"Move a little to the left," said a photographer, and I scooted over a bit.
Joyce picked up a vaguely peanut-flavored lump of food with chopsticks. "Say 'aah'," she told me, and put it in my mouth. As I chewed, the assembled cameras flashed.
Today, I was used as photo-op fodder.
This afternoon, Tatung university summoned all the foreign exchange students to go to a Hakka food festival that was being held in the main hall. I was confused when I got there, because I wasn't sure what was going on. But while I'm frequently dopey, I'm not stupid -- after a few minutes I realized that there was a reason that they were inviting the American students to use a mortar and pestle, or eat some rice noodles, and taking copious photographs of us. We were being used as some kind of publicity device. Smile for the cameras.
That was certainly novel. Tatung had taken pictures of us before, apparently to illustrate what a fancy multicultural place they were, but this was over the top. I'm still not sure what the reason for this was. Generic publicity? Novelty? Giving the appearance of public validation and international acceptance of the historically-downtrodden indigenous Hakka people of Taiwan? Your guess is as good as mine.
The food was pretty neat, though. The first thing we did was make a kind of Hakka tea. This is not a conventional kind of tea. In regular tea, it's a well-known formula: take tea leaves and put them in hot water for a few minutes. If you're feeling British then you may put milk, sugar, or possibly even lemon juice in your tea. Hakka tea isn't like that. First you take some dried green tea leaves and grind them into powder with a very large mortar and pestle. Then you add sesame seeds and grind them up. Then add peanuts and grind them up into powder too. Then add sugar and hot water, and put some puffed rice on top for texture. Stir and serve. It's a surprisingly tasty concoction. It looks like something a witch would brew in a cauldron, but without dodgy, unappetizing ingredients like "Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing". Here's the recipe:
Hakka green tea
There was also a food made of some squishy substance that people assure me is rice, somehow. It's sweetened and rolled around in some powder that was probably made from ingredients similar to those in the tea. It seems to be a fairly popular snack in Taiwan. That's the food I was talking about in the introduction of this story; I was photographed being fed some of this by another person, which is not really something I would have done were it not for the cameras.
Another food is bamboo soup. They take bamboo and turn it from wood into something that only looks like wood but is actually a kind of food. It's a little bitter for my taste, but most people in Taiwan really enjoy chowing down on their heavily cooked wood.
Probably my favorite thing there was the noodles. The noodles were made from rice, which is not very unusual -- rice is big here. But they were nicely seasoned, with some cabbage and meat and carrot, so it was pretty tasty. The photographers loved it; nobody with a camera can resist a close-up shot of someone eating noodles with chopsticks.
I'm still confused by the whole thing, but hey, free food.
Joyce picked up a vaguely peanut-flavored lump of food with chopsticks. "Say 'aah'," she told me, and put it in my mouth. As I chewed, the assembled cameras flashed.
Today, I was used as photo-op fodder.
This afternoon, Tatung university summoned all the foreign exchange students to go to a Hakka food festival that was being held in the main hall. I was confused when I got there, because I wasn't sure what was going on. But while I'm frequently dopey, I'm not stupid -- after a few minutes I realized that there was a reason that they were inviting the American students to use a mortar and pestle, or eat some rice noodles, and taking copious photographs of us. We were being used as some kind of publicity device. Smile for the cameras.
That was certainly novel. Tatung had taken pictures of us before, apparently to illustrate what a fancy multicultural place they were, but this was over the top. I'm still not sure what the reason for this was. Generic publicity? Novelty? Giving the appearance of public validation and international acceptance of the historically-downtrodden indigenous Hakka people of Taiwan? Your guess is as good as mine.
The food was pretty neat, though. The first thing we did was make a kind of Hakka tea. This is not a conventional kind of tea. In regular tea, it's a well-known formula: take tea leaves and put them in hot water for a few minutes. If you're feeling British then you may put milk, sugar, or possibly even lemon juice in your tea. Hakka tea isn't like that. First you take some dried green tea leaves and grind them into powder with a very large mortar and pestle. Then you add sesame seeds and grind them up. Then add peanuts and grind them up into powder too. Then add sugar and hot water, and put some puffed rice on top for texture. Stir and serve. It's a surprisingly tasty concoction. It looks like something a witch would brew in a cauldron, but without dodgy, unappetizing ingredients like "Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing". Here's the recipe:
Hakka green tea
- Green tea leaves
- Sesame seeds
- Peanuts
- Sugar to taste
- Hot water
There was also a food made of some squishy substance that people assure me is rice, somehow. It's sweetened and rolled around in some powder that was probably made from ingredients similar to those in the tea. It seems to be a fairly popular snack in Taiwan. That's the food I was talking about in the introduction of this story; I was photographed being fed some of this by another person, which is not really something I would have done were it not for the cameras.
Another food is bamboo soup. They take bamboo and turn it from wood into something that only looks like wood but is actually a kind of food. It's a little bitter for my taste, but most people in Taiwan really enjoy chowing down on their heavily cooked wood.
Probably my favorite thing there was the noodles. The noodles were made from rice, which is not very unusual -- rice is big here. But they were nicely seasoned, with some cabbage and meat and carrot, so it was pretty tasty. The photographers loved it; nobody with a camera can resist a close-up shot of someone eating noodles with chopsticks.
I'm still confused by the whole thing, but hey, free food.
