Like Huo Yuanjia in Fearless fleeing Tianjin in shame, I was down and out. Not in a good Cam’ron ft. Kanye with the 1970s Heron flow, either. I was down and out facing trial for aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, a third-degree, level six charge with a maximum five-year sentence. Enter the motherland.
I didn’t want to go to Taiwan. The last time I went, I was twelve. We stayed at my aunt’s crib in the middle of the summer with no AC and there were mosquitos and moldy-smelling clothes hanging everywhere. I got diarrhea eating street food and the Chinese kids looked like Sanrio characters flashing peace fingers and jazz hands. Fortunately, the parents knew better. I’d fallen completely off the tracks and the only trick they had left in their kung-fu manuals was to send the kid home to marinate on things.
The trip was part of a program that officially went by the name of Study Tour, but people called it “Loveboat.” The concept was simple from our parents’ point of view: go home, see the motherland, and, eventually, get someone from the same tribe pregnant. I wasn’t opposed to getting anyone pregnant. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to hitch the rest of my life to an island whose only real draws were cheap video games and stinky tofu.
The video games were bootlegged, but the stinky tofu was real: an ugly, smelly tofu that’s cured in rotten cabbage. In Taiwan, they take the tofu, fry it, and serve it with garlic oil, vinegar, chili sauce, and pao tsai—pickled vegetables, usually carrots, cabbage, and radish. My mom and her friends used to go to a Taiwanese restaurant in D.C. to eat it, but even there they’d only serve it for xiao ye (midnight snack) after 11 P.M., when most of the lao wai (foreigners) had left, because the smell from the tofu was so funky. This shit-smelling food was my favorite thing about Taiwan. But after a plea deal, I had an opportunity. I could get approval to visit Taiwan, or sit at home on felony probation. So off I went.
I was sleepwalking on my way to Taiwan. That’s how I felt when I got to Taoyuan International Airport. For months, I’d dreaded the trip, but then all of a sudden it was on me.
It was the same airport I flew into when I was twelve, but it was different this time. Everywhere I looked, Taiwanese people in suits, in sandals, in tank tops, in Iverson jerseys, with mole-hair growths, without mole-hair growths. No matter where you turned, slanted eyes were watching. The cabdrivers were on that dress shoes and socks flow with shorts waaayyy before Thom Browne! I mean, it definitely doesn’t look the same when you have a belly-out tank top and bowl cut, but you get the picture. Like RZA said, “Protons Electrons Always Cause Explosions,” and fireworks went off in my head.
WHEN I ARRIVED in Taipei, to the college that hosted the trip, I was late as usual.
“Meester Huang?”
“Yeah, checking in.”
“Ay yah! You are very late, sirs!”
“My bad.”
“What do you means ‘my bad’?”
“Like my fault, my bad. It’s all good, can I still check in?”
“No, not good! We thought you weren’t coming and gave your room away.”
“Yo, I just flew nineteen hours. I’ll sleep in a bathroom if I have to.”
The woman at registration went to the office and started speaking to her supervisor in Chinese. Apparently, they’d given my room away to someone who was on standby. I overheard their conversation, but there were two other guys who were late as well and in the same position as me.
“I don’t know if you want to do these, but there ees one room on the girls’ floor that has a bed availables. There are two other males roommates to be your companion, though, so not awkwards with all the females on floor.”
Taiwan, I love you. I felt like King Jaffe Joffer up in the joint. Please feel free to serve me your most eligible shawties. I went to the room, saw one bed free, and slept for twelve hours. The next day, I woke up stankin’. All in, it had been about thirty-two hours since my last shower—this for a dude who doesn’t go eight days without a shape-up and ten hours without a shower. I mean, baby girl, I make Cool Water smell good. My first day in Taiwan, it was middle school dance party steez; I sprayed on whatever cheap cologne I could find.
I grabbed a towel, put on my Iceberg Muttley flip-flops, and went to the bathroom. In front of the sink was a girl with long black hair in a turquoise American Eagle shirt and shorts, putting in her contacts. Even though she had a finger in one eye, I thought to myself, If the other side looks like this one, just without a finger in the eye, she’s pretty damn fly. Despite being from stankonia and only wearing a towel, I figured it’d be OK to say hello.
“Wassup!”
The girl totally bugged out, threw in her other contact lens, and ran out without saying a word.
Despite crashing and burning, I figured I could still enjoy my shower. I walked into the stall and next to the shower was the toilet. Not just any shitter, but a squatter: a hole in the floor with a wastebasket next to it for your shit tickets. You could take a shit, brush your teeth, and wash your dick at the same time if you wanted to. I mean, I respect the creativity, but the last thing I want to do while showering is take a shit or fall in the squatter with a sign next to it that says, “Put dirty papers in can.” To complete the décor they had a neon green flyswatter hanging on one side of the window in case you wanted to kill mosquitos while doing all four of the above. I didn’t have to work out all summer, I just did the circuit in the shit-shower-swat room.
After going to the “gym,” I got back to the room and met my roommates. They were pretty much what I expected. Glasses, Hang Ten gear, goofy T-shirts that said MIT: Made in Taiwan. You know, not God body shit. This was always a funny negotiation for me. On one hand, I had childhood photos of me wearing the same uniform and it cracked me up, but once I decided I didn’t want to be the Taiwanese Balki Bartokomous, I made money to buy Nike and ’Lo.
“Hey, I’m Richard. What’s your name?”
“Eddie, wassup, man.”
“I’m Tim!”
“You Taiwanese, dude?”
To go on the trip, you had to be Taiwanese because the government paid for it. Tim had orange hair, so I figured daddy was a white man.
“Ha, ha, yeah, man, I’m half Taiwanese, dude!”
“Oh, that’s what’s really good. I was just curious. Yo, y’all know we’re on the girls floor, right?”
As I said those words, Richard looked like he was about to puke on his MIT shirt. Even as a nineteen-year-old, he was still working his way through the cootie stage.
“Yeah, it’s kinda weird, but I think we’ll be OK.”
Tim gave me the universal eye-roll for “this dude needs GPS to find his dick.” We all got dressed and went down to eat breakfast. I got in the elevator and saw the girl with the contact lenses.
“Hey, weren’t you just in the bathroom?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yo, stop playin’, you remember me! What’s your name?”
“Ning.”
“I’m Eddie!”
We went down to the cafeteria for breakfast: rice porridge, black pickles, dried pork sung, fried peanuts, vegetables, tofu. It went on and on. Porridge is our soup, our grits, our sustenance, so it’s pretty much the go-to for breakfast. For the first time, I ate with a bunch of other Taiwanese-Chinese kids my age who knew what the hell they were doing. Even at Chinese school, there were always kids that brought hamburgers, shunned chopsticks, or didn’t get down with the funky shit. They were like faux-bootleg–Canal Street Chinamen.
That was one of the things that really annoyed me about growing up Chinese in the States. Even if you wanted to roll with Chinese/Taiwanese kids, there were barely any around and the ones that were around had lost their culture and identity. They barely spoke Chinese, resented Chinese food, and if we got picked on by white people on the basketball court, everyone just looked out for themselves. It wasn’t that I wanted people to carry around little red books to affirm their “Chinese-ness,” but I just wanted to know there were other people that wanted this community to live on in America. There was one kid who wouldn’t eat the thousand-year-old eggs at breakfast and all the other kids started roasting him.
“If you don’t get down with the nasty shit, you’re not Chinese!”
I was down with the mob, but something left me unsettled. One thing ABCs love to do is compete on “Chinese-ness,” i.e., who will eat the most chicken feet, pig intestines, and have the highest SAT scores. I scored high in chicken feet, sneaker game, and pirated goods, but relatively low on the SAT. I had made National Guild Honorable Mention for piano when I was around twelve and promptly quit. My parents had me play tennis and take karate, but ironically, I quit tennis two tournaments short of being ranked in the state of Florida and left karate after getting my brown belt. The family never understood it, but I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to play their stupid Asian Olympics, but I wanted to prove to myself that if I did want to be the stereotypical Chinaman they wanted, I could.*
AFTER BREAKFAST, WE went to language class. Compared to my parents and older cousins, I didn’t speak Chinese that well. But in Study Tour class, I realized that I was actually one of the more fluent speakers, especially with food. I knew the names of everything, but unless it was a food item, I couldn’t write it. The teachers thought it was funny and kept calling me the hungry kid: “Xiao Ming hao ci!” I couldn’t help it: all I thought about was pussy and food. So, after class, I asked Ning out. To eat.
“Yo, you hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Let’s go to the night market anyway. It’ll be fun.”
“Isn’t there a curfew?”
On “Loveboat,” there was always a story about people from the year before either getting pregnant or married, so they instituted a curfew. When we first got there, Tim and I started snooping around the dorm and went to the ground floor. On the back side of the dorm was a window that the guard at the door couldn’t see from his position. So we broke the window. Delinquent 101 shit. They really should have made it harder.
The curfew was a curse because Taipei is the best at night. The neon lights go on, the youth come out, and street vendors serve everything from fried squid in a bag to stinky tofu to oh-a-jian, an oyster pancake. Xiao ye is an event, like reverse brunch. By the time xiao ye comes around, you’ve most likely already eaten all three meals, but in Taipei, around 12 A.M., people start to come back out for late-night food. There are no tablecloths, servers, or even backs on chairs. I learned that a three-star dining room doesn’t always equate to three-star food and developing-nation garage stands could get Ferran Adrià any day. The best things I tasted were humble, honest, and served on bright green melamine plates by people wearing sandals and getting high on betel nut.
Ning and I crawled out of the window and made our way through the dark to Shilin Night Market. On the way, we nearly got killed by the crazy Taipei traffic. Scooters are a serious life hazard in Taipei. Wherever you try to go, a scooter is cutting you off. One-seaters had two people on ’em, two-seaters had three, and three-seaters had a family. They were like Mexican vans on two wheels with the top cut off.
Although I tried to play it cool, my first trip to the Shilin Night Market changed me. While most head to the food court segment, I preferred the vendors sprawled down the nearby side streets and alleys. The atmosphere was elevated and electric—neon lights blazed with synthetic colors and the smells from all the cooking overwhelmed me. It was like being in Eat Drink Man Woman with smell-o-vision. I can’t remember exactly what Ning and I ate at the market or even what we talked about, but I know I was wearing a Charles Woodson Raiders jersey and Ning had on these hilarious platform sandals with multicolored flowers on them.
Ning didn’t actually say words a lot of the time; she just made sounds or bobbed her head.
“EEW.”
“STALE.”
“HU-HUH.”
“ERR.”
*HEAD BOBBLE*
*NOSE WRINKLE*
It was kind of disturbing at first. She was eighteen and native Taiwanese but came to America when she was four. You’d never know she was born in Taiwan since she grew up in America, but it was there dormant just like it was for me. Ning was unlike any girl I’d ever hung out with. No games, genuinely nice, totally herself all the time, and comfortable with whatever naïveté or ignorance there was about her. She was one of the most self-aware, confident people I knew, but she projected it clothed in insecurity.
In a strange way, even with our goofy clothes, Ning and I fit right in. Everyone in Taiwan is mismatched, outfitted in American-style clothes as interpreted by ardent Pokémon fans. Asians are funny; we can take anything and repackage it for your inner eight-year-old. As a kid who grew up with Girbauds and The Chronic, it was refreshing to see people just having fun. Hip-hop hadn’t had that since Kid ’n Play’s “Ain’t Gonna Hurt Nobody.” If my homies from Florida had been around, I would’ve probably been clowning these night-market anime lovers, but that was the best part. They weren’t. And in the absence of their gaze, I allowed myself to encounter a part of myself I’d lost, shunned, and cast aside years ago. Tony Kushner talks about serpents shedding their skin too early, but I was a different animal. I had to shed my skin in America if I ever wanted to reclaim it on my own terms that summer in Taiwan.
Taiwan got me into food in a way I’d never experienced it before. When I went to Taiwan as a kid, my parents knew where to go, but this time, at the night market, I had to eat my way to my own discoveries. We realized that the way to eat in Taipei was to identify the house special and bounce around the street to complete a meal. All you had to do was look at the customers. Even if a restaurant had twenty items, if their signature was open-ended pot stickers, that’s the only thing people ordered. Without the stall even advertising it, you’d know what to order. The key is not to go too big at one stall and blow your load. Every stall was different, and you could get almost anything in the Shilin Night Market. Taipei is for food nerds what Amsterdam is for hooker connoisseurs.
Every dish has a basic, foundational technique, but after that, it’s open for the individual cook’s artistic interpretation. By far, the three biggest dishes in Taiwan are minced pork on rice, soup dumplings, and beef noodle soup. Minced pork on rice, everyone will tell you, ah-ma (grandma) makes best. It’s all about childhood preferences. The dish is proletariat home-style chic; updating, modernizing, or remixing it violates the whole idea of minced pork on rice. It’s ground pork and diced pork belly stewed with black shiitake mushrooms, five-spice, and rice wine. What distinguishes one minced pork dish from another is the sweating of the pork. You don’t want to brown it. The trick is to sweat the pork so all the moisture evaporates, but the flavor stays in the pot. When your soy sauce, rice wine, and water go down, it picks the fond back up and reincorporates the natural juices and flavor that you cooked out of the pork. A lot of them had Roh gin mien, which was a childhood favorite of mine. When I got a cold, my mom would take fish paste, pork strips, and carrots and make a boiled dumpling out of them, then serve the dumplings in chicken soup and cabbage with vinegar, white pepper, and cilantro. The technique was a lot like Southern chicken ’n’ dumplings.
With soup dumplings, everyone knows the best is Din Tai Fung. So since ah-ma wins in minced pork and Din Tai Fung wins on soup dumplings, the only Taiwanese dish where the hood title is really up for grabs is beef noodle soup, the holy-grail-sword-in-the-stone of Taiwanese cuisine. I ate beef noodle soup everywhere. It was the one food item that screwed up our stall ordering strategy. People love the dish so much that even if it isn’t a specialty of the house, it gets ordered, on the off chance that you’ll discover the next great beef noodle soup at some random stall in the night market. At least that’s why we ordered it. I had it at the Grand Hotel—too much soy. At karaoke—not fortified enough with bone. At the college cafeteria—almost not beef noodle soup anymore. At a superbuffet—ehh.
I sometimes wondered why no one restaurant had risen to the challenge and dominated beef noodle soup like Din Tai Fung did soup dumplings or Da Dong does Peking duck. The difference is that beef noodle soup has no bounds. Soup dumplings and Peking duck aren’t open to wild reinterpretation because there are strict parameters and fewer components to work with. For beef noodle soup, the only prerequisites are beef, soup, and noodles. Some cooks add tomato, some don’t, some use anise, some use cut chilis, some use whole chilis, some like thick noodles, some like it thin. Every year it seems like there’s a new beef noodle soup champion. Stalls display their medals and awards, but like Zagat ratings and assholes … everybody’s got one.
During that trip to Taipei, I had a lot of good but not great beef noodle soups and it was disappointing. I started to examine my mom’s version. She always had the perfect balance of tomatoes, scallions, ginger, just enough garlic, chilis, and her secret: peanut butter. Our family loves peanut butter. We whip it together with sesame paste and boiling water to create a brownish gray slurry that we used for body in a lot of our soups and stews.
Nine years later, I went to Taipei Main Station with my dad. They had just opened a new food court, divided into sections. There was the bento box section where vendors sold only bento box favorites like fried pork chops, minced pork on rice, and tong-a-biko (Taiwanese sticky rice). They had a section for sweet congees where people specialized in dessert congee, there was the curry district where all the best curries were, but the crown jewel of the food court was the beef noodle soup section. There was an area of roughly a thousand square feet that had six beef noodle soup vendors who had all at one time won Best in Show.
It was like a beef noodle soup ice-cream shop. The vendors each gave tastes of the soup to coax customers. It was insanely competitive: imagine going to a food court that had six burger joints or five fish ’n’ chips stalls. I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was a good business move to set up shop next to five people selling the same item, but that’s the beauty of Taiwanese food. We have very discerning palates and people have an appreciation for nuanced flavors. Every one of those stalls was busy because they each put their own intricate twist on the soup that made them distinct from each other. I tasted every one of the soups and they all stood out in their own way but it’s not the way Americans think of “owning a dish.” You hear chefs talk frequently about “owning dishes,” but it’s all about big movements like deconstructing a dish, putting a sauce on top, or entirely changing the presentation. When Taiwanese-Chinese people compete on beef noodle soup and attempt to own the dish, it’s all about the two-inch punch. You can’t even see what it is they did different; it’s the slightest move of the needle that manifests itself in the soup. Perhaps you snuck a few soybeans into your stock to give it more depth and umami. Maybe you flash-fried your beef to cook off the first instead of blanching it. Or, maybe you sautéed some peanuts with your aromatics. Inspired, I continued to work on my own version, using my mom’s recipe as the foundation.
1. Throw out the first: always flash-boil your bones and beef to get the “musk” out. I’ve gone back and forth on this a lot. I would sometimes brown the meat as opposed to boil, but decided in the end that for this soup, you gotta boil. If you brown, it’s overpowering. The lesson that beef noodle soup teaches you is restraint. Sometimes less is more if you want all the flavors in the dish to speak to you.
2. Make sure the oil is medium-high when the aromatics go down and get a slight caramelization. It’s a fine line. Too much caramelization and it becomes too heavy, but no caramelization and your stock is weak.
3. Rice wine can be tricky. Most people like to vaporize it so that all the alcohol is cooked off. I like to leave a little of the alcohol flavor ’cause it tends to cut through the grease a bit.
4. Absolutely no butter, lard, or duck fat. I’ve seen people in America try to “kick it up a notch” with animal fats and it ruins the soup. Peanut oil or die.
5. Don’t burn the chilis and peppercorns, not even a little bit. You want the spice and the numbness, but not the smokiness.
6. After sautéing the chilis/peppercorns, turn off the heat and let them sit in the oil to steep. This is another reason you want to turn the heat off early.
7. Strain your chilis/peppercorns out of the oil, put them in a muslin bag, and set them aside. Then add ginger/garlic/scallions to the oil in that order. Stage them.
8. I use tomatoes in my beef noodle soup, but I add them after the soup is finished and everything is strained. I let them hang out in the soup as it sits on the stove over the course of the day. I cut the tomatoes thin so they give off flavor without having to cook too long and so you can serve them still intact.
9. Always use either shank or chuck flap. Brisket is too tough. If you want to make it interesting, add pig’s foot or oxtail.
10. Do you. I don’t give you measurements with this because I gave you all the ingredients and the technique. The best part about beef noodle soup is that there are no rules. It just has to have beef, noodle, and soup. There are people that do clear broth beef noodle soup. Beef noodle soup with dairy. Beef noodle soup with pig’s blood. It would suck if you looked at my recipe and never made your own, ’cause everyone has a beef noodle soup in them. Show it to me.
After the first two weeks on Loveboat, we had “Family Day.” We were supposed to go out for the day with our families in Taipei. Most people still had some family in Taipei, but I didn’t. While my mom and dad were born in Taiwan, the rest of their families were from mainland China. By the seventies, there was just more opportunity in America than in Taiwan so most of my family left.
In Taiwan, people would always ask about your family heritage since everyone’s journey to Taiwan was different. Some were Native Taiwanese, Hakka, some were Japanese-Taiwanese, Wai Sheng Ren (Chinese-Taiwanese), etc. And on family day at Loveboat you could expect to tell your family history at least once an hour. Luckily, Ning came to my rescue.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Nothing, I’m gonna go play basketball.”
“Aww, do you not have family?”
“Naw, not here.”
“Ha, ha, orphan boy!”
“Whatever …”
“Well, do you wanna come eat with my family?”
“What are you guys eating?”
“Really? Sushi in Taiwan? Why would you do that?”
“Whatever, go play basketball, orphan boy …”
THE SUSHI SPOT wasn’t more than a garage on the street level of an apartment building. Cook downstairs, live upstairs. You walked in and on the right side was the standard blue Japanese curtain with octopus cartoons. Behind the curtains was the kitchen, barely four feet by three feet. Ning’s aunt and uncle were really good people. They didn’t pry about my family, didn’t seem to mind that I was wearing my Orlando Magic jersey backward, and ordered a ton of food. It was par for the course for the Juang family.
The sushi was very cold. In Taiwan, they keep the sushi at a temperature several degrees lower than in Japan or America. Sometimes, you’ll even get thin ice chips on the surface of sashimi. The chunks are significantly larger and cut like two-ounce slices of New York strip. Thick, wide, and blocky. I didn’t like it. To me, sushi is about mouthfeel and texture. When you serve the fish close to frozen and in bricks, it defeats the purpose.
The sushi sucked but Ning was cool. While other girls were obsessed with dick, going out, cliques, and ladder climbing, she was totally oblivious. Part of it was naïveté, but another part of it was just that she didn’t buy into the things people told her were important. She lived in her own cocoon, a cocoon filled with anime, bubble tea, and fantasy novels. I was dismissive at first, but then we started playing Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., and smanging. It was like returning to some version of me that had gotten lost over the last decade, since I was a kid with my brother Emery, crawling through the house and playing Mortal Kombat at 2 A.M. with the sound off while my mom was asleep. Emery and I’d read comics, watch kung fu flicks, and not give a fuck about this girl or that party or who had beef. I realized that I missed that.
It’s not until I’m writing today that I realized why we got along so well. We were both wolves in sheep’s clothing. We’d realized early on to “play dumb.” I dumbed out destroying everything in my way, but Ning did the opposite, built a pleasure dome and kept to herself. Before I met Ning, it was only in the really hard times that I looked at myself and forced myself to understand who I really was and not get lost in the act. But I didn’t have to act around her, I could just be.
Ning also got me back in touch with my identity. While I was out drinking Mad Dog 40/40 and running over frat boys with Mitsubishi Monteros, she went to Chinese school on weekends all the way up until her senior year of high school. Instead of sneaking into bars or clubs, she was going to Bubble Island with her girlfriends. We kept making fun of each other, but as they say, opposites attract. I had become so obsessed with not being a stereotype that half of who I was had gone dormant. But it was also a positive. Instead of following the path most Asian kids do, I struck out on my own. There’s nature, there’s nurture, and as Harry Potter teaches us, there’s who YOU want to be. Every part of me was something I sought out and encountered. And that summer in Taipei, I looked around and saw myself everywhere I went. Pieces of me scattered all over the country like I had lived, died, burned, and been spread throughout the country in a past life. Here I was coming home to find myself again in street stalls, KTV rooms, and bowls of beef noodle soup. All the things instilled in me from a young age by my family and home, rehydrated and brought to life like instant noodles. They never left, they just needed attention.
I REMEMBER SITTING in the Taipei airport the day I left Taiwan. Ning had a flight around the same time so I walked her to her security gate and said goodbye. I wasn’t big on goodbyes. I remember she had a giant backpack, shorts, and something orange on, but I wasn’t sad. I knew I’d see her again. She already planned to come visit me in Florida when she got back. But I was worried about Taiwan. Who knew when I’d come back? There was a part of me that dreaded going back to Florida. It was like going back to work.
I knew that in a matter of days, I’d be back to the land of slanted-eye or ching-chong jokes. After those months in Taiwan, I started asking myself: Why? Why the fuck do I have to be Q-Tip cryin’ Sucka N!gg@? I was sick of explaining myself, sick of being different, and sick of Florida. I felt something weird and new: I was happy. Reconciled. I learned my lesson from America and didn’t want to go back. But in truth, in Taiwan, I was different, too. I had to explain myself to people in Taiwan just like I did in Florida and I realized that if I stayed, I’d have a whole new set of hurdles to face. And I was already buggin’ out because I was about to miss the Redskins’ second preseason game after Danny Wuerffel set the world on fire in the first one. I was stuck in the middle.
The airport honestly felt more like home to me than either Taiwan or Florida, and I enjoyed every moment. There was fried chicken, beef noodle soup, hamburgers, Coke, Apple Sidra, fried rice, and doughnuts. Something for everyone. I guess it’s the only place I didn’t have to explain anything. Everyone was in-between. The relief of the airport and the opportunity to reflect on my trip helped me realize that I didn’t want to blame anyone anymore. Not my parents, not white people, not America. Did I still think there was a lot wrong with the aforementioned? Hell, yeah, but unless I was going to do something about it, I couldn’t say shit. So I drank my Apple Sidra and shut the fuck up.
* It may seem contradictory to say I want people to preserve their culture and then reject certain things like the model-minority expectations, a la carte, but there is a fine distinction to be made between stereotypes and actual culture. In my Chinese America, I don’t care if you have high SAT scores or use chopsticks. All I want to know is if you are aware of shared problems and issues due to our skin, eyes, and country of origin.