Taipei Personality

“Engwen ma?” I say as I point to the menu.
“Yo,” says the employee as he searches through the stack of menus to find the English version.
Today I want fried rice, and I know this restaurant has it.
Speed reading through the oversized laminated menu for foreign dummies, I find chicken fried rice, shrimp fried rice, pork fried rice, and squid fried rice.
“Su de chaofan ma?” Vegetarian fried rice?
The employee doesn’t understand.
“Wo chi su,” I try again.
“No meat?” Another employee says in English.
“Yes! No meat!”
They point to the part of the menu that features shrimp, fish, and frog. I tell them that I don’t want any of it. They show me a plate of whole shrimp, and I tell them “bu yao,” or “don’t want.” A group of three or four people is now perplexed by my actions.
“Do you speak English?” someone asks.
They think I don’t understand the English menu because I don’t want meat. I see a pricey eggplant dish and go with it. After a few minutes, my order arrives – with pork inside.
***
Being vegetarian is most often frustrating in Taiwan, but street food can sometimes simplify things – just grab some sticks of food and hand them to the cook. Everything comes on a stick: whole squid, chicken skin, pork, fish dough, octopus tentacles, vegetables, tofu and rice. Fruit doesn’t come on a stick, but it comes in a bag and you eat it with an oversized toothpick. In my year in Taiwan, I often bought barbecued mushrooms, green peppers and tofu, but I also tried to be conservatively adventurous. So, when I saw something that looked meat-free, I would point to it and ask “Yo ro ma?” I did this on one occasion when I saw a bar of black rice that was up for grilling. The vendor said it had no meat, so I went for it. The bar was alright. It was just gummy rice with no real taste other than the spices it was grilled with.
A couple of weeks later, I was perusing the grocery store when I saw the same black rice. I had already eaten it twice. I looked closer to see if the secret ingredient, either seaweed or molasses, would be revealed. The English caption said “Rice in pig’s blood.”
My heart sank. I slumped over onto my cart, staring at the package. I thought about my terrible Chinese language skills and took solace in the fact that I probably had asked correctly, it’s just that blood is not technically meat.
I can still see that aisle of the grocery store in my mind’s eye – I’ll never forget the day I found out what made the rice stick together.