, I noticed banyan trees, with their artfully tangled trunks, dotting every patch of green, and my ears were abuzz with the high-register squeeee of passing motorbikes. Pastel pops of cuteness - saucer-eyed cartoon figures plastered onto the sides of buses, pet hotels, blinking neon pinwheels - reached out and hugged me from across this landscape of glass and steel.
It looked like any urban East Asian nation. But muggy, perennially grey-skied Taiwan is unique in ways that aren’t readily apparent.
Passed like a hot potato from the Dutch to the Japanese to, finally, China, Taiwan has developed a culture that is a jumble of a halfdozen influences, including that of the Han Chinese, who make up the largest ethnic group here. There is also a tiny indigenous population - which, I learn from Lishan Chang, of the US-based Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, has more in common with Polynesians than with the Chinese. (The president, who took office in May, proudly touts her indigenous family roots.)
All this cultural wire-crossing plays out in a dozen ways, including in the food, particularly what fills the island’s Las Vegas-like night markets and its streetside stands.
Thanks to Taiwanese Americans, I’m already familiar with some of Taiwan’s delicacies, many of them novelties. Among them: xiao long bao, the twoin-one culinary nuggets that the Taiwanese would claim as their own. Dumplings with a centre that bursts with meaty soup, they’re the specialty of Din Tai Fung, the island’s famous chain.
As our car pulled to a halt outside the restaurant’s downtown Taipei location on Xinyi Road and we ambled out into the sea of humanity, it’s apparent that a soup-dumpling pilgrimage hadn’t occurred only to us. Blissfully, we’re called pretty swiftly - the promise of dumplings has a way
The youth population in Taiwan is dwindling markedly as couples delay marriage and put off or forgo having children, but at the night markets, youthful energy bubbles.
of blurring the passage of time - and soon we were clambering up a narrow set of steps, past a picture window that reveals what must be Din Tai Fung’s secret: a sea of professional dumpling-pinchers, all men, cloaked in all white - including masks - sealing and steaming with surgical precision.
Settled into our seats at this jumbo jet of a restaurant, we were instantly approached by a fawning fleet of graceful serverstewardesses, their collars fastened firmly with bow-ties, their hair slicked flat into sleek buns. I asked in English what offerings were vegetarian, and despite the language barrier - the people here speak mostly Chinese - our stewardess smiled warmly. Shortly, a plate of bean curd appeared, drizzled in sesame oil and sliced so thinly that it resembled noodles. It was followed by warm fried rice dotted with vegetables and an artfully arranged bed of actual noodles, fresh and warm and swimming in a pond of liquefied sesame seeds. The meat eaters, of course, got the real variety show: drunken chicken (which looks raw but, I’m told later, was just prepared in a way that spotlights the quality of the meat), shrimpcapped shumai and, of course, bamboo vessels the size of hubcaps bearing steaming xiao long bao.
The journalist next to me wiped his brow. Feasting is work.
I’m on a stinky-tofu hunt. A cousin who travels widely in Asia for work assured me that this is the holy grail of Taiwanese eating, the thing I needed to snarf down only so I might brag about it later, like a contestant on “Fear Factor.”
My group was fresh off a remarkably easy, 40-minute trip to Taichung, in the centre of the island, on the Taiwan high-speed rail. We spent the night at the toocool-for-school Red Dot Hotel, where guests can take a slide down into the lobby and the elevators light up like a rave. I located the espresso maker in my room and nearly squealed with joy. As I climbed into my huge bed with perfect sheets and traditional Hakka floral-print headboard, I pledged to never leave.
The next day, of course, I did, albeit grudgingly. We decided on dinner at one of the island’s massive eating-and-shopping bacchanals, Feng Chia Night Market, among the largest night markets in Taichung, a city with more than 10 such bazaars.
The youth population in Taiwan is dwindling markedly as couples delay marriage and put off or forgo having children, but at the night markets, youthful energy bubbles. At the maze-like Feng Chia, street after street lights up with the neon glow of food stalls hawking delicious junk food, including bubble tea, liquid nitrogen ice cream and shaved ice, German pig knuckles, taro pancakes, oysters and Japanesestyle fried squid. This market alone rakes in 11 billion Taiwanese dollars a year, says Tristan Liu, director of Taichung’s Economic Development Bureau. — Washington Post