Rose-ringed Parakeets in Taiwan (5): Seeking Snacks in Chiayi East Market
A lot of the time, what we eat is a memory: a memory of childhood, or a compensation for something we never got to experience as a child.
Young people from Chiayi often have a similar story: after graduating from high school they leave to study, keep going up the academic ladder, and after graduating they go straight to work somewhere else. Leaving home means setting out on the road away from home. Going back home usually means returning to Chiayi once every few months to see their parents. Home is always in their hearts.
It was only after I left the city of Taipei, where I had lived for nearly ten years, at the end of last October and returned to Chiayi that I truly got to know Chiayi. Zhongxiao Road, the main road of the East Market, was my route to elementary school. Starting from the front door of my home, along the way I passed the fragrant pickle stall, the tofu shop, the mobile fruit stall, the snack vendors that children love most, and the pork floss stall that gives off the smell of meat all year round. I grew up along with the East Market, and the East Market watched me grow into an adult.
In summer, after school I loved most to stop at the sugarcane juice shop at the corner of Lanjing Street and Zhongxiao Road. The proprietress knew well that schoolchildren love sugary drinks, so she set up a slush ice machine in a corner of the storefront. The mixer inside the ice bucket spun without stopping, and as the machine whirled, our craving for slush ice came spinning out too. Us little kids did not have much pocket money, and a cup of slush for about ten yuan was enough to satisfy a whole day's longing.
At such a young age, with so little pocket money, how would I have known to go into the cooked food section of the market to buy things like Jinheyu large intestine or East Market pig's blood soup? At lunch there was the school lunchbox, and at dinner I ate at home too, rarely eating out. As for the East Market noodles, it was only after I began researching the history of the East Market that I understood that the family had already been running it for three generations! The East Market star fruit ice is astonishing too: founded in 1922, it has now been running for 92 years.
The cooked food at Xinmingjin, however, was something I knew well. My mother loved to go to the market on weekends and buy some fried chicken legs to give us a treat. Unlike chain fast-food restaurants, the fried food at Xinmingjin had its own unique flavor. For the family cook, who had always been strict about controlling fried food, to make a special exception and let the children eat fried food was a happiness as big as the sky! That is just how people are: the more you cannot get something, the more you long for it.
To me as a child, the East Market was simply a bustling market with many stalls; now it is a must-visit spot when I take friends from home and abroad around. You can go from stall to stall eating snacks for more than a dozen stops in a row, and if you do not have a big appetite, the total cost will not even exceed 500 yuan!
Photography: He Mengxue