18. September 23, 2023
It's the first day of Autumn as I'm writing again! A time to cook Taiwanese food, read Taiwanese, Taiwan related, descended, and based authors, and books about Taiwan!
I asked every friend I could think of in Taiwan, China, the U.S. and all over the world, who knows, loves, or wants to learn about Taiwan to share their recommendations for books that are fiction and non, old and new, in Chinese and in English. Some of the books I’m sharing I’ve read, many I look forward to reading. I’ll roll the recommendations out over a few posts because people who catch them may be inspired to share more and we can keep the conversation going.
Clarissa Wei’s newly released, debut cookbook, Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation, is available everywhere books are sold and the options are a click away on her beautiful website.
Those of you who know me and Ted know we love to eat Taiwanese food (Little Fatty, Din Tai Fung), and Chinese food (too numerous to mention). But you might not know that we both love to cook, especially with Sichuan peppercorns or that we are desperately in need of new recipes and love learning the histories and traditions behind the recipes we cook so Clarissa’s book has arrived just in time.
Lately, we’ve been eating mooncakes not just for dessert, or a snack, but breakfast (!) ever since a friend gave them to us as a gift even though the mid-Autumn festival doesn’t officially begin until September 29th, also Ted’s birthday, also our film’s U.S. premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival that we hope will be triply auspicious!
Clarissa’s book Made in Taiwan “celebrates the island nation’s unique culinary identity—despite a refusal by the Chinese government to recognize its sovereignty. It contains deeply researched essays and more than 100 recipes inspired by the people who live in Taiwan today. You’ll learn how to make stinky tofu from scratch, how U.S. aid changed Taiwan’s food scene, and get broth tips from a five-time award-winning beef noodle soup master.”
Clarissa has received terrific press, but one of my favorite articles about the book is this one: “‘Made in Taiwan’ is the cookbook that couldn’t have existed 20 years ago”
When I met Clarissa I liked her immediately for being direct and unapologetic with me about how she doesn’t have time for foreigners or fellow Americans (she’s Taiwanese American) who fly in and out of Taiwan for a quick story to feed the sensationalist news cycles that continually fail to give Taiwan the time and attention, the depth and focus it deserves simply for itself and all that’s beautiful about it and not because of what it means to China or America. She knew I’d spent seven years on my labor of love film in Taiwan. I’d come recommended by a person she trusted who I’d worked with as my first editor, someone I had chosen *not for his martial arts fighting skills, or his cooking* because he was born and raised in Taiwan and wanted to work with me on a giant undertaking of a documentary, Pete Lee.
Pete shares Clarissa’s love of food and is an excellent food photographer in addition to being a filmmaker who’s had a short fiction film he directed, Don’t Be A Hero, at Sundance in 2018. Pete and I met when Ted and I lived in San Francisco for two and a half years and he showed us music videos he’d shot featuring our friend and Pete’s, filmmaker and lead vocalist of The Coup, Boots Riley. When Ted and I moved to L.A. in 2015, Pete gave us a copy of the cookbook he’d done the photographs for: The Food of Taiwan: Recipes from the Beautiful Island.
And that was the book that film producer, Nina Yang Bongiovi reminded me about. Ted and I met Nina for the first time in Taiwan in 2005 when she had a company called Double Edge Films and we went to Taipei and then Shanghai during their film festival with a small film delegation from New York. That I first lived in Taipei 1995-6 as a student, then returned a decade later in 2005 and 06 as a filmmaker, and again a decade later in 2016 with an international election monitoring delegation in order to be able to film the election and make a film, must mean that I’ll have to return in 2026!
I cannot speak on behalf of Taiwanese people or articulate what it means to be Taiwanese, but I can speak to the process of learning about Taiwan, that’s how I feel and that’s how my friend Lev Nachman so eloquently puts it with Jonathan Sullivan in the introduction to their forthcoming book: Taiwan: A Contested Democracy under Threat. Their book comes out on October 19th and I’m excited that it will be available as our film, Invisible Nation, makes its way out in the world and engages in discussions because they’re good companion pieces.
I’ve got many more books to recommend, but I’m going to leave you where I was considering beginning the post with Winnie the Pooh on the first day of Autumn and what a grand adventure it can be when you know how to enjoy it and laugh at yourself:
This Pooh would never tell another country that it doesn’t exist and must surrender to their force, their money and their power!
But many people don’t know that the People’s Republic of China has never controlled the Republic of China, Taiwan or that Taiwan exists as a country. If you only listened to the Winnie the Pooh of Beijing or the people, corporations and outlets who amplify his message, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, then you wouldn’t know either. If you had never been to Taiwan or never had an interest in that part of the world and all its interconnections with ours then you might not know.
Hanging on all these decades with determination, grit and love while being hated, misunderstood, overlooked, blamed, slighted, left out, not heard, not respected, not appreciated, not seen, not given opportunity and not given credit for all of its many, varied, tremendous economic, political, and social accomplishments, that’s Taiwan. And if you’ve ever felt the same way, you’ll love and be inspired by Taiwan too!
It might be taking the increased intensity of threats from China, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to bring the attention Taiwan has deserved on its own merit all these years. But let’s hope that we can give Taiwan the support it needs to maintain the peace it wants, preserving its democracy, without constant threat from China, before Beijing uses force. It may be hard to imagine in the near term, but it’s not impossible that one day, a leader in Beijing might reconcile, forgive, understand, accept the truth, and sign a peace treaty in which Taiwan is treated as an equal.
Until that day, and even, idealistically, to help bring about that day of a peace treaty between equals, we have a lot of reading and catching-up on Taiwan to do, especially everywhere books are not yet banned. Read them while and where you can. Recommendations to be continued…
Great piece!! I❤️Taiwan!
Lovely piece! Inspiring!❤️