an affinity for round things
The following itinerary goes out to my brother, who has shown more explicit interest than anyone in the culinary (or should I say gourmandistic) side of my fieldwork. Yesterday, on the Mid-Autumn Festival, my coworker JT invited me to his house for some grilled meat.[i] I took along My American Friend (everybody loves Americans, there’s always room for one more—especially a like-sized one). We started eating grilled meat around noon and ate on, alternating with fruit, with nary a pause until around four thirty in the afternoon, at which point we drove out to a smaller city about forty minutes outside of Taipei to go to another coworker’s family home, where we were fed an entire meal of non-bar-b-qued things before they even got the grill going, upon which people attempted with not much success to feed us more grilled meat. We left there around eight and by shortly after nine I was at J’s place, wishing everyone a happy holiday and insisting that I couldn’t possibly eat another bite, until around ten, at which point I devoured the rest of the shrimp and started in on the bacon-wrapped scallion.
The tradition on Mid-Autumn Festival is to eat moon cakes (sweet sweet sweet cakes usually filled with red-bean paste which everyone claims to hate) and pomelo (which are roundish, and in season, and which nobody is silly enough not to like) and to gaze at the full full moon from within the full full circle of one’s family. Asked why we also grill meat on the Mid-Autumn Festival, JT gave a long, animated, suspenseful explanation about something that happened around fifteen years ago, which in English could be summarized by the term “marketing gimmick.” Apparently there is no specific term for “marketing gimmick” here, which is kind of astounding, since Taiwan is All About marketing gimmicks. On the way to the second coworker’s house JT played for us a popular hip-hop-y song (which I’d actually heard bits of before in some hip adolescent venue) with the chorus: “Take off your coat, take it off, take off your coat. Take of your shirt, take it off, take off your shirt. Take it all off, take it off, take it off, etc.” (Of course in Chinese you can put the clothing item first as topic, and then “take it off” as the comment, making it altogether a more efficient and smooth way of getting the message across.)
Perhaps prompted by the (pretty funny) nonstop take-it-off, JT started wondering if there would be a “pole dance show” at the second coworker’s house, and even asked him when we got there. His family home, the place he’d grown up in, was in the alley right behind the night market. When he was a kid, he said, there were pole dance shows all the time, permanently, in the night market street, advertising things. Like what? “Like what? I don’t know, like health insurance.” We had spent a little while looking for the full moon from his alley, but it was nowhere to be seen: too cloudy. Oh well. Finally, after refusing the last hot dog and getting a tour of the family house (complete with a very large altar for the ancestral tablet, with Guanyin, Guangong, and Tudigong standing next to it, in a room specifically dedicated to the ancestors), we got ready to leave.
About a minute into the drive, as we were turning in front of a temple onto a bigger road, we finally saw it: the pole dance, minus a real pole. A girl in pretty impressive boots was writhing about sexily on a little stage arranged right to the side of the temple. After a minute she jumped down from the stage and started accosting various men in the audience, most of whom looked like they wanted to run away. Finding herself in the middle of the temple next to the incense stand, she turned to the altar and made the baibai motions, then sashay-waddled in the impressive boots, swishing the transparent skirt, over to the smaller altar to the left and bowed to it as well. Around this time I looked up and saw the full full moon above the temple, although no one else seemed to take much of an interest in it. So what with that, the stripper, the grilled meat, and the final return to what is more or less family here, the Mid-Autumn Festival was pretty much complete.
[i] The word for bar-b-que is a verb-object combination, which is a common way of forming verbs and seems basically to be a way of getting around transitivity. For instance, “to eat” is a transitive verb—you have to eat something—but so you don’t always have to specify what it is you are going to eat exactly, there is an unmarked version of thing-to-eat, which is rice. So when someone asks if you would like to eat-rice, they might very well be thinking of pizza. Bar-b-que is kaorou, to grill-meat. Of course other things might potentially be grilled as well, but somehow although I barely even associate the “rice” in eat-rice with actual rice anymore, I always think of bar-b-que as specifically grilled meat. Although it might very well be green peppers (there were some in the afternoon) or octopus eyeballs (there were some shortly before midnight: really Q).
The tradition on Mid-Autumn Festival is to eat moon cakes (sweet sweet sweet cakes usually filled with red-bean paste which everyone claims to hate) and pomelo (which are roundish, and in season, and which nobody is silly enough not to like) and to gaze at the full full moon from within the full full circle of one’s family. Asked why we also grill meat on the Mid-Autumn Festival, JT gave a long, animated, suspenseful explanation about something that happened around fifteen years ago, which in English could be summarized by the term “marketing gimmick.” Apparently there is no specific term for “marketing gimmick” here, which is kind of astounding, since Taiwan is All About marketing gimmicks. On the way to the second coworker’s house JT played for us a popular hip-hop-y song (which I’d actually heard bits of before in some hip adolescent venue) with the chorus: “Take off your coat, take it off, take off your coat. Take of your shirt, take it off, take off your shirt. Take it all off, take it off, take it off, etc.” (Of course in Chinese you can put the clothing item first as topic, and then “take it off” as the comment, making it altogether a more efficient and smooth way of getting the message across.)
Perhaps prompted by the (pretty funny) nonstop take-it-off, JT started wondering if there would be a “pole dance show” at the second coworker’s house, and even asked him when we got there. His family home, the place he’d grown up in, was in the alley right behind the night market. When he was a kid, he said, there were pole dance shows all the time, permanently, in the night market street, advertising things. Like what? “Like what? I don’t know, like health insurance.” We had spent a little while looking for the full moon from his alley, but it was nowhere to be seen: too cloudy. Oh well. Finally, after refusing the last hot dog and getting a tour of the family house (complete with a very large altar for the ancestral tablet, with Guanyin, Guangong, and Tudigong standing next to it, in a room specifically dedicated to the ancestors), we got ready to leave.
About a minute into the drive, as we were turning in front of a temple onto a bigger road, we finally saw it: the pole dance, minus a real pole. A girl in pretty impressive boots was writhing about sexily on a little stage arranged right to the side of the temple. After a minute she jumped down from the stage and started accosting various men in the audience, most of whom looked like they wanted to run away. Finding herself in the middle of the temple next to the incense stand, she turned to the altar and made the baibai motions, then sashay-waddled in the impressive boots, swishing the transparent skirt, over to the smaller altar to the left and bowed to it as well. Around this time I looked up and saw the full full moon above the temple, although no one else seemed to take much of an interest in it. So what with that, the stripper, the grilled meat, and the final return to what is more or less family here, the Mid-Autumn Festival was pretty much complete.
[i] The word for bar-b-que is a verb-object combination, which is a common way of forming verbs and seems basically to be a way of getting around transitivity. For instance, “to eat” is a transitive verb—you have to eat something—but so you don’t always have to specify what it is you are going to eat exactly, there is an unmarked version of thing-to-eat, which is rice. So when someone asks if you would like to eat-rice, they might very well be thinking of pizza. Bar-b-que is kaorou, to grill-meat. Of course other things might potentially be grilled as well, but somehow although I barely even associate the “rice” in eat-rice with actual rice anymore, I always think of bar-b-que as specifically grilled meat. Although it might very well be green peppers (there were some in the afternoon) or octopus eyeballs (there were some shortly before midnight: really Q).
posted by blahgstein at 12:06 PM
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