Fresh Off the Boat (27 page)

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.

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.