I first became interested in Taipei through the movies of Edward Yang. With little else to do during the height of Covid-19, I decided to delve further into the world of East Asian cinema, each week taping a handwritten note on our fridge of my various movie selections. Typically, it was a film by the likes of Hirokazu Koreeda, Wong Kar-wai, or Edward Yang. What I found with each of these directors, are films that are deeply humanistic, portraying the emotional textures of existence—our relationships and their silent tethers to each other, the whirring undercurrent of passing time, and the rootlessness we suffer from as we’re swallowed by ever-changing metropolises. In an article titled Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang, Ruochen Bo writes that Yang in particular,
let the city of Taipei, with its unique history and complicated identity, become a marvelous site for the world to contemplate perennial questions such as the meaning of life, the pursuit of happiness, the knowledge of the self, and the challenges of the individual’s navigation with broader social forces.
In a world that I felt increasingly alienated from, I watched these films set in a city I had never been and still somehow found comfort in characters and stories that spoke to me empathetically. What resonated with me then and still does now, is that there has never been respite from the world’s uncertainty. This is an inevitability of living, but life, even though bewilderingly different from how we might imagined it, is ours to navigate even if it feels like we’re doing so with our eyes closed.
By the time I had finished watching just three of Yang’s films, Taipei Story (1985), A Brighter Summer Day (1991), and Yi Yi (2000), I resolved that Taipei was somewhere I desperately needed to visit at least once within my lifetime. And finally, six years later living in Tokyo, I turned to my boyfriend one afternoon and said, “Let’s go to Taipei” and so, we did.
I sleep for most of the plane ride and finally find myself awake on the bus from the airport, my eyes widening as we wind around highway roads that look onto an overcast afternoon. The heavy sky hangs above lush green curving landscapes that sprout skyscrapers in the distance. From the bus window, I peer out towards a city unlike any I’ve ever seen—a dense urban jungle of buildings built into and stacked upon each other, some beacons of modernity and others with their own aged and tattered character, still breathing with feathery trees and pink flowers growing out from their narrow balconies. The bus lets us off three minutes from our hotel in the Zhongshan District, which is at first impossible to find because its entrance is on the 8th floor of a building currently under construction. We walk back and forth a few times, tired of travelling and overwhelmed by everything’s newness, until we find the hotel’s name under a list of other unrelated businesses on a beaten sign behind the security guard. He’s watching tv on his iPhone and eating a handful of rice crackers sprawled on the desk from a clear plastic container with a red lid, the type of container that every auntie or uncle has in their cupboard storing something other than the food that it originally held.
After sprawling out on the hotel bed and a brief nap interrupted by excitement, we set off to walk around Zhongshan and grab some dinner. In the early hours of the evening before the sun has fully set and when the night begins to become tinged with the faint glow of red lanterns, a fruit store is still open with oranges tied in their lacy red stockings, apples netted in pink foam, and other tropical fruits stacked on display tables draped in plastic tablecloth. Commercial posters of still-life fruit are pasted on a wall behind a tv that stands above a freezer with pink, green, purple, and yellow striped plastic bags that hang off of its corners. There’s nobody in this shop that reminds me of my popo’s garage (if it had been well-stocked with fruit). Clutter like this feels synonymous with the Chinese spaces I’m used to, and this sameness extends to those I see in Taiwan. But, around the corner from such homeliness is the juxtaposition of the crystalline wealth of skyscrapers and grandiose department stores. In the basement floor of one of these, we eat a quick meal at Din Tai Fung. The wait is short, so I feel obligated to seize the opportunity for all those reviews who have claimed 2.5 hours+ waiting times. The food was clean, flavourful, and exactly what I’d expect from Taipei’s most famous franchise—consistent and satisfying, but of course not the most mind-blowing meal of the trip. Still, it was a meal that set the tone of the trip, tastes that I continued to seek out in an effort to feel, even just for a brief few days, like I was eating back at home. Even now as I write this, I find myself once again craving a fried pork chop on egg fried rice and a steaming basket of xiao long bao.
Later in the evening, we walk through Chifeng Street in the Datong District which is dotted with old, two story buildings that have been reclaimed by young cafes, restaurants, and boutiques. One of such is a small homeware store (舊目立屋｜導航：赤峰街16-7號) housed behind sliding wooden doors with encroaching greenery bursting from steel pots on the sidewalk. Inside you can find shelves of quaint ceramic plates, bowls and cups. Nearby, there’s an independent bookstore and coffee shop (浮光書店) with a narrow bookcase and long windows reminiscent of somewhere you’d come across in Europe, but with books primarily in Mandarin. And one street over, up a narrow white stairwell, there’s a vintage store with an interior inspired by the American 90s called Mitty, a fun place to poke around while you decide on what you feel like eating. But most of all, whether you have or haven’t decided on dinner, there’s 螺螄福Rose food正宗柳州螺螄粉 across the street.
There’s always a disorientation when you arrive in a new city—overwhelmed by choice and different languages, how are you supposed to choose from the surplus of options, most of which you can’t really understand? Thankfully my friend recommended this restaurant to me and again, we were met with a line that was unusually short. The restaurant has three main dishes on the menu alongside a few side dishes, but the speciality here is the Luosifen—a Chinese soup hailing from Liuzhou, Guangxi. This consists of boiled rice noodles served in a soup made by stewing river snails, pork bones, and an array of spices and additional ingredients, typically pickled bamboo shoots, peanuts, fried tofu skin, etc. I ordered their classic dish, river snails rice noodle soup, and took a risk with Google Translate by ordering a topping of “boneless claw”. But with that risk, was an award of quite possibly the most delicious, buttery, boneless knuckle I’ve ever had, melting as it met my teeth. The soup itself was a fragrant bowl of mind blowing textures and flavours—a salty, spicy, sour broth, nuttiness and crunch from the peanuts, spicy and equally stinky bamboo shoots, sour pickled beans, squeaky black fungus and duck balls, delicate quail eggs, crispy fried tofu skin, and slippery rice noodles. All in all, it made for a perfect first meal. After a bubble tea and a wander around the streets with traffic moving in every which way, we had an early night ready to set out for the next day.
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