While we wait for the incense to burn down to around the halfway point, we eat our own lunches, biandang, convenient boxes (it’s actually the Taiwanese transliteration of bento, as in bento box, from the Japanese colonial period). A biandang is a thin cardboard box with a thick layer of rice, topped by a variety of things: usually a green or two (cabbage, green beans), a stewed hard-boiled half of an egg, some form of tofu, maybe a fish ball, and a main dish. Today as a main dish I have bought something that shocks even me: kourou, a thin layer of pork topped by a thick layer of fat and skin, stewed heavily in a sweet brown sauce. I remember one of my teachers commenting that she didn’t care very much for what she called the “white meat” part of kourou, which where I come from isn’t even “meat” at all, but “fat” pure and simple. This is a very popular dish in the restaurants that cater to pilgrimages and other long-distance karaoke bus-based excursions, and the first few times I went out on trips with people from the neighborhood I study I was handed large slabs of this disgusting, quivering, lardy mess. It was absolutely nauseating. But there you have it, the gradual assimilation of the taste buds.


a little break for some offerings to our own stomachs: kourou