Street Potatoes

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/street-potatoes

Friends,

This last month has given us the best stretch of weather I can remember having seen in Taipei thus far. So many perfect days of hovering right around 70 degrees (I’m at a point where I can translate Celsius easily when it comes to weather, but not baking, and I still don’t think in Celsius), not too much rain or humidity, and a regular nice breeze. I’ve been hitting the pavement a lot as a result, making the long walks home from work instead of the short bus rides, wandering around new neighborhoods, checking out alternative routes.

The photo above is from the university where I teach, National Taiwan University. We trekked across campus on Saturday, and it seemed like more people were on campus than during a normal class day. This particular cluster of people was gathered around a small bright green bird, which may or may not have been a White-Bellied or Whistling Green-Pigeon (thank you to birding enthusiast 林紋沛/Wenpei Lin for helping identify based on my bad description!), with other clusters surrounding every pond, picnic table, and patch of blooming flowers as far as the eye can see.

I’m told that the park-like status NTU holds is a source of contention for students. I get it — especially when there are no tables or seats around a classroom building for people needing to cram some food in before the bell (yes, universities here have bells), or needing to swerve to avoid meandering packs of birdwatchers, but I also think that a lack of integration into community is one of the reasons it’s been so easy for America to make cut after cut to higher education budgets (while simultaneously expecting universities to provide more and more services). So, I guess right now I am happy to see the crowds. Let’s see if I grow bitter if I continue in my role there.

While I do not partake in the birdwatching, I do have a new hobby: window watching. (Wait, that sounds creepier than I mean. Please don’t stop reading.) Having been here long enough, and ventured into enough apartments of friends and tutoring students, I’ve learned that old dilapidated buildings frequently hide luxury apartments within. The easiest way to tell? The windows. You’ll often see buildings where most of the windows look older than me, with aluminum frames and sure to screech when opened, but then there’ll be one apartment with shiny new windows: blinds, well-insulated, completely out of place. Of course, not everyone who gets nice new windows has a luxury apartment, but…

I would’ve expected it to be the AC units, but they’re not as reliable of a sign. Or I don’t know what a fancy new AC unit looks like. Equally possible.

Walking more means I’m eating while walking more, and my favorite walking food is the humble convenience store sweet potato. In the US, 7-Eleven usually has a class case of rotating hot dogs and taquitos. Here, they still have the hot dogs, but instead of taquitos its roasted sweet potatoes . The best ones are the ones that have sat there a little too long, where some of the sugar has syruped its way out and burnt to a crisp, that just kind of melt in your mouth. If I take it home, I might put a little peanut butter or miso or chili oil on it, but I’m perfectly happy with no condiment. Just me and a roasted sweet potato.

At the morning market, the man selling them wraps each one in newspaper. I am not sure if that means most people do not eat the peels, or if most people are fine with eating newspaper-wrapped skins. It does not seem likely they are. But Taiwan as a whole does not eat a lot of food on the street, especially post-Covid with about half the people on the street still masking.

A roasted sweet potato wrapped in newspaper makes me think of 7th grade, oddly enough. At that point in my life, I am not sure I had ever eaten a sweet potato. But I had a geography teacher who was one of my few male teachers, one of my few young teachers, and possibly my only young male teacher, who made quite an impression on me. I don’t remember much from middle school, but I remember him describing a trip to China, and how he had bought a roasted potato off the street and eaten it plain while walking, and how delicious it was in that moment. I remember being skeptical. A baked potato with nothing on it? The same baked potato I loaded with butter and cheese and seasoning salt at home on a regular basis?

But now, here I am, ~25 years later walking down the street, eating my unseasoned sweet potato. And one day it could happen to you, too.

Sweet potatoes in Taiwan are not yams, but we do have 山藥, mountain medicine , which is a yam. So, I will use this opportunity to encourage you to revisit Randal Keenan’s “Visible Yam.” His voice is missed.

In 7-Eleven, beside the roasted sweet potatoes, there’s usually a soup pot full of dark tea holding hard-boiled “tea leaf eggs.” Lately, though, those have frequently sat empty. Taiwan is in the middle of an egg shortage crisis, dominating the news like no other topic (except for a brief moment where it was punctured by an escaped baboon ). There’s conspiracy theories (restaurants seem to rarely run out but have used the opportunity to raise their prices), political accusations, and even my usual Korean bento box has had its half-a-boiled-egg replaced by a few cubes of tofu. When people from the US ask what I hear about banks collapsing or China’s latest threats or Trump, I can answer quite honestly that outside of expat-centric spaces online (Taiwan reddit/Twitter), I hear way more about eggs.

Further reading:

• Clarissa Wei, Taiwanese-American journalist and food writer, had a wonderful “36 Hours in Taipei” piece in the NYT . Her cookbook, Made in Taiwan , is also out now, and it looks fantastic. I’ve linked to the photographers that worked on it before, but here they are again .
• At some point recently a second season of Old Enough got added to Netflix. I highly recommend it, though they included some “Where are they now?” epilogues that aren’t very good.
• I love this thread of random bug facts .
• Taiwanese American killed it this month with two great pieces: An 18-year-old Taiwanese-American aspiring filmmaker’s thorough love for EEAAO and Beia Giebel on her grandfather and the White Terror and Green Island .
• I have an unresearched hunch that English majors are actually less prescriptivist about language than other people. I tell all my students that the rules are arbitrary and that if your audience understands your message then you’ve achieved your goal, and that’s what matters. I’m fine with using literally figuratively . And I loved this comment from my dictionary .
• Horrified to learn about the swallowing goldfish sport that was all the rage last century in the US.
• I am desperately hoping Twitter hurries and dies so something new can rise from the ashes. It no longer holds what it once did, even if you’re okay ethically with using it. Natasha Lomas lays out why . But Post never got off the ground, Mastodon is a huge mess, and reddit fills a different niche. Maybe one day.
• Obviously to move to Taiwan was to move away from a lot of friends, but man let me tell you how great it is to be able to meet up for coffee with friends with little to no planning. It’s not at the level of support that Anne Helen Petersen is describing in her piece on living close to friends , but it’s getting there.
• Ever since writing about The Legend of Tianding , I’ve been occasionally appreciating 月琴 (yueqin/moon lute) music. At first I was just listening to older stuff, like 楊秀卿/Yang Hsiu-ching , but recently I found a group called 木子/mooz who do covers of more modern songs. Highly recommend their cover of KTV croon tune 魚仔 , or 非常女 .

Five months ago, I wrote to you that we had framed several pieces of art, but that they would probably sit in a bag in the corner of the room until we moved somewhere else. Fear of holes in wall, uncertainty, impermanence, etc. However, I’m pleased to say that thanks to adhesive and Carolina’s initiative, they’re now on our walls, instilling some sense of investment. We also have another new decoration: an unusually shaped piece of beautiful wood leaning against the wall on top of a shelf. We bought this piece of wood in Yingge/鶯歌, intending for it to be a cutting board, as the shopkeeper assured us it could be.

We then got home, set it on our counter, only to find that it was not flat. And flatness, as you may know, is an important quality to have in a cutting board.

And so it will sit, a reminder and something to laugh about and the impetus for a story. It was a small price to pay for such an object, and I am grateful. For you as well,

-g