, despite all the Chinese food. It only takes the winter holidays to prove it. Christmas is popular here, with Santa Clauses, tinsel, and holiday greeting cards everywhere. Bookstores sell miniature Christmas trees—pre-decorated—and clerks at Surewell (like our Pathmark) wear Santa caps. (Their red-shirt-and-green-vest uniforms help add to the elf look.) Christmas songs are also ubiquitous (my ninth grade biology teacher’s favorite word [“Here comes the ubiquitous Alana” No, not correct usage, as it turns out. I called him out on it, which was, in hindsight, a rather bitchy thing to do {feichang bu limao really disrespectful}. I apologize and realize that I deserve every bit of rudeness I get from my students.]), though not continuous. This makes a great difference. In New Jersey, it seems that radio stations will play five Christmas songs in a row, throw in something by Clapton, and then fall back on the holiday tunes. There are even Christmas song marathons. Here, we get a heap of songs, but they are pretty evenly broken up by other songs. The songs also tend to be more skewed towards pop or jazzy gospel versions of the songs. Very little cutesy stuff going on, which makes it much more pleasant to listen to. For example, one song I hear a lot of (a very lot of—sometimes it seems to be on repeat, though this is probably just the effect of wallowing for two hours in front of a coffee cup and an LSAT book at a local café and the next day trying on nearly every style of Crocs in a shoe store and then wavering between three colors until the employee attending me suggested I just buy two pairs—these places do not have extensive music libraries) is “Last Christmas, I Gave You My Heart.” The story in the song may take place during Christmas, and “Christmas” may be in the title, but the song isn’t really about Christmas, so it doesn’t feel oppressive.[1] Though there are many Taiwanese Christians (and a whole slew of churches that some of my fellow ETAs are trying out), Christmas here seems almost more like a fun Western gimmick than a highly marketed and publicized religious holiday. One sample of this is how co-workers ask me how my family celebrates Christmas, even though I’ve told them I’m Jewish. (Maybe they forgot but I think this happened when I was in Beijing for the summer, too, and then my teachers definitely knew I was Jewish.) I think they see it as more of an American holiday than a Christian one. To be fair, I think a lot of Americans see it this way, as well.
Tonight I had a hearty dose of how unexposed Taiwan is to Judaism. I decided to make latkes for my students to include in a lesson on Chanukah. This would require potatoes, onions, and eggs (all of which I’d seen in the supermarket), as well as either sour cream (fat chance in Taiwan—still haven’t gotten my hands on ricotta or cottage cheese) or apple sauce, which I naively assumed would be a standard food item of any developed nation. As part of the lesson, we would be playing dreidel, so finding some of these was also a must. Surely, I thought, even if there were no authentic dreidels in Luodong (a plausible scenario), there would at least be normal tops that I could decorate with ‘N’s, ‘G’s, ‘H’s, and ‘S’s.
My first stop was Jin Yu Tang, a large stationary chain store. Large in its popularity (think Staples) and in its actual size: three floors of anything from sucking candies to posters of idols (Taiwanese celebrities). On a side note, names here tend to be very glamorous. Jin Yu Tang translates directly into “Gold Jade Palace.” Furniture stores might be named something like Joy Fortune Home Décor. A popular mall here is You Ai, which I think means Friendship and Love. Anyway, after being directed to the correct room/department in Jin Yu Tang, I was shown a “top.” These are Chinese tops, an object I had forgotten about until I saw them in the store. Thinking back on it, though, I think I saw people playing with them at the Columbia Lunar Gala show. They are large wooden cones. I would not be able to wrap my fingers around one of them. At the top is a string and I think you set them spinning by yanking on the string and releasing, rather than twisting an arm of the actual object, as we do. I motioned “no” and imitated twisting a dreidel in the air in front of me. The employee who had lead me to the Chinese tops went back to see if they had any tops like the one I described. She came back with a negative, and that really set the theme for the night. I asked if there were any toy stores nearby where I might find what I was looking for. She suggested the night market, which would have been my next guess. I had hopes of an actual store dedicated to toys tucked away in the market, but what I found were what I had seen numerous times: narrow shops/stalls filled with notebooks, study guides, and toys, generally of the cheap plastic kind. I looked into a few places, but found none. People seemed intrigued with the concept of a top you spin by using your hand. I wasn’t really homesick, but I could almost feel all the bags of plastic molded dreidels flooding New York this week. If only I could reach out and snatch a few. Eventually, I settled on buying dice and covering them with paper squares printed with ‘N’s, ‘G’s, etc. (It wasn’t until this morning that I realized that a dreidel has four sides and a die six. Oh well. It worked anyway, except with one group of boys where one boy cast the die and it kept landing on one of the uncovered sides, showing a few dots instead of a letter. Each time he would look up as if blocked from continuing the game, and I would reach over and recast the die for him until it finally landed on ‘G’ and I pushed the pile of candy to him and thankfully moved on to another group.
After the dreidel/die settlement, it was time to pick up some supplies for the latkes. First I went to Poya (like Walgreens) figuring they would have apple sauce, individually-wrapped candy by the bag (for the dreidel game), double-sided tape (for converting the dice), and a hair catcher for my shower (unrelated purchase). I drew a zero, though admittedly I didn’t even bother to look for the tape after I nixed on everything else. There was some bagged candy, but expensive. Applesauce was not in their inventory. OK, I thought, it isn’t a supermarket, after all. (There were hair catchers, but too small for my drain.) On to Surewell. No hair catcher (suitable for me, that is—there were catchers that could go into a drain, but I needed a surface model). Some bagged candy, but mainly toffee and jelly-like things, some coffee and caramel sucking candies, no “fun-sized” Snickers or Crunch bars. No applesauce. An employee and I finally settled on the actual word for it (I think). At first I was calling it pingguo jiang (“apple” “sauce,” but this “sauce” is more like soy sauce) and was told to look by the bread (as if it were a jam), but on describing it as something soft that small children and babies eat, I was told that the store did not have any pingguo ni. Where might I find some, I asked the elf/employee. Try a store that specifically sells infant products, he suggested. Well, it was already too late last night to find a baby supply store. At 10:00 pm, I was lucky to make it in and out of the supermarket. I wonder if I would’ve gotten a better answer if I had also described it as a popular food for the elderly. Or are there elderly supply stores here? So no topping to go with my latkes, although H. Davies told me last night that it was actually very easy to make applesauce. Maybe I’ll try that this week. (Nice surprise call from the Davies last night as I was trying to write this entry.)
I stayed up till about 4:00 am cooking the latkes. It takes a remarkably long time to peel two potatoes and one onion. I was a bit nervous when adding the wet mixture of eggs and grated vegetables to the hot oil since I had just had a conversation with my dad about starting kitchen fires by adding water to hot oil. It all turned out alright, though, if a bit burned around the edges. One latke (my last and best!) did fall on the floor while I was flipping it from the pan onto the paper towel-lined latke plate. I considered throwing it out, but this was my best latke ever we were talking about (this being my first time cooking latkes), so I blew on it and brushed it off over the garbage can. I think it was fine, at least once I plucked off the long brown hair. I only felt a little guilty about feeding it to my students in class today (a sweet group of three girls), and mentally congratulated them on their caution with trying the latkes, though they were of course concerned for the wrong reason, not knowing the personal history of the specific latke they were sampling. But I would never ask anything of my students that I wouldn’t do myself, and so I ate a piece of that latke, too. And speaking of the Davies and cooking fiascoes, it’s déjà vu all over again.
End result: dreidel game: success. Latke sampling: sparse (but who could blame them: these latkes were cold and not giving off their particular winsome scent). I made nine large(ish) latkes, worrying about how I’d split them between my 24 students.[2] It turned out to be enough for them and eight co-workers in my office with an entire one left over for me. I guess trepidation makes the latkes go round.
[1] The day after beginning this blog entry, I heard a re-make of this song, now sung by a man. Very into the remix/karaoke culture here.
[2] Twenty-four had latke curriculums for that day. I have roughly 650 students total, and taught four classes of around 30 students about Chanukah (or “Hanukkah,” as my students know it, in conjunction with Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins). (But only the first class got latkes.)
