Chopsticks ChopsticksCheju-do is a windblown isle known mostly for its fresh air and honeymoon packages, female pearl divers and fresh abalone. But driving on a coastal road toward another seafood feed, I stumble on a local edible that leads me to a history buried as deeply as any prized mollusk.
On small plots overlooking the sea, lustrous groves are heavy with orange fruit. Off the southernmost tip of South Korea, Cheju is the polar opposite of the frigid North and its constant food shortages. But in this ever-politicized nation, even fruit comes with a lot more than pulp. The tangerines grown by an estimated 30,000 island farmers have become shiny symbols in the North-South divide.
It turns out Cheju province’s Civic Movement has so far shipped a total of 13,573 tons of tangerines and 6,000 tons of carrots to the North. The North even invited 255 Cheju growers for a rare cross-border visit as thanks for the prime produce — supposedly distributed to hospitals and kindergartens.
Call this Vitamin C diplomacy. But reasons for the shipments go beyond humanitarian concerns. For one thing, they neatly reduce surplus in a period of overproduction. For another, there is, as every farmer freely confesses, “the memory of April 3.”
This 1948 date still resonates all over Cheju. In the tense months leading up to the outbreak of the Korean War, U.S. troops under United Nations auspices were organizing elections which would lead to the August 15 founding of the Republic of Korea and the inauguration of Syngman Rhee as the first pro-U.S. military strongman. All through that spring, the streets of Cheju city seethed with protests against the Americans’ use of Korean soil to further its Cold War aims. During a rally on Cheju in March 1948, Korean military police, backed by U.S. forces, shot dead six peaceful demonstrators. A month of unrest followed. American propaganda labeled the island “a second Moscow.”
In the early hours of April 3, nationalist protestors set fires on the many peaks that dot the volcanic island and some 1,500 guerrillas attacked police stations. A crackdown followed, in which the military, with apparent U.S. backing, perpetrated what has become known as the Cheju Massacre.
“They would kill whole families, round up villages and burn everything,” says Kang Dong Jo, 79, a tangerine grower for the past 20 years. Recounts his farmer son, “The activists didn’t want violence, but they were suppressed so harshly that they learned to defend themselves. Control of the island shifted between the police and the protestors from day to night. Many innocent people were victimized.”
With South Korea’s increasing democratization, students and historians agitated for a release of documents concerning what many termed hidden “U.S.-led atrocities.” A law called for truth-seeking and compensation for victims. Estimates put the crackdown’s death toll between 10,000 and 80,000.
Had I not stopped to admire the beauty of some seaside citrus, I might never have known how much Korea, from top to bottom, remain one people — at least in their collective memory.
“This is the pure expression of brotherhood, reconciliation and the strong wish for reunification from the people of Cheju Island,” declares Yoon Chang Wan, an organizer of the tangerine transfer. So long as an easing of tensions allows, Cheju’s growers plan to continue their donations, an apt expression of nature’s “sunshine policy.”
OppositionTough to find down a gritty Taipei cul-de-sac, Hung Yu (“Red Jade”) seems the sort of hole-in-the-wall that would always keep their door open. And open their back door they did, even when curfews and martial crackdowns shuttered their façade. Recommended here for a true taste of Taiwan, I soon get more than I expected. A narrow linoleum galley with luridly green shellacked walls, its first floor taken up mostly by fish tanks, its second floor of box-like private rooms crammed with noisy revelers, the place boasts a menu that is proudly local — and politics to match.
“Our regular clientele didn’t come here for the food, but for the political atmosphere,” founder Tu Hsinfu proudly admits from behind a messily littered desk that doubles as cash box, eager to brag about a who’s who of opposition activists who cut their teeth here, finally feasting on power with the 2000 election of pro-independence president Chen Shui-bian. Defying decades of iron-fisted Kuomintang rule, famished rebels would flock here for both the stir-fry and stirring meetings.
Later I would talk with Frank Hsieh, the mayor of the southern city of Kaohsiung and the Democratic Progressive Party chairman, who was among those drawn to Hung Yu’s back entrance. “In the days of the KMT dictatorship, opposition activists could hardly find any places to meet,” he reminisces. “But many in the restaurant owner’s family were opposition activists, so this became a natural gathering place. We felt we’d found a safe haven.”
Tu’s commitment nearly got him jailed back in 1986. But it wasn’t due to his outspoken views or underground affiliations. He was merely trying to keep his beloved restaurant afloat and wrote a bad check to cover accumulated bank debts of NT$3 million (nearly US$86,000 at current exchange rates). After years of overinvesting in equipment and fancy chefs who did standard turns with seafood, this crisis was the turning point in the restaurant’s success.
“We lost so much that we had to sell my mother’s house just to keep open,” he admits. Without kitchen help, Tu’s wife took over, slowly honing her own simple dishes with tips from cookbooks and newspaper columns. At last, the cuisine was as authentically, pungently Taiwanese as the owner’s politics.
These were crystallized after the “228 Incident,” named for the date in 1947 when a street dispute over cigarette taxes led to a bloody campaign in which 28,000 people were killed by the KMT government. “We always hated them,” says Hung Yu’s feisty, white-haired proprietor. His combativeness might well have been inherited from his late father — a middleweight boxing champ who once met Joe Louis. Dad’s pugilist portrait hangs over the restaurant’s cash register. However, his father’s notoriety didn’t spare him from being rounded up for antigovernment agitation and held in a freight car for three months.
No wonder Tu made his establishment a refuge for “anybody with anti-KMT sentiment.” After the 1979 Formosa Incident, when a human-rights protest led to the arrest of many opposition figures, clientele with what he terms “the right stand” started to frequent Hung Yu. “Of course,” says Tu, “my phone was tapped and the police used to watch the restaurant.”
Still, he never ratted on anyone, though he claims that his ability to remember each customer’s tolerance for spice and their favorite dishes contributed to Hung Yu’s success. Largely ungarnished and served on thick platters, such specialties were nothing to sneer at, incorporating the Fujianese predilection for garlic, anise and even tomato; the Japanese delicacy in cutting and dearth of saucing; the Hakkanese love of basil; and a native farmers’ taste for fatty pork and bold flavors. Hung Yu illustrates what may be the very definition of a great restaurant: when every dish tastes better than its menu description, from noodles with chicken testicles and squid in basil, to splendid pork chunks stewed to blackness and their signature garlicky lobster.
“I treat everyone the same, even when they return now,” insists Tu, who likes to personally greet and gab with anyone who comes through the door. “They came here because I was always ready to debate a question, or to lend them a book from my collection.”
No doubt these pushed an upstart pride so evident I can almost taste it. Pro-independence to the end, Tu vows that he will continue his outpost of Taiwanese food — and Taiwanese history — even if mainland China invades.
“When China gets more democratic, we will be happy. But if they want to try something else, we won’t simply collapse.” Speaking from years of vigil at the back door, he declares, “We are not afraid of anyone.”
One phrase in the American vernacular sums up the capitalist ethos more succinctly than all others: “There is no free lunch.” As China hurtles down its own free-market road, only this one benefit of state socialism seems to be hanging on. In fact, nearly every entrepreneur and new corporation now competes to boost employee loyalty through one critical, edible perk. Nothing affects morale more than the quality and cost of the midday meal. As one Shanghai office manager reminds me, “China isn’t a nation that eats at its desk.”
Only a dozen years back, anyone visiting the People’s Republic could witness the great 11.30 a.m. stampede, as a nation, mess kits in hand, sprinted toward the nearest factory-like feeding station. Inside, they were treated to a diet of poor-quality rice and fatty meat in a runny sauce. Just as the free lunch was the edible ritual that once bound the masses to the state at gut level, it now reveals the wide menu of China’s changes.
In Beijing, fleets of bicycles guarantee hot, Domino’s-style delivery through sleet and snow; in Shanghai, a French catering conglomerate is installing a credit-card system in a network of humble neighborhood restaurants so that workers can charge their lunches back to their boss. At company dining halls, catering managers circulate complaint forms and in-house trade unions dictate menu items to cowering cooks. For innovation, Eachnet.com, the country’s leading online auction site, decided to turn their sleek new conference room into one of China’s oldest workplace fixtures: the subsidized, canteen. Unlike the grim basement kitchens that characterized office life in state enterprises, here employees are encouraged to doodle creatively and scribble feedback on the walls with magic markers. One dot-commer was moved to scrawl, in calligraphy, “Thank God for our lunchroom!”
For a business that only began a few years ago, the climate is already remarkably cut-throat. Li Yiyong, a former restaurant manager who recently founded Shanghai’s Weino Fast Food, describes competition as “ferocious.” That’s where Sodexho, a French-based multinational catering company, sees a golden opportunity. It did an exhaustive, three-year survey of restaurants within a five-minute radius of Shanghai’s major employers. It offered the best ones the chance to join its Sodexho Pass network, enticing them with free staff training and hygiene improvements. The card allows workers to charge their meals back to their employers without cumbersome receipts or coupons. The average allowance charged by some 20,000 users is 220 yuan (US$28) per month.
“Under the planned economy,” explains one lunch-biz launcher, “each [state factory or institution] was a mini-economy, with its own nursery, food production and so on. Now we can specialize these tasks in a much more professional manner.” They plan to experiment with pre-washing and pre-slicing at central warehouses, with meals finished at the last-moment by what the company terms “idiot chefs.”
The subsidized lunch has even entered into the country’s burgeoning environmental debate. For the first decade of quick growth, as new office towers began to fill with hungry mouths, the solution to a quick lunch seemed to come in a crunchy white styrofoam box — since, in reaction against past womb-to-tomb facilities, many of the hastily constructed skyscrapers and industrial parks were built without any mess halls. This saved money on plumbing and infrastructure, freed up whole floors for more lucrative rentals and saved real estate companies the trouble of managing food services.
So the white-collar worker, often with less time for eating than in the past, learned to order take-out. The breakdown of the state work-unit feeding system, combined with the proliferation of phone delivery, led to the creation of thousands of small-time kitchens. These unregulated outfits started churning out lunch boxes, or he fan, by the millions. These meals of rice, vegetables, meat and tofu quickly became as much a part of the modern landscape as construction cranes. Usually delivered on bicycles, the he fan proved perfect for cities flooded with an itinerant workforce.
At first, the vast majority of he fan scarfed down across China came in styrofoam boxes. One year, the country had to dispose of 2.3 billion of them (along with untold billions of one-use wooden chopsticks). It’s said that enough accumulates each day to dam up the Yangtze River. Soon, government regulations will mandate that companies use biodegradable boxes, and in Shanghai at least, sellers now have to pay a tax to cover their containers’ removal.
Li Hua, a catering company in Beijing, is trying to streamline the he fan concept. In a dust-free headquarters staffed by dozens of women in matching red jackets, banks of computers track bikes and trucks sent out from 10 city branches to deliver 25,000 servings daily, all within a half-hour of the phone order. Vice-manager Zhang Ju Li has added a vegetarian medley to the menu and a high-end set meal at 20 yuan (US$2.50). The company also offers an online nutritional analysis of all its items. “We believe we can become the most successful delivery operation in the whole world,” says Zhang. Recently, Li Hua began serving its meals in new containers from Japan that are fully recyclable.
Meanwhile, back at most company canteens, employees don’t care how the lunch tab gets picked up — so long as they don’t have to do it. Says one advertising executive trained in the U.S., “Look at this — four stir-fries with vegetables and soup. And you’ve got to admit, free is still the right price.”
Who knew that Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks would lead to a whole new restaurant industry? Every summer in Malaysia, an equatorial country with no apparent seasons, the “Arab season” descends. Serviced apartments built to accommodate the influx of visitors from the Middle East fill with large family groups who snack on floor carpets and often leave furnishings a wreck. A curtain of black cloth suddenly drops over the easygoing tropical merriment of sidewalk cafes, raunchy Planet Hollywood clubs and Chinese foot massage parlors that share Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang nightlife.
On one side street, amidst trickling fountains and blaring belly-dance music, the restaurants are meant as a haven for homesick sheikhs. But at the Sahara Tent, foreign Muslim visitors are able to dine out in a way they never could dream of doing in their own countries. Three couples sit at neighboring tables in a sex-integrated room. One couple from Saudi Arabia, laden with bags from a day’s shopping, draws a curtain across their booth so the wife can remove her face-covering veil while eating. Next to them, a Jordanian man, in shorts and T-shirt after a day at a beach resort, shares a table in the open with his wife, who wears a mere headscarf like most local Malays. And seated nearby, points out Sahara Tent founder, Ala H. Salih, is an Arab woman who “hasn’t just uncovered her head, she’s dyed her hair blond.”
Emerging from his booth, Hamoud Al Tamimi, a Saudi engineer on a three-week holiday to Malaysia with his wife, explains: “It’s great to be among people who don’t point at us, [and who] understand our prayer times and give us our halal food. Yet we can feel so relaxed, experience something different.”
In 2000, there was only a single Syrian-run kebab joint in the suburbs of Malaysia’s capital. Now there are Middle Eastern restaurants everywhere in the city. Beyond the new flavors, however, the restaurants illustrate another facet of the tourist rush. For inexperienced travelers from restrictive Middle Eastern regimes, Malaysia — a nominally Islamic republic where Chinese and Indians have long shared in both the national spoils and identity — is offering a window on a pluralistic form of Islam.
Says Salih, a former government official who left Iraq in 1975, “It has become a role model for Muslim countries where you can go to a mosque, a church or a bar. It offers all the options.”
From 1999 to 2002, the number of Middle Eastern visitors to Malaysia rose by more than 500 percent, spurred in large part by the attacks of September 11, 2001. With many Arabs finding it difficult to get visas to Western countries, or not feeling comfortable going there, they started turning East — especially to fellow Islamic states. To encourage them, Malaysia’s tourism promotion board spent US$2 million in the Middle East on a publicity campaign that included commercials on regional satellite networks, billboards and even a dance troupe extolling the country’s assets — chief among them its wide range of halal (religiously approved) dining.
Restaurateurs like Salih have been the main beneficiaries of the Middle Eastern tourist influx. In less than three years, this ebullient trader has turned the ground floor of the Fortuna Hotel in Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang tourist zone into a 150-seat restaurant fronted by a patio with Moroccan-made Moorish arches. His empire also includes an adjoining row of shops housing an Arabic-speaking barber, mini-mart and travel agent, plus an outdoor cafe serving Yemeni rice-lamb casseroles baked in underground ovens. Salih is now expecting a shipment of six goat-hair tents for a private upstairs dining hall where Asians and Arabs alike will be able to dine on the floor, Bedouin-style. A plan to build a 14-shop “Arabian Bazaar” — something like a new Chinatown — is awaiting government approval.
Generally speaking, Arab travelers are not known as the most adventurous. While a woman in full covering is sometimes seen at the beach on a surfboard, it’s mostly shopping and eating that occupy their holiday time. And few will stray far from familiar foods. “Chili’s, KFC, Starbucks,” enumerates Ayman Rashid, a vacationing Saudi Arabian customs inspector. “When it comes to Malaysian food, it’s so sweet. I have no idea what they are putting in there.”
Now K.L. is catering to true solidarity with its Muslim brethren through restaurants offering up such rare treats as tashrib, tender lamb shanks served on a lemony bed of torn, juice-soaked bread, or fesenjan, an Iranian chicken stew dominated by a thick walnut and pomegranate paste, or manti, the Turkish version of an Asian dumpling, smothered in yogurt and mint. During the month of Ramadan, Malaysia’s hotels now serve massive buffets for nightly fast-breaking while locals have adopted the Middle Eastern custom of munching on the finest desert almonds and dates. Inspired by the influx, and its potential earnings, an enterprising group of starry-eyed young Malays are even intent on launching the first worldwide guides for halal restaurants. They hope these will become the gold standard for religiously minded fine diners, the Michelin on the way to Mecca.
But it’s an Asian brand of Islam that will have the most lasting impact. While still debating a trend toward headscarves for women as a source of Malay pride and the role of strict shariya law in civil society, especially marriages, this is still a country where access to information, experience and goods are free, the long-time acceptance of other religions creating a working, winking sort of ecumenism.
Says a Saudi engineer, returning with his wife and son for a second holiday. “We can find our own food, yet the atmosphere is so different.” Adds another, “There’s a wonderful feeling of tolerance that brings tears to my eyes.” And though the wives have to remain covered, their husbands, who have brought them out largely as a reward for years of remaining repressed, explain for them, “Back in the Middle East, you have to put on three or four different faces. Life in the street is very different from life inside the family. But here, they are the same. I like this Islam better.” Hardly referring to the bread ovens, one Arab diner adds, “The Malays take things easy while we’re always on fire.”
It was inevitable: there just had to be a bakery called Beijing Bagels. But long before some enterprising American got the idea, you could get more authentically Semitic rounds of chewy bread topped with sesame seeds in the wet-market stalls of Xinjiang Village, a large neighborhood of struggling new arrivals from Western China. After a series of separatist riots in China’s restive Muslim territory — to be repeated many times since — authorities orchestrated a widespread crackdown that included the swift bulldozing of that wonderful quarter. Gone, it seemed, were the wonderful sights, smells and tastes of the Silk Route caravans, another victim of Chinese authorities’ heavy-handed approach to anything slightly threatening. But in the new China, free enterprise finds a way where free speech can’t.
Now when people from Xinjiang — the vast “New Territory,” conquered in 1768, holding no fewer than 47 ethnic groups from Uighurs to Tartars — set off explosions near to China’s center of power, it’s at places like the Afunti Hometown Music Restaurant. This pre-packaged oasis of Muslim merriment kicks off the night’s entertainment with thinly veiled belly dancers and ends with tourists and Chinese stomping on the tops of tables to join in the hoopla. Having emerged as one of the most enjoyable attractions amidst a dour night scene mostly devoted to scarfing down various rare animals in garish private rooms, co-owner Fan Jun boasts to me, “Afunti is now as famous as the Great Wall.”
Like that hoary old symbol, more reconstructed than a Hollywood starlet, the hallmark of Afunti (named for a dashing Central Asian type known for his kindness) is clever marketing. Pastel walls, native art and tapestries and waiters dressed in colorful homespun costumes give it the feel of a Sino-Islamic theme park. The floor show features dap drums from Xinjiang, string music and acrobatic Tartar dance. Balloons flood the hall and embroidered caps are tossed out as souvenirs. Diners are seated at long tables that make it easy to mix, mingle and, once the plates are cleared, jump up and dance to music that’s half-Gypsy, half-disco. In Xinjiang itself, the female dancers would likely be more modestly dressed, rattling tambourines rather than exposing navels. Mostly, the Afunti experience is a watered-down amalgam of Central Asia’s many rhythms. Still, the creator insists, “This is what Uighurs call ‘meshrep’ — coming together to raise the spirit.”
The food, however, is not just for show: mutton in many forms; flatbreads; lemony, Mediterranean-influenced chicken dishes. The hot spices, though, are toned down, and chewy shashliks of beef tendon have been replaced by softer cuts.
But as harmless as the restaurant appears, a nightclub for getting more than sheepish, it’s a true groundbreaker — and getting it up and running was a controversial matter, involving an intra-ethnic romance that reads like a Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet. When Fan, who grew up in a military family that moved around China’s fringes, met Sadat Hamait, a Uighur woman raised in Beijing, the nascent romance immediately became a tangled affair. Hamait, whose light-brown locks and limpid blue eyes make her look almost Slavic, was the daughter of the provost of Beijing’s important Ethnic Minorities University. Her uncle was the head of the powerful State Council back in Xinjiang. To this day, open liaisons between Uighurs and Han remain the exception. Even after eight years of courtship, A funti’s founders could hardly broach the idea of a legal bond. Fan explains that both his father-in-law and the State Council were “strongly against the marriage.”
In a show of sincerity, Fan converted to Islam. He also became a board member of a council promoting ethnic minorities. Even then, it took a while to persuade the Uighur elite to hand over one of its daughters. The couple finally married on December 26, 1998, “the birthday of both my wife and Chairman Mao,” Fan says proudly. The partnership has since paid off handsomely. Fan has enlarged the Afunti trademark to include travel, media and software businesses, while Hamait is the hostess and handles public relations.
Yet the simple fact that Xinjiang culture has achieved such a public, albeit kitschy, success comes as something of a surprise — even if forms of Muslim cooking have been around ever since Beijing’s founding. As recently as last century, in fact, Mongol sheepherders of the Hui minority would drive their flocks all the way to the city gates for slaughter. Numerous restaurants in the city are still announced in Arabic script. And one, Kaorouji, has been the standard-bearer for grilled lamb since it was founded by a Hui family over a hundred years ago. Its menu of tender marinated lamb strips heaped with fresh cilantro and stuffed in hollow sesame buns, washed down with thick millet soup, still draws a loyal following. During the 1950s, elite Communists like Premier Zhou Enlai would frequent Kaorouji’s famed back kitchen for grill-it-yourself banquets.
But Kaorouji’s gruff service and dowdy ambience are decades behind Fan’s “food as culture” formula for Afunti. Whether it’s the hearty portions or the table-dancing, something appears to be working. Since it opened in 1993, Afunti has gone from eight tables to a seating capacity of more than 400. The restaurant’s success has spawned numerous copycats — most of them considerably tackier and less hygienic.
Afunti’s most important function, the founder claims, is to offer mainland China “a window on Uighur life” and “a symbol of unity between all peoples.” In other words, to make China safe for Islamic-style expression — with some restaurant proceeds funneled into scholarships for poor kids back on the farm. In a country where even belly dancing has symbolic rumblings, Fan hopes that Afunti can help dispel lingering negative stereo-types. No wonder, then, that the Xinjiang State Council, which once tried to block his marriage, has now come to bestow on the restaurant owner the moniker “Fanhaty” — Uighur for hero.
Two of the most thrilling nights I ever spent in Asia were thanks to Chen Shui-bian. No, he isn’t a chef, but the first native-born opposition leader to be elected both mayor of Taipei and president of Taiwan — events I got to witness being celebrated with delirious frenzy. One small part of China had taken its destiny in its hands — and everybody knew that nothing in Chinese history would ever be the same. Though Chen’s story has ended in surprise disgrace, he would also redefine dining habits in a culture where autocracy had for centuries been a foodocracy.
Every emperor through the millennia made ostentatious show of all he was able to consume, down to Taiwan’s founding general Chiang Kai-shek, with his opulent banquets for the elite entourage forced to flee the 1949 Communist takeover. But during Chen Shui-bian’s brief and thoroughly anomalous reign, the joke became that the last thing anyone ever wanted was an invite to dine at the Presidential Palace.
Certainly, no one craved to join the homespun couple combing small Taipei markets each morning before six. But for Lin Chang-mei, a lean man with tousled hair and a chiseled jaw shaved down by a serious operation, and Ku Shu-jin, his scrupulously nondescript helpmate of 32 years, that’s exactly how they want it. For their own good, and the security of the nation, nobody was meant to know that their shopping trolley of vegetables and fish would be consumed that night by President Chen and his own partner and aide-de-camp Wu Shu-chen (most famed for having been paralyzed by an attack of Kuomintang opponents during a political rally). For the first three years of Chen’s term, Lin and Ku, unheralded veterans of hotel kitchens, served as the sole official menu planners, cooks, dishwashers and even waiters.
“He’s not a dainty eater and his tastes are nothing fancy,” Lin told me. Admitting that he often sneaks peeks through the kitchen door to gauge the response of Ah Bian and bodyguards, he adds, “I’ve never seen him complaining, frowning or hesitating over his meals.”
While political pundits from Beijing to Washington were trying to read the tea leaves of Chen’s intentions in playing his Cold War cat-and-mouse games over independence moves, it might have been more revealing to study his menus — revealing a cautious, conservative fellow.
Working out of a kitchen at the Taipei presidential residence equipped simply with one wok, one steamer and one pressure cooker, Lin, 56, and Ku, 52, cook specialties such as hearty beef noodles and thick “to-tu” fish soup — types of dishes that are readily available in Taiwanese night markets for no more than $5. Says Lin, “Health is our main concern when shopping and cooking for the president. We always choose the least fatty cuts of meat and use only small amounts of pork.”
Spinach and cabbage are served after just a simple blanching or quick saute, topped with mashed garlic. Lin also frequently prepares a vegetarian hot pot, a similar “dragon boat” of fresh fish, and also prepares many dishes using bean curd and fresh bamboo shoots. Normal lunch dishes might include beef noodles in clear, light soup, green vegetables, and a stewed or smoked fish. In summer, Ku, who previously specialized in Western cooking and patisserie, often puts out platters of salad and fresh fruits — the president’s usual late-night snacking preference.
Still, the President is not above enjoying oily native eels with noodles, or another rich specialty of his hometown of Tainan: dan-zi noodles, small portions of freshly made noodles topped with pork and shrimp. “The president always finishes up his food — or at least 90 percent of the meal,” Lin boasts. Such meals reflect President Chen’s peasant Taiwanese roots as well as his no-frills, egalitarian style of leadership.
It seems appropriate, then, that such a nationalistic president should have chefs who share his own roots as the offspring of Taiwanese rice farmers. Seeking a promising trade at a time when Taiwan was still quite poor, Lin Chang-mei apprenticed himself to a master of Zhejiang cooking (akin to Shanghainese) in Kaohsiung 23 years ago. He was introduced to his wife, already in the restaurant trade, by mutual friends. After spending 15 years working his way up through the ranks of chefs at Taipei’s Lai Lai Sheraton, Lin was summoned to the presidential palace for a cooking audition in which he had to prepare ten of the most typical Taiwanese dishes.
At first Ku feared she “might bring shame to her family” if the president didn’t like the couple’s cooking and they lost the coveted position. But she soon came to be at ease with President Chen, whom she terms “very frugal” and “just ordinary folk.”
With little time to cook their own meals, the pair’s main perk is to dine on presidential “leftovers.” Then they do the cleaning up, because “the President doesn’t like a lot of servants.” In what seems a confirmation of the joke going round about trying to avoid the call to sup with this ruler, the chef adds, “Most often, the two of them eat alone.”
Lee Teng-hui, President Chen’s immediate predecessor, seems to have especially enjoyed French cooking: lobster soup and orange souffles were a weakness. Chiang Kai-shek, in contrast, dined often at Taipei’s showy, mandarin-red Grand Hotel. Where Kuomintang Chiang favored dishes from his hometown of Ningbo on the mainland, including fare such as stir-fried Chinese celery and grilled fish, the glamorous, Americanized Madame Chiang usually breakfasted on toast, cream puffs and coffee.
In February 1966, Chiang Kai-shek held a state banquet for South Korean President Park Chung Hee, where guests feasted on dishes including “Shredded Abalone Soup,” “Superior Shark’s Fin in Gravy” and “Sliced Deer Meat Saute — Deep Fried Chicken Gizzards.” In contrast, the banquet for Chen’s 2001 inauguration offered humble fare including “Milkfish Balls Soup,” “Roast Mutton Chop” and a “Taro and Sweet Potato Sponge.” These days, too, fewer endangered ingredients such as shark’s fin and abalone appear at his banquets. Dinners are now more likely to feature Taiwanese delicacies such as black tuna from Pingtung county and lobster caught in the Penghu Islands, or home-style fare such as Tainan rice cake — pro-independence statements that may be easier to digest than his policies.
When the emperors of China command, chefs everywhere tremble. Food has always served the needs and aims of voracious rulers in the land with the most mouths to feed. No wonder, in trying to find some connection between cuisine and the drive to mount Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Games, I quickly find special competitors dashing past flames higher than any Olympic torch.
In one cramped back kitchen, a three-month marathon of prep work is reaching its finish line. Teams of uniformed chefs are passing plates like batons, or carefully placing sliced peppers to look like five-ring insignias, on their way for judging as strict as for any ice skaters, with more at stake than mere places on a podium.
It turns out one dish made of stacked bean jellies is called “Gold and Silver Medal Cake.” Another, a pottery crock filled with sea cucumber and other high-priced goodies, has been titled “Big Bowl Looking Forward to Big 2008 Party.” A large, gruesome-looking stewed crocodile claw is meant to suggest “The World Hand-in-Hand At Olympics.” At this branch of Huajia Yiyuan, a restaurant popular among foreigners for its courtyard setting and chili-soaked crayfish eaten with plastic gloves, some 40 dishes are being offered by four chosen groups of cooks for the honor of being placed on this August’s sports-themed menu.
“Having the Olympic Games in my city in my lifetime — that’s a golden opportunity I must seize to make my restaurant world-famous,” declares owner Hua Lei, 40, who began 20 years back with Sichuan, then Cantonese, restaurants before finding success with more local fare. Amidst the estimated 40,000 restaurants in China’s capital, a race more hotly contested than any in the coming games is underway to show patriotism while gaining publicity. Now he and his invited arbiters must select something among the lavish plates spread before them that can actually be put on the menu and made for a profit.
Quivering rounds of scallops in a five-ring logo are deemed too droopy; the Olympic torch carved from a carrot is hardly original. Each judge carries a printed sheet for scoring, with categories weighted for importance: “Taste 15 percent, appearance 20 percent, plates and containers 10 percent,” etc. In what may be the freest election ever seen in China, the dishes are presented in anonymity. Hua insists, “Things like this aren’t very fair in China, so I have made sure that nothing will be done out of friendship. In my business, none of my relatives can be hired, not even anyone with the name Hua.”
To that end, the state-owned Quanjude Roast Duck, one of Beijing’s oldest tourist attractions, has garnered attention for a host of so-called Olympic dishes already featured exclusively at a new branch as near as any Peking Duck roastery to the main Olympic stadium (an inspiration as well due to the lattice-work design that has won it the nickname of the “Bird’s Nest.”) Naturally, bird’s nests made of noodles, flour or mashed potatoes will be popping up all over town, ready to hold almost any colorful sort of stir-fry, especially shrimp, scallops and, yes, even real bird’s nest within the bird’s nest.
Quanjude has come up with a shrimp salad festooned with a chocolate tennis racquet (in honor of a medal won previously by China’s women’s doubles team), breaded duck liver in the shape of ping pong paddles, abalone rowing on a raft of asparagus spears, a golfer carved from taro root and swinging at a fish ball (though golf isn’t an Olympic sport). The chafing dish placed over a candle to keep candied duck slices warm has been punched with the five holes of the Olympic insignia.
Even during ordinary times, eating in Beijing could be considered a culinary steeplechase of sorts. Thanks to the large presence of restaurants from nearby Mongolia, there’s always camel’s hoof and whole lamb on offer (sometimes served with a knife still in the skull and always with fresh, hot lamb innards). For hardy champions of chomp, there’s the more traditional, and medicinal, penis hot pots, while one of the more popular street snacks are pancakes stuffed with sliced pig ear.
But inspecting his entrants’ vast spread of creations, Hua is still seeking that elusive signature dish to help him stand out during the games. While his Huajia Yiyuan is a standout along Guijie (“Ghost Street”) — a popular eating section of Dong-zhimen Avenue, lined for blocks on both sides with gaudily lit eateries — he has expanded by purchasing and remodeling two traditional courtyard houses out back, in anticipation of the projected 2,200 diners per day during the seventeen days of the games.
“We don’t have the privilege of catering to high officials, so we have to fight for the market,” says Hua. In olden days, an emperor’s favored occasions may have been feted with such rarities as grilled flamingo feet. So this August’s athletic conquest may be honored by Huajia Yiyuan’s fried pomfret fish with Olympic logo in green tea powder, the appealing squid paste in Olympic rings, sesame balls served in cocktail glasses with colored sauces, a “full bag” of dough to haul medals.
“And next year,” he declares, “we’re going to have a contest for the healthiest dishes.”