It’s officially been one week of classes, and Chinese at ICLP is every bit as intense as they promised. Some classes are easier than others, but all require constant attention in the classroom and extensive studying not just of the vocabulary, but of the history and literature being taught, late into the evenings each day. My time management… is a work in progress. I can definitely feel myself improving, though, and particularly in ways that are conducive to my learning goals. My class on Chinese culture, for example, is by far the hardest, because the vocabulary to discuss ancient and modern Chinese society isn’t something I’ve encountered while speaking Chinese with my parents–but as someone who’s hoping to one day study Chinese and Chinese American history, it’s extremely useful. With just a week under my belt, I already find myself able to understand more from Chinese-language articles and blog posts about culture and history.
Specifically, I’m in interested in Chinese food history–and the food in Taiwan has been amazing so far. I’m in Taipei, and Taipei is cosmopolitan food city, but the Japanese and regional Chinese influences are clear to see and even better to try. It’d be too much to go over every individual dish I’ve tried. But if we’re talking about more general customs, Taiwanese breakfasts and the night markets have to be some of the biggest highlights. I haven’t been able to hit the biggest night markets yet, so for today’s post I’ll focus on the breakfasts here, which are genuinely top-notch.
Everywhere you go, you’ll find breakfast restaurants and stands. They tend to have fairly similar menus, featuring a mix of Asian and Western influences, from dan bing to hash browns, burgers to savory soymilk and you tiao. Usually carb-heavy and always delicious, I’ve found these breakfast spots to be an unassuming star of the trip so far. Growing up in an Asian-dominated neighborhood in the East Bay, most of the foods on the menu aren’t unfamiliar to me, but these cheap, quick, and delicious breakfasts-to-go are a new way to enjoy them. A lot of these doughy, wheat-based foods were brought over by Chinese refugees in the 1940s, where before the Taiwanese staple grain was rice. Mainland bing was eventually adopted among the ethnic Taiwanese, too–and that process has an amusing connection to baseball.
Baseball was introduced during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan, and by the 1960s and 70s the Little League Baseball World Championships had become a pretty big deal in Taiwan. Taiwanese fans stayed up late into the nights to tune into the games being played in the USA, a 12 hour time zone away. Come morning, they’d be hungry–and one of the few chains open was Yonghe Doujiang, a breakfast eatery catered towards mainland Chinese. Through Yonghe Doujiang and Little League Baseball, the ethnic Taiwanese population gained a taste for mainland Chinese bing, leading to the traditional menu of Taiwanese breakfasts I’ve gotten to love recently.
There’s this really great breakfast vendor near ICLP’s building, and I’ve taken to eating brunch there during the lunch breaks when I need to hunker down and review material and can’t afford to chat with my friends in the cafeteria. (The cafeteria, by the way, is also amazing. The fresh fruit is 10/10 and when I saw steamed egg in the buffet selection my mouth immediately started watering.) When I leave, I have no doubt that I’ll dearly miss these Taiwanese breakfasts. This country is really onto something.