Asian Hospitality

NTNU Mandarin Training Center Windows on 10th & 11th Floors

We had arrived in Taiwan about 10 days before our classes started, giving ourselves time to register for school and take our placement tests. With our bellies properly full of the vegetable dumpling stew, we set off with a few of the NTNU students to find the Mandarin Training Center on campus. It was on the 10th and 11th floors of the high-rise annex across the street from the main campus. We just had to walk to the end of our alley, turn right and walk a quarter of a block to the main door. The building was air conditioned and had elevators. It stood in stark contrast to the alley running beside it. We successfully registered, and all testing was waived when the school learned that we only knew two words of Chinese: xie xie (sheyay sheyay) or thank you and zai jian (dzeye geeyan) goodbye. That freed up a lot of time for us during the rest of the week before classes.

That day our guides helped us get name chops (wooden seals) with our Chinese names engraved in them so we could open bank accounts at the Post Office. Then half the guides took Lynne to the NTNU English Department to report for her teaching job while the other half took me to wander around the campus. It was really very pretty. The walls surrounding the main campus were of decorative red brick as were the paths leading from building to building. There was a lot of lush, green shrubbery along the paths, and the buildings were either of decorative red brick or the fronts were tiled and shiny. There was an alley running alongside the Campus called Shida Road, literally NTNU Road. It was jam-packed with push-cart vendors. Some sold fruit juices, some sold sausages, others stir-fried noodles right there in the street. You could buy just about any conceivable dish (even porridge or soup) and take it away in a little plastic bag to eat with skinny bamboo chopsticks. The bags were tied with a red plastic string loop that you held to keep from burning your fingers on the hot soup inside. My guides sternly warned me NOT to eat from the push-carts because the food was not always clean and some of them spread hepatitis B. About 6 months into our stay, the student center had to close its meal service because some of the boys got hepatitis from eating at Shida Road. Since the facility did not have a sterilizing dishwasher, the only way to prevent a hepatitis outbreak among the students was to stop us from eating together.

That first week someone notified the elderly people in the church that Lynne and I had free time now, because beginning that evening we were invited out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, and in between different people took us on a whirlwind tour of Taipei’s sights. We were still slightly jet-lagged, we understood less than 5% of what was said to us, and every time we went anywhere, an entourage from the student center had to accompany us. We never went any place with less than a jam-packed vanload of students. Sometimes the girls who spoke English were unavailable, and the person inviting us would grab students at random to “make us feel at home.” We went to several parks, but I don’t know their names; many museums, but I’m not sure what ones; and different restaurants for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Usually we were served 12 course feasts. It was nice to feel full, but it was truly overwhelming.

On the last Sunday before classes started the church gave a potluck in our honor at another hall in a remote district of Taipei. The church vans were in use picking up the elderly and the children on their usual Sunday routes, so our roommates took us by bus to the outskirts of Taipei. We went to church, and afterwards attended the potluck. All the ladies had made their prize dishes, and they kept bringing spoonfuls of their cooking and plopping it into our bowls. We were already at the end of a weeklong feasting spree, so we were not at all hungry, but to be polite we did our best to eat what was put on our plates. This only encouraged the ladies to give us more. We would say no, no, no, but they gave us still more. Anytime our bowls were finally empty, they would dish up more. One lady was particularly assiduous, and her dish contained tofu and pi dan. Pi dan are pickled eggs. They are black with green yolks. I learned later that the ancient recipe called for pickling them in horse urine. My husband loves them, but after my experience that day in Taiwan I cannot even look at a pi dan without feeling queasy. Because you see, I ate until I honestly could not take another bite. And then we had to ride on crowded buses without air conditioning, which jolted along, weaving erratically through the crazy Taipei traffic. I got horrifically sick. We would ride a few blocks, and I would get off to hurl. Then we would ride a few more blocks, and I would get off again. We did this for almost an hour before we ran into a friend of one of our guides who had enough money to lend us cabfare home. We cancelled that evening’s dinner invitation because we needed to do laundry, and we wanted to get a good night’s sleep before getting up early the next morning for an 8 am class in Mandarin Phonetics.

We later learned that Chinese table manners run just about opposite to American manners, and that the whole thing could have been avoided if we had not been so polite in the American way. But that will be the topic for a whole ‘nother post.

The Market

Vegetable Pushcart in the Alley near the Market

Taiwan now has supermarkets with neatly packaged food, and today there are a couple of Costco stores on the island, but when I first went there in 1982, the government had not even allowed the McDonald’s franchise to enter its borders. Very soon after our arrival, I was scheduled to cook breakfast for the 30 to 40 people living in student center housing. We had to have breakfast ready by 6:45 so that people with early morning classes could get to school on time. That meant we had to get up a little after 5 to go to the market.

In those days, when you wanted to buy food, you went before noon to the market. Even today, every neighborhood has its market. Some vendors drive their trucks in from the outlying farms, park along the alleys near the market entrance, and sell their wares out of the backs of their trucks. These are usually the fresh fruit and vegetable vendors, although I have seen butchers’ trucks with pig carcasses hanging from wire frames along the sides and a chopping block on the tail gate. Another truck had a nanny goat tethered in the back, and you could buy goat’s milk fresh from the source. The alleys near the market were even more crowded than the alley between our apartment and the student center. Once again, my Chinese guides and co-cooks grabbed my hand and led me along like a child. I was 21 years old, but I felt like a two year old. I couldn’t understand anything people were saying, and I couldn’t read a word on any of the signs. The alleys twisted and turned, and the trucks now became permanent stalls with awnings along one side of the street. Then there was a sharp turn into a dark alley that was jam-packed with women and totally roofed over. My guides led me into this alley.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the thing that struck me most was the stench. The stench even overpowered the noise for a moment. It was all I could do to keep from retching. Up and down the aisles were fishmongers, pork butchers, chicken butchers, fruit and vegetable stands, booths that sold spices, and here and there a cloth merchant or a tailor thrown in. As my nose accustomed to the stench of blood from freshly slaughtered meat, my ears began buzzing with the constant drone of vendors hawking their wares, customers asking for help, and bartering and haggling going on everywhere.

One of my guides was an English-speaker from Hong Kong, and she had ascertained that Lynne and I did not eat well at all the day before because we were so slow using chopsticks the boys kept beating us to the food. My cohorts decided to make a pork, dumpling, and vegetable stew that would give us more in our bellies than watery rice, a peanut, and a bite of tofu. Later, I noticed that for the next month or so, even the congee had some meat and vegetables in it to give us a fighting chance at getting full, so I guess someone relayed the message that we had left the table hungry.

We had 300NT to spend for everybody’s breakfast. In those days the exchange rate was 40NT to 1USD; we were going to feed about 35 people on $9.50. The biggest expense was going to be the meat, so we first went up and down the aisle with butcher stalls. My friend from Hong Kong taught me how to look for stalls that washed down their cutting blocks after serving every customer and that had fans with swatters twirling around the meat to keep the flies from laying eggs in it. The butcher stall aisle had flies everywhere, and the floor was red and sticky with blood from the freshly butchered meat. We decided that we would spend 100NT on the meat and use the other 200NT to buy vegetables, flour, eggs, and herbs for flavoring. The kitchen provided oil, salt, soy sauce, and hot sauce, but we needed to buy things like garlic, ginger and green onions fresh each day.

We found a nice, clean piece of pork shoulder without too much fat, and the butcher sold us a 600 gram chunk for our 100NT. I remember thinking that it looked a little smaller than the pork roasts my mom made for our family of four; I thought, “Well we have enough for the girls at my table, but what are those hungry boys going to eat?” I soon found out that we would all fill up on veggies. For our 200NT we got 600 grams of flour, 5 potatoes, 3 cabbages, 4 monster-sized carrots, and several bags full of other vegetables that I had never seen before. By the time we were finished washing, chopping, and stirring, we had an industrial-sized pot full of stew. Everyone got full, and there was still some left over. I think that was when I realized that from now on, meat was going to be a condiment to give flavoring to dishes, and it would no longer be my main food source.

First Impressions of Taipei, 1982

The Alley Outside our Apartment on a Winter Afternoon

In my last post, I left off my tale when we were awakened before six in the morning by music that sounded very much like an ice cream truck. We did not go chasing it that day, although the weather was hot enough to make us want something cold and frosty. We had been warned not to drink unboiled water, and we discovered that most Chinese people drank warm water even in the heat. There was a thermos bottle of hot water in our room, but we turned up our noses at it. In those days, most apartments were not air conditioned, so we had sweated a lot during that hot, muggy night. We showered again, and our roommates took us to the student center for breakfast.

As we walked out into the streets by the light of day, it really sank in that we were in a totally different world. Taipei is divided into grids by large thoroughfares, and in 1982 the superblocks formed by those thoroughfares were a rabbit warren of cement and brick apartment buildings set on narrow alleys. (Even today the alleys do not always run in straight lines.) Most of the buildings were surrounded by high cement walls topped with broken glass or barbed wire. Every building had a steel entry door, usually painted red, with an intercom and rack of mail slots beside it. Interspersed among the buildings were patches of what the Chinese call “short houses”, one-story shanties of brick or wood, usually roofed with corrugated plastic or steel. These “short houses” were often linked together, and foot paths off the alleys ran among them to houses that were otherwise inaccessible from the larger streets. Many of the “short houses” that directly abutted a larger alley had a store in the front and living quarters in the back.

Every morning the alleys were alive with people. Some families who lived in the “short houses” did their laundry in tubs with washboards right there in the gutter beside their front doors. In other families, the kids got ready for school by brushing their teeth outside and spitting into the gutter. A husband and wife in one of the “short houses” across the alley from our apartment were always yelling at each other at the top of their lungs right there in the middle of the street. There was a corner where a retaining wall intersected a “short house” across the alley from us, and old men would always stop there to urinate. And through it all, there were street vendors on bicycles or motorized tricycle carts wending their way through the teeming humanity screaming or playing scratchy recordings to announce their wares.

Our roommates grabbed us by the arms and pulled us along like children. We had to thread our way through the people in the alley to get to the student center for breakfast. On the first floor of the student center there was a large kitchen and dining area. Breakfast and dinner were included in our rent. Our Malaysian friend quickly ran over to help us, and she explained that everyone living in the student center was expected to help cook breakfast at least once a week. My name was on the schedule for the following day. She led us to a table where we filled three of the eight chairs. Our roommates brought us steaming bowls of plain congee (a fancy word for rice gruel or rice soup). The student center had no forks and knives. We had to learn how to use chopsticks and to grab our food from the plates in the center of the table. Each table had four plates of food. One plate had tofu and soy sauce, one plate had scrambled eggs, a third plate had peanuts, and the fourth plate had some kind of pickled cabbage. By the time we had managed to pick up one peanut and one bite of tofu with our chopsticks, the rest of the food had been scarfed down by the hungry male students at our table. Student center rules said that each table should seat 4 men and 4 women. Now we knew why; there wasn’t enough food to feed a table of 8 men. After washing our own bowls and chopsticks in cold water only, we went with our roommates back to our apartment to take another shower before unpacking and settling in.