The traveling Taiwanese misses nothing more about home than Taiwanese cooking. It’s not just food; it’s composition of the soul. Whether you are studying or working abroad, nothing is more deeply comforting than savoring a taste of Taiwan.

The appeal of Taiwanese cuisine extends beyond our island. Din Tai Fung, famous for their xiaolongbao (steamed dumplings), has stores in countries such as the United States, Singapore, and Japan. 85°C Bakery Café and its bubble tea joined the ranks of digital giants in Silicon Valley. BAO swept through London with its delicious steamed buns.

Upon learning I’m from Taiwan, my Chinese colleagues often say to me, “I had so much fun when I visited Taiwan, I especially liked all the Taiwanese snacks!” Unprompted, they would go on to recite their favorite menu: stinky tofu, bubble tea, beef noodles, Taiwanese meatball, oyster vermicelli, rice pudding, canned rice cake, pig’s blood cake, xiaolongbao, etc.

You know that saying: you are what you eat. Taiwanese cuisine goes a long way to answer some basic questions: who are we? Where are we from? What is us?

Let’s expound on this theory, shall we?

Minnan Snacks: Soul Food for the Working Class

Obviously, Taiwanese cooking produces more than just snacks, but it’s a good starting point.

In the past four hundred years, Taiwan was consecutively ruled by the Dutch, Zheng Chenggong, and the Qing Dynasty. During those long centuries, Han Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong immigrated to Taiwan en masse in search of a better life. Poor and destitute, their decision to cross the Taiwan Strait was less of a choice than it was an act of desperation. The Han Chinese immigrants threw themselves into labor-intensive agricultural work after they settled in Taiwan. The livelihoods of these early settlers helped to create the delectable Taiwanese snacks as we know them now.

For example, my grandmother told me that in her childhood, she had to help prepare five meals a day during the harvest season to feed all the neighbors who pitched in to help. Besides the three regular meals, lots of snacks were served to help the farmers recover their strength quickly and get back to work in the fields.

The famous danzi noodles were so named because they literally mean “shoulder pole noodles” in the Taiwanese dialect. We can imagine the vendors carrying the snacks over their shoulders, walking along the paddy fields to feed the hungry, hard-working farmers.

Foods are a product of their time. Early Taiwanese snacks tended to be small in portion, high in calories, and easy to eat. The lack of resources also meant these snacks were plain and cheap to make. The ingredients rarely contained meat or fish, consisting instead of mostly carbohydrates.

Even though we are no longer an agricultural society, we still retain these characteristics in our popular snacks. (Read: Let’s Eat, the Taiwan ‘Way’)

The Japanese: Taiwan’s First Culture Shock

Japan’s half-century colonization of Taiwan got underway in the 19^th century. The food of the colonizers was integrated into our daily diet. Japanese cuisines such as sashimi, miso soup, tempura, and sushi took on a local flavor when they appeared on Taiwanese dinner tables. When I was young, my mother’s family still made a pot of miso soup every week or so.

It’s not uncommon for the “conquered” to adopt the palate of the “conqueror”. The Korean kimbap is based off of sushi, which made its way into Korea during the era of Japanese rule.

Japanese rule also injected the finesse—and dare I say, the philosophy—of Japanese delicacies into Taiwanese cooking. The Taiwanese restaurant Shi Yang Shan Fang is highly recommended on many travel websites. It advertises a fusion of Taiwanese food and kaiseki-ryōri, which is a mixture of Japanese tea ceremony and Zen philosophy. Needless to say, the results are absolutely magical.

I think we need to keep the word “fusion” in mind. It neatly encompasses the complexity of Taiwan’s geo-political situation for the past fifty years.

Chiang Kai-shek and His Chinese Chefs

Fast-forward to 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan in defeat. He brought with him the best cooks he could get his hands on in China. The fabled “Eight Cuisines” of China came together in Taiwan and shared their secrets. The popular Taiwanese dish Lion’s Head came from Huaiyang cuisine; mapo tofu and kung pao chicken came from Sichuan; stir-fried smoked pork came from Hunan; meat with pickled cabbage hotpot came from Shandong.

Of course, though there were eight schools of Chinese cooking, Chiang Kai-shek and his officers mostly hailed from Zhejiang, so that was the predominant cuisine in those early days. Dongpo pork, West Lake fish in vinegar, Longjing shrimp, and Ningbo nian gao (year cake) are staples of Zhejiang cooking. Taiwan absorbed all these different styles to create its own type of cuisines.

Looking back, we can see the evolution of Taiwanese cooking reflecting our history of being conquered, then merging the new conquerors’ culinary culture with our existing diet.

Another example is the Taiwanese luó song soup, which is actually a transliteration of the word “Russian”. In fact, it is Russian borscht, which became popular in Shanghai in the early 20^th century, then made its way to Taiwan in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo spent over a decade living in the Soviet Union; he took a Russian wife: Faina Chiang Fang-liang. And so this dish came to Taiwan from faraway Russia.

The Americans: Wheat and Steaks

Speaking of cultural conquest, we must not forget the Americans. Perhaps my readers are aware that after the Second World War, the entire chain of East Asian islands and peninsulas (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines) became nothing more than American sub-colonies. The Chiangs were rulers in name only. The United States was always the actual master of Taiwan’s economy, culture, military, and even politics.

During the Cold War, the United States Seventh Fleet harbored in Kaohsiung’s Zuoying District. Taiwan was a refueling base in the grand Pacific strategy. American restaurants, bars, and discos became all the rage; they served their wealthy G.I. patrons. American food made its way into the Taiwanese diet.

The most symbolic food product was wheat flour. Dear readers, think back to your childhood history lessons, recall that our main agricultural output is sugar canes and rice. Wheat never entered the picture. Even today, Taiwan produces only 400 metric tons of wheat in a year, while the Taiwanese gobble up 1.3 million metric tons annually. The rest is all imported. Why are we so accustomed to eating wheat when we produce rice?

This has direct relation to the American aid we received all these years ago. In the 1950s, the U.S. gave Taiwan an annual allowance of 100 million dollars in loans and aid. The cash was then used to buy up all the surplus wheat the Americans produced.

Besides the government-mandated dumping of goods, American culture was perceived as being superior, so by extension Western foods (cakes, bread, spaghetti) were thought to be “classy”. Also, lots of Chinese immigrants who came in 1949 were already accustomed to a wheat-based diet. Wheat flour was used to make traditional Chinese dishes, such as noodles, steamed buns, dumplings. Gradually, wheat became a mainstay of our culinary culture.

American occupation changed dietary practices not only in Taiwan. The famous Korean budae-jjigae was a stew made from boiling leftover sausages, lunchmeats, and cheese from American military bases in a spicy broth.

I think the most interesting “fusion” cuisine that resulted from American influence is the steak. The steak is obviously a pricey American dish. During the roaring eighties when Taiwan’s economy took off, the newly rich aspired to lead a Western lifestyle. The steak became the signature delicacy of the rising middle class’s fancy, and even came to represent the West as a whole. For many people of my generation, having a steak dinner carries with it the connotation of being rewarded for good behavior, such as getting straight A’s in school.

Not that the Taiwanese steak is anything like its American origin. A steak dinner in Taiwan is served with a side of noodles on a steaming steel plate, with a half-cooked egg oozing all over it. This is a purely local invention.

Even the steaks served in respectable eateries gave in to Eastern influence. The popular Formosa Plastics Steak (named for the conglomerate funding the restaurants) of the 1990s did not ask if you wanted rare or medium-rare meat. Everything was well-done to the point of tasting liked braised beef, then served with a side of garlics and sour plum soup. This was how Taiwan turned Western cuisine into a part of its own culture.

New Immigrants and Cuisines from Southeast Asia

In the 1960s, the Taiwanese government invited Chinese immigrants from Southeast Asia to bring their money here. By the 1990s, Taiwan’s economy hit a crescendo, attracting unprecedented numbers of new immigrants from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They came here to study, marry, or work. They brought their food along and added it into Taiwan’s big melting pot.

In the Gongguan shopping district near National Taiwan University, there is a street famous for its Southeast Asian eateries. Their Vietnamese and Thai dishes soothed the homesick hearts of countless migrant visitors in Taipei.

Younger readers may not remember that Taipei’s ritziest five-star hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, began its existence as the Mandarina Crown Hotel (中泰賓館), built by Chinese immigrants from Thailand. It was the social elite’s favorite watering hole in its heyday. Formosa Magazine, the political publication that challenged the Kuomintang’s rule, had its opening celebration here in 1979, resulting in a military blockade surrounding the hotel. Years later, President Chen Shui-bian’s daughter Chen Hsing-yu held her wedding here for this exact reason.

The restaurant Thai & Thai in the Mandarina Crown Hotel used to serve the best Thai food in all of Taiwan. Beginning in the year 2000, Thai immigrants started a Thai food craze in Taiwan. The Taiwanese version of the moon shrimp cake was so popular that it eventually found its way back to Thailand.

Needless to say, these Southeast Asian ingredients were also incorporated into Taiwan’s culinary smorgasbord.

The New Fusion: What is Us?

Let’s look back at what defines the contemporary understanding of Taiwanese cuisine: the foundation was the everyday diet of immigrants from Minnan and Guangdong; it was then fused with the raw delicacies of Japanese cuisine, infused with the essence of China’s “Eight Cuisines”, baptized in American culture, and finally injected with new blood from Southeast Asia.

It may be that the most befitting symbol of Taiwanese cooking is the hotpot. It has all kinds of ingredients slowing melting into one taste. Just like our history, our identity: complex, conflicted, slowly fused into peaceful coexistence.

Right now, there’s a restaurant in Taipei that’s almost impossible to reserve a table at: celebrity chef André Chiang’s RAW. It perfectly realizes the fusion concept. Native Taiwanese ingredients such as water bamboo, sweet potato, karasumi, kelp, and foxtail millet are incorporated into dishes from around the world. (Read: A Chinese Culinary Creator – André Chiang's New Position)

Like our cuisines, Taiwan’s identity is undergoing a slow and sometimes painful fusion process. We may need a few more decades to swallow up our differences and find a common identity.

It’s good to tuck in while we wait. We’ve got miso soup, steaks on steel plates, steamed meatballs, stinky tofu, Lion’s Heads, water spinach in shrimp sauce, xiaolongbao. We need not ignore our differences. This land was built by immigrants of different cultures and heritages.

We just need a little respect at the dinner table. Enjoy the food, relax. Let time sort things out.

Translated by Jack C.
Edited by Sharon Tseng

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Crossing features more than 200 (still increasing) Taiwanese new generation from over 110 cities around the globe. They have no fancy rhetoric and sophisticated knowledge, just genuine views and sincere narratives. They are simply our friends who happen to stay abroad, generously and naturally sharing their stories, experience and perspectives. See also Crossing Arab World.

Original content can be found at the website of Crossing: 擔仔麵與味噌湯、台塑牛排與月亮蝦餅、蔣介石和他的中國廚子──舌尖上的台灣：家鄉記憶與文化融合

This article is reproduced under the permission of Crossing. It presents the opinion or perspective of the original author / organization, which does not represent the standpoint of CommonWealth magazine.