The Pork Landmine Removal Task on Taiwan, China's Dining Tables (Part 1)

In my university days I got to know quite a few foreign friends. After these foreigners had spent half a semester in Taiwan, every time we met I was astonished by how quickly their spoken Chinese improved. Their Mandarin gradually became fluent, they could banter and trade jabs with half Chinese and half English, and they finally learned to use chopsticks.

They also came to understand that the most terrifying food in all the world is none other than pig's blood cake.

The beautiful F is a devout Muslim, of Turkish and German mixed heritage, with facial features as finely chiselled as a classical Greek statue. Walking across the university campus, even other girls would turn to look at her. (See "1 Traveller, 16 Dining Tables," "The German Table: A Shawarma Vendor's Antique Gold Rush")

She loves tea, and specially bought a teapot to learn how to brew gongfu tea, trying to appreciate the sweet aftertaste without sugar. Even though it left her mouth fragrant, her biggest trouble in Taiwan was eating.

Muslims do not eat pork. But Taiwanese people eat everything from pig's ears to pig's tail; apart from the pig's squeal, they eat it all, and they are first-rate masters of cooking pork.

So for F, eating was a bit of an ordeal. The streets and alleys were practically landmines everywhere, and she simply could not eat just anything.

And I was the one responsible for screening things for her, a friend in life and death who filtered out the pork.

It was not until then that I finally realised the unshakeable place pork holds in Chinese cuisine. It turns out fish really do not know they are living in water.

 

F carried a small card with her wherever she went, with the Chinese characters "I do not eat pork" written on it, to avoid accidentally eating it at restaurants or roadside stalls. In the period when her Chinese was a complete blank, when she was deaf, mute and illiterate, this life-saving card was almost more important than her passport.

F took several hours of intensive beginner Chinese classes a day, and after class she slowly accumulated everyday vocabulary from the Chinese characters on street signs and menus. On one hand she bravely resisted the fierce assault of the square characters, and on the other she carefully avoided stepping on pork landmines.

F: "Meat bun?"

Me: "Plain steamed bun is safe, just eat that."

F: "Wonton noodles?"

Me: "Ugh…… Miss, one bowl of wonton noodles without wontons. What? Even the broth is simmered from pork bones? Then forget it."

F: "Braised pork rice?"

Me: "Out of the question. Just eat turkey rice."

F quickly grasped the key point: in Taiwan, any food whose name starts with the character for "meat" - meat thick soup, meatballs, meat zongzi, meat dumplings - if it does not specify what kind of meat, is all pork.

F: "Caozaiguo? It looks like it's made from plants."

Me: "Better not. The dried shredded radish is only fragrant when stir-fried with a little minced pork."

F: "The traditional big cake from our senior's engagement?"

Me: "No. The pastry is only that flaky and crisp because lard is rolled into the dough."

The scallion pancake with egg at the stall in front of the bus stop by the school gate really smelled wonderful. With only spring onions and dough it looked like it should be very safe, but such an enticing aroma usually means it was fried in lard too.

If, for F, wandering Taipei in search of food was as dangerous as walking through a minefield, then I was the local-guide hero carrying out the pork landmine clearance mission, leading her to cut a path toward rebuilding her daily eating life.

 

For Muslims, once outside the Islamic dietary circle it is like a fish out of water. The biggest everyday difficulties are none other than alcohol, HALAL pure meat and pork. The most reassuring source of protein, whichever way you look at it, is only the tea eggs at the convenience store.

Taiwanese students are used to eating out and almost never cook for themselves. Dormitories usually do not come with a kitchen, and the fridge at most holds toner or lotion. The road of cooking for yourself is not a smooth one. F and her other Muslim friends finally came to understand that if they would not eat anything but HALAL pure meat at every meal, then there were only two choices.

One was to throw themselves into the warm embrace of the brothers and sisters at the Taipei Grand Mosque.

The other was simply not to eat meat at all, and to go with Buddhists and Daoists to vegetarian restaurants to eat tofu.

A Tzu Chi sister with silver hair once saw the foreign students and, with a face full of benevolence, praised them: "Amitabha." But I really did not dare confess to that sister with the Buddha's light shining above her head that they had come here because they had no other choice.

The Islamic dietary circle has never had the vegetarian religious view that "not killing is compassion." At Eid al-Adha every household slaughters cattle and sheep as a sacrifice, sharing fresh meat with the poor, which is a great virtue pleasing to Allah.

As for alcohol, that is very much a matter of individual interpretation. F, after all, has half Germanic blood in her, and she absolutely loves drinking Taiwan Beer. But at the same time there are also those who strictly observe the rules and do not touch a drop.

There are also those who cleverly get around it on a technicality—– it does not matter if rice wine is added, as long as you repeatedly instruct the mutton hot pot proprietress to make sure it is boiled and brought to a rolling boil, leaving not a trace of alcohol, host and guest alike can still eat with great gusto.

To borrow the words of this fellow with a hundred percent grasp of scientific trivia: "After all, when you are under someone else's roof, you have to bow your head. In Taiwan, if you do not gather around the pot to eat hot pot together in winter, you have almost no university social life."

They are all Muslims, but depending on their region of origin and their personality, their acceptance of Taiwanese food varies. Both pure meat and alcohol can be broken as rules - the one exception is pork, which they will absolutely never touch, and which they are unwilling to put in their mouths from the bottom of their hearts, with a taboo as strong as seeing a cockroach.

More devout and strict Muslims refuse outright any pot that has ever cooked pork or any bowl or plate that has ever held pork. Fortunately F had lived in Europe for many years and was still young, so she was not too particular.

So when she ate beef noodles, I ate pork and cabbage dumplings with pork ball soup.

When she ate fried chicken cutlet and bubble tea, I ate braised pork rice with pig's blood soup.

Humour requires profound intelligence. When you can tell a joke in a foreign language, understand the locals' punchlines, and know how to gauge the social limits, then the back-and-forth, the cut and thrust of words, means your foreign language level has already crossed the threshold.

So as F's Chinese improved more and more, our conversations instead often became more and more idiotic.

Taiwan has no clear dietary taboos. Beef tongue, chicken testicles, goose webs, duck heads, pig intestines - in the eyes of foreigners, it looks as if people here "eat absolutely everything." I do not know whether that is really a virtue. Hearing the question "You Taiwanese are so daring with food - I hear some people even eat dog and snake?", I often can neither shake my head nor want to nod.

 

While clearing the pork landmines I kept my mouth shut. Once we knew each other well, I finally dared to get to the bottom of it: "Why do you Muslims not eat pork?"

At first they were somewhat embarrassed, not sure whether they should tell the truth. Under my curious questioning, they finally said in unison: "Because pork has a strange smell."

I could not help finding it odd: "But you clearly have never eaten pork, and have never seen a pig walk, so how do you know it has a strange smell?"

They looked at each other and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, made a face: "Pigs eat everything indiscriminately, they even love eating excrement."

"Then what about pigs at modern pig farms that eat only corn and soybean feed and get showered every day - would that be all right?"

"No, because pigs are inherently very dirty animals."

At that time we were young and green. University students around twenty were pure and innocent, very friendly, without a trace of malice.

But that tone and expression of "How dare you eat pork?" was a bit like the way I had scolded my two- or three-year-old nephew: "How dare you pick up candy from the ground and eat it?"

As a Taiwanese who had grown up eating pork, I could not help but feel a little emotionally wounded.

Heaven knows how much literary charm there is in Dongpo pork, stir-fried pork with bamboo shoots, Wuxi spare ribs and Jinhua ham.

How the older generation of Taiwanese miss lard mixed with rice from the hard days.

Whether for a birthday or to dispel bad luck, we always have a bowl of pig's trotter noodles to offer congratulations or to calm our nerves.

And these dishes, laden with deep emotion, are to them nothing but dirty things?

(To be continued. If you like this article, please give it a like and share it. Thank you.)