Getting at the Heart of Taiwanese Cuisine: An Interview with Clarissa Wei

Clarissa Wei is a journalist who has worked around the world, seeking out little-known stories that speak to the heart. After living in Central America, she packed up and moved to Taiwan, where she's currently working on her first cookbook, Made In Taiwan: Recipes From the People. We recently sat down with her over video to discuss her book project, her writing experiences, and how the 2008 US Presidential election inspired her to become a journalist.

Undomesticated: Your forthcoming book will include recipes from Taiwanese cuisine, but you'll also include the politics behind the recipes like the recent pineapple issue, in which China refused to buy Taiwan’s pineapple crop, nearly guaranteeing the death of the industry for the year. If you could arrange a dream dinner party with Taiwanese chefs, food producers and political figures, who would sit around your table? And can you tell us a little bit about each person and what they bring to the conversation?

Clarissa Wei: I really want to meet the people who created the classic dishes that I’m researching because I think in the States or in another culture it's so easy to figure out who created a dish or when it was created or which restaurant did it, for example the Caesar salad. But here in Taiwan, you don't get any of that history at all. It's just rumors. So, the oyster pancake, for example, was a dish made out of poverty and they put sweet potato powder in it and I'm really curious who did that. So I don't think I would necessarily invite a politician or someone famous because those people did not cook. The people who are very much the backbone of Taiwanese society are these no-name people, but I'm curious to see how they came up with these dishes that are now so classic in the cuisine. In Taiwanese cuisine we have a lot of foods that are endemic to this area that you can't find anywhere else.

Undomesticated: That’s great. I would be interested to know about the origins of the pineapple cake that's so famous and how that came about. It’s all over Asia, but it's Taiwanese, and I think Singapore tries to take credit for it sometimes.

Wei: Most of the pineapple cake is not even actually made with pineapple. It’s made with winter melon because it's cheaper than just using pure pineapple. That's my journey for the next year: for a lot of these things I know the broad strokes, but it's really exciting to have been given almost two years to really dive deep into the history of these dishes.

Undomesticated: That's really exciting. So if you could introduce North Americans to one or two Taiwanese dishes, which would you choose, and can you tell us a little bit about each and why you love them?

Wei: One that I always gravitate towards is the oyster omelet or ô-á-chian. That dish was invented in Tainan, the southern city where my parents are from. It's a very gloopy omelet and it's actually more starchy than it is eggy. And it has a sauce called haixian which is a Taiwanese riff off of hoisin sauce, but it's much sweeter and does not taste the same at all. One omelet has eight oysters and it’s served with a lettuce that’s very similar to romaine. It doesn’t sound that appetizing honestly for a Western audience, but I really like it and I think the texture sums up what Taiwanese cuisine in the south is like. There's a soft mucousy texture, which is again so different from food that you get anywhere else in the world. So that's the main one.

The other one everyone loves is lu rou fan, which is braised pork belly over rice. You get renditions of that in Taiwanese American restaurants in the States, but there's something about the versions here that just melt in your mouth completely. It's because people here aren't afraid to use the fat and the skin of the pork, and also the pigs here are raised to fit that mold whereas in the States when you buy pork in the grocery store, it's more lean. Those are the two dishes I love and I think really represent this country.

Undomesticated: I'm often drawn to places because of their politics and their contentious history. For Taiwan I've always been obsessed with Kinmen, or Quemoy as it used to be called. It seems so Cold War. In the west we don't talk much about the Cold War in Asia apart from the Korean War and Vietnam War, but people here really don’t know much of it beyond that. And so it seems like Kinmen is such a special place with a complicated history, and from the pictures I've seen the sites look really lovely. Is there a cuisine that's specific to Kinmen, and how does it differ from other parts of Taiwan?

Wei: Not in particular, but there are some dishes there that are unique. One is a deep fried oyster fritter with chives and vermicelli. The other dish they're known for is a Cantonese-style porridge. That's everywhere in the city. But the cuisine is not so distant from Taiwanese cuisine at all, and I wouldn't say it's necessarily a food-centric city either. With that said, though, from a tourism perspective or unique things to see, there's a really cool artisan there who makes knives out of old bombs from the Cold War. There are old artillery shells that China dropped there during the Cold War and they've collected these shells and he's making these cleavers out of them. I got to interview him and he’s a really interesting character. The second important thing they have is gaoliang, which is a high proof liquor made out of sorghum. And that was sort of an industry that was instated in Kinmen to create income for the island, just as farming income and obviously booze sells really well.

Undomesticated: Back to the pineapple. I first heard about the politicalization of pineapples when I saw friends in Hong Kong post photos of Taiwanese pineapples and how it's become a symbol of protest there. You've interviewed Taiwanese pineapple farmers and restaurant owners to show that China's sudden cancellation of pineapple exports from Taiwan has left these farmers with millions of dollars in pineapple reserves, since China accounts for 90-something percent of all pineapple exports. Can you talk about the background of this issue, and how are the Taiwan pineapples doing now?

Wei: I think one thing that people don't realize, and this sort of gets glanced over, maybe for the sake of drama, is that the pineapple farmers didn't really actually suffer. Because of the pineapple campaign, all the domestic pineapples were bought by local Taiwanese people, and those in Japan, Hong Kong and other places. So they didn't actually lose any money this year.

There was this fear that they were going to lose money. But what happened was that in March, China issued this ban on Taiwanese pineapple, citing that they found scale insects on them. But people in Taiwan knew that China also has scale insects on their pineapples. They thought it was just a retaliation against Taiwan or an arbitrary trade decision. It really spooked people here, because it's not just the pineapples. I think that's why this story was so interesting, because China and Taiwan signed an agreement called the Economic Cooperation Free Trade Agreement, where many products such as grouper, pineapples, and a lot of fruit are dependent on cross strait relations, and many industries here became dependent on the Chinese market. And the fact that China can all of a sudden cut it off really scared people here, and it really pissed people off.

And so this pineapple campaign was a movement to wean people here off of China, and also get people to push back against the bullying that can all of a sudden stop trade without any notification and without any transparency. I interviewed the agriculture minister and he said he would have appreciated it if they could have sat down and had a meeting with us before they announced this. So it plays into a broader story about trade. But I will say that I think the average person who reads this news story thinks that the farmers are suffering when in fact they really did not this year, and I think it was because of this campaign.

Undomesticated: Yeah, that's good. I teach English to seniors in Chicago’s Chinatown and I'm doing it on Zoom now because of the pandemic. My son joins us sometimes from Taiwan and one day, I think in April or May, we were talking about fruit and he kept saying there are too many pineapples in Taiwan. I didn't understand why, but then I saw your video and it suddenly made sense. So can you talk a little about how you go about interviewing people like the pineapple farmers and about your research process? I think what's interesting or different about interviewing people in Chinese is that there are so many different dialects and different accents. If you're going to interview someone in English, you pretty much understand what they're saying even if they have a thick Scottish brogue. It could take a while, but I think it's easier to understand English because it's more standard. But some Chinese dialects are their own languages, like Cantonese and Taiwanese. Do you use an interpreter, and how do you go about doing those interviews in Taiwan?

Wei: I don't have a problem in Taiwan because everyone can either speak Mandarin or, with the old school people, can understand Mandarin. My parents are from the south in Tainan, where their mother language is Taiwanese. I can pretty much understand Taiwanese, so I rarely have a problem in Taiwan with language. The only thing is talking to government officials when I have to use a higher sophisticated form of Mandarin that I'm not used to, but I just have to practice a little bit.

I do encounter issues in China for sure because of the number of dialects, but I will say that everyone does speak a basic level of Mandarin, so even when it's like a crazy northern Chinese accent, I can still understand 40% of it. There have been exceptions before where I've gotten an interview from a freelance videographer and I have to write the script and I really can't understand them. Then I'll pass it to my friend or my boss, who grew up in China and she can understand it. So there's always someone who can help out, but I think knowing a base level of Mandarin has been really helpful. Living in Hong Kong, though, Cantonese was impossible for me, obviously because that's a completely different dialect. But as you know, in Hong Kong you can get by with English just fine.

Undomesticated: Right and Mandarin now, too. I think Mandarin would help up in the New Territories where they may not understand English well. I just love languages and I think it's something a typical North American wouldn't think about. Getting into more general travel and writing questions, you've worked for years as an independent journalist and have traveled all over the world. Can you share a little about how you were able to do that, especially as a freelancer and not break the bank?

Wei: Yeah, so if you look at the history of my traveling, I never went to Europe or somewhere really expensive. I just went to places that were really cheap. So for example I lived in Nicaragua for three months, and my rent was 70 US dollars a month, and food there is $1 to $2 a meal. It's really cheap and I was living in a volunteer house, leading backpacking tours as a volunteer, but I was also freelance writing at the same time. So I was actually able to make a significant amount of money being in a place like that. And the fact that I would stay in one place really saved on airfare. So that was my philosophy when I was doing this travel, just finding a place where I knew I could afford the rent but also where I could actually make money by being in those places and writing about the topic. I would never do that again. That was definitely a time in my life where I was single, I was really young, and I didn't have any commitments. I didn't have rent to pay back home because I just put everything at my parents’ house and I went where I wanted to go, to a place I could afford and it worked well. So I think the key to that is having a sense of flexibility. I'm not a high maintenance person and did not stay in hotels at all. It was volunteer houses or really cheap hostels. But again I'm at a different point in my life and I would never do that again and am glad I got that out of my system.

Undomesticated: Yes, definitely. I think that’s something about youth and being more flexible. But there’s something to be said about hot showers and air-conditioning. Our readers are always looking for advice about travel and writing and how to combine the two. Can you share a couple of do's and don'ts when it comes to starting out as a travel writer?

Wei: I think the biggest advice is that I didn't see it as travel journalism. I just saw it as journalism in general. I think when you approach it as going to an exotic place and painting it as an exotic adventure then you lose out on where the story is. And so, I would be in a random town in Nicaragua that I've never been to before and obviously it was really exciting for me but I found out, for example, about a feud between two towns. They had a taco feud about which one was more authentic. And I wrote that and it was a travel story, but it was really about the dynamics between those two towns. I think that really helped me as a journalist and it helped me place a lot more stories, versus if it was just a shallow “here’s where I am, this is why this town is cool, and here’s where to stay.” So I think that's my biggest advice for people starting out in travel writing. Don't think of it as travel writing. Think of it as doing journalism where you are and dive in deeper than the average person. I think by having that mentality, you'll get scoops and find angles that the average person would not.

Undomesticated: I think that’s great advice just for traveling in general—not to look at it as a superficial thing but to understand more about the people there and the industries. When you were growing up, or when you were younger, did you have any inspirations for becoming a foreign correspondent or did you come on to this on your own?

Wei: My formative experience was watching the 2008 Obama election and seeing Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer on CNN. I had this very visceral moment when I realized what they said on TV was really impacting my perspective of the presidential elections and the fact that these people can talk and influence the way I saw the world was very powerful, and I wanted to have a part in that. And also realizing that because I was a young Asian woman, I would be at a disadvantage compared to my peers. I was very young back then, but that was kind of my eureka moment. I wanted to be at a place of influence where I could show people my perspective of the world. At that time I didn't really know what medium I wanted to pursue. I thought about video initially, but then I ended up gravitating towards writing and I think that's definitely more my preferred and loved medium. I'm really thankful I had that eureka moment at such a young age.

Undomesticated: Was that when you were still in Los Angeles?

Wei: Yeah, this was when I was 18 years and I was still in high school.

Undomesticated: Were you able to vote?

Wei: I was a year shy of being able to vote.

Undomesticated: That must have inspired you for the next election.

Wei: Yeah for sure and that was what made me want to go to NYU too because New York is in the center of the media outlets and I thought it could really change my life and it really did, just being in New York and having all these internships.

Undomesticated: And for our last question, if you could give readers advice to visit one place in Taiwan, where would you suggest they go and why?

Wei: I think it would be Taitung, which is a really broad answer because it covers a large area, but I lived there with an indigenous family for a month a couple of years back and I saw a different side of Taiwan that I don't get in the city. My experience was correlated with what my host family showed me. We would go up into the mountains and pick wild vegetables and cook them and they were all organic. It was also really beautiful and it made me feel almost as if I was in Hawaii, versus Taiwan. Then I realized it's a very similar climate and Taiwanese indigenous people are Polynesians, as well, and it's just another facet of Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese culture that you don't get because of all the colonial influences and the fact that indigenous people are marginalized. That made me really fall in love with Taiwan. The ocean is also beautiful and the people are unique and diverse. And I think for most readers who make it out to Taiwan unfortunately that probably won't be their first stop because it's just a little bit harder to get to and you kind of have to know someone, but I think it's definitely more of an aspirational thing to go for if you ever have the time here.

Undomesticated: That's great. I think most people who go to Taiwan for the first time usually go to the west coast.

Wei: Yes, because it's just more accessible. You can't really get around on the east unless you have a car or you know someone who can take you around.

Undomesticated: But there are trains?

Wei: There are trains but they're very small cities and you can take a taxi but the beauty of the east coast is the nature so you really do need some form of private transportation to get anywhere significant.

Undomesticated: That’s so good to know. Well, this has been so great. Thank you so much for chatting today.

Wei: I really appreciate you guys reaching out.

To learn more about Clarissa Wei, visit her at Clarissawei.com.