- This friend of mine suggested that we go to this big
slam-bang "Taiwan Banquet" at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown
Los Angeles. Twelve-course dinner for 1000 crazed people. I'm always up
for a gag, so I went.
-
- Well, this was Taiwanese banquet, not a Taiwan Banquet,
if you catch the drift. This was "Taiwanese gourmet cuisine,"
the most potent oxymoron since "winnable nuclear war." I count
myself lucky to be alive. If you call this living.
-
- Understand that I love Taiwan, and have visited the place.
Understand that I think the native Taiwanese people (as distinguished from
the mainland immigrants who arrived in the late '40s with Chiang Kai-Shek,
and built the place into a thriving capitalist wonder) are a proud and
wonderful folk, with a great culture. Understand that I think Taiwan is
an independent country, and that China has no more claim on it than Bush
has on literacy.
-
- Understand, finally, that I've been to many a banquet
offering Chinese fare from many regions---even rural countryside rustic
banquets in Taiwan. They were all splendid, in varying degrees. My former
wife, who was from Taiwan, used to warn me about Taiwanese food, though,
and now I understand why.
-
- Imagine that you have no cooking skills at all, aside
from sticking things in a deep fryer, and that you have a strong desire
to eat things that taste like they were roasted in water buffalo bile and
pig puss. That gives you the idea.
-
- This was an exercise in how to brutalize food into surrendering
all texture and flavor, then imposing entirely unpleasant, alien, and improbable
texture and flavor in its place. You know, kind of like what the U.S. is
doing in Iraq. The best courses of the evening were tolerable, and I would
say that explains at least two of them. (How hard is it to boil a chicken?
Or fry up rice noodles?)
-
- I have never---I mean NEVER---come across cuisine that
was so systematically and deliberately tortured and tormented out of all
palatability. Give a Taiwanese chef a nice ripe watermelon, and he or she
will soak it in bizarro pickling spices, boil it in chicken blood, and
deep fry it with salt and pepper. I mean it was really staggering. What
goes on in the mind of the average Taiwanese, that he or she could imagine
this is good food? No, no, I don't want to know.
-
- I don't know if you are aware how incredibly ugly-sounding
the Taiwanese dialect is. Oh, its a lovely language if you are Taiwanese,
I'm sure, and a Taiwanese poem or song surely charms a Taiwanese lady as
much as Shakespeare sonnets beguile the English Rose. But this lingo is
an almost sickening to listen to. Korean, Cantonese, Vietnamese---all Chinese
dialects I've heard are gorgeous, compared to Taiwanese. It's a bleak,
gnarled, clumsy thing. Kind of like glorified throat-clearing, or trying
to talk with half a tongue. Or both. Loudly.
-
- Well, they torture and debase sounds the same as they
torture and debase tastes. I really mean that---there's a parallel. I don't
ever want to know what one of the "soups" was made from. Among
the admitted ingredients were "pork strings," whatever the hell
that is, and "tendons." I think they threw in the sphincter and
associated environs, too, probably with original atmosphere intact. This
was some funky sh*t! And the soup was full of what was said to be "green
beans." Hey, they were neither green nor beany. They looked like giant
boogers. Thankfully, they had much less flavor (I would imagine).
-
- And to top it all off, you had to sit there and listen
to one of those insane Taiwanese Independence guys rant and rave for an
hour while you awaited (in dread) the next course. You know, one of those
guys who is always looking sad, wearing dumpy K-Mart attire, shaking his
finger in the air, and declaiming about the tortured Taiwanese soul. Likening
the white radish to the strong, indomitable Taiwanese personality, or something
like that.
-
- I swear to you that at one point this guy began talking
about how Taiwan looks like a big fish. And there was a map turned sideways
so it sort of resembled a big fish. And the guy starts talking about how
the fish's spine runs down the right side, and the head, and the mouth,
and then he says (translated in subtitles) that Kaohsiung, the big port
city in the south, "is like the anus of the fish!" He says this
with great passion in his voice, finger aloft, and the crowd applauds.
Now that was pretty much when I stopped eating. I figure any people who
find a fish anus to be a complimentary metaphor are not to be trusted in
the kitchen.
-
- I went to bed feeling poisoned. And I suspect I was.
If you didn't know, Taiwanese men are almost obssessed with keeping their
"erections" up. Drinking snake blood, and snake bile (really),
and all that crap. I recall a dentist telling me once, when I visited Taiwan,
"Taiwan man deek like steel - western man deek big, but weak!"
Well, my big Western counterpart was like steel all night long after that
foodfest. Yes, I suspect the chef spiked the food with some kind of testosterone.
Probably rabbit deek or peeg balls.
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