Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation

"What’s interesting about reading these two together, as I did, was that Clarissa Wei – who’s lived largely in Taiwan but grew up in California – writes that when she was a kid, people whose families had come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or mainland China could talk about a shared connection to Chinese culture, but that has changed over time. It’s become more politically fraught to identify with these different places, but also, there’s an awareness of how artificial the idea of a singular Chinese culture is. Like Dunlop’s book, this book is a love letter to a cosmopolitan cuisine, but to a more specific one, associated with an often overlooked or underappreciated setting. It makes the case for appreciating Taiwanese food as something that can’t be thought of as a subset or distillation of Chinese food. It is a cuisine in which some dishes are heavily influenced by versions that existed in China, but for centuries Taiwan has had a separate historical trajectory, which has sometimes been tightly connected and sometimes at most only loosely connected to the Chinese mainland. It has been influenced by indigenous traditions and by other parts of the world, especially Japan, and includes versions of ingredients that aren’t found on the mainland. You have a blending of influences from different parts of the Chinese mainland by immigrants who come from different places at different times. The end result is a radically distinctive cuisine, even if you think you recognize some of the dishes. It shouldn’t be that hard a concept to recognize if you think about Europe and how different dishes that seem somewhat similar are when they’re made in places across different borders. There’s a blending of what we think of as Chinese food with all kinds of other dishes that have much more to do with local, Japanese or other influences. Wei clearly has an interest in thinking about this as a story not only about food, but also as a gateway into thinking differently about Taiwan – not thinking of it as a place temporarily separated from China, but as a place with its own history going back for centuries and which has also been a self-ruled country since the late 1940s. The subtitle of the book is “Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation,” and this is one reason that a mainland edition of this book would not work. It made me hunger for a comparable book about Hong Kong, using food to capture how different Hong Kong is than just something that’s a subset of China. I was waiting to see if she would refer to Din Tai Fung, which is a quintessentially Taiwan restaurant chain that has now become a global one. Its trademark dish is xiaolongbao – which I think of as Shanghai-style soup dumplings, though some claim they originated in other parts of the Yangzi Delta region. She has a nice way of talking about how that fits into the story of Taiwan cuisine. She doesn’t say it, but it’s almost as if we were to say McDonald’s isn’t an American restaurant because the hamburger doesn’t originate in America, you can find its roots elsewhere. There’s a way in which the story of food is about flows between cultures, which are complicated. Whenever you’re talking about something that’s related to one place, you often can find a more interesting global story about it as it travels."