Konjac – chewy goodness. Fermented tofu – caution recommended.

So the Taiwanese are here. Each June we host some number of visitors from Taiwan. Long story, but there’s a guy named Gordon over there in Taipei & he organizes parades. He has become familiar with the Fremont Arts Council & the summer solstice parade they put on each year, & each year he sends over some emissaries to learn more about making a parade. We knew we were hosting someone but thought it would be closer to the parade date. So it was a surprise when one day last week, we got a call from the powerhouse (parade headquarters) alerting us to the recent appearance of various wide-eyed visitors. “Now?” I yelped to Rodman, “they’re here NOW?!” Yes, they were. Communication with Taiwan is always sketchy, can’t say why. Conversations with Gordon are long but afterward, you realize your brow is furrowed & there are certain key pieces of information that don’t seem to have made it across the language gap.

This year we got Muse & Cleo. They always have clever non-Asian names, names that are easy on the American brain, tho not necessarily actual names, such as Apple. I asked Muse about this & she said that they start studying English in kindergarten, & the teacher just goes around & says, “your English name is (whatever).” Her first English name was Winnie but when she got to high school, she & her mother decided that was too childish. Her mother said, “You are my muse, so you should be Muse.”

Cleo & Muse are quite nice, tho very young. Cleo is 24 & comes from a family of 4. Her parents are mango farmers. Muse is 18, just out of high school. Her English is very good & she translates for the shier Cleo. Muse is an only child, her parents are in advertising. I will say there is a lot of giggling. A LOT. This is their first time to the US & everything is so wild for them. I often hear Muse muttering words under her breath. I’ll hand her a jar of jelly & she’ll say, quietly, “jelly, jelly, jelly….”. Yesterday I spent the morning baking & decorating a cake for Rodman’s birthday. They found this hugely engrossing, & Muse, wandering into the kitchen & finding me measuring things, excitedly called Cleo in. They stood about 4 inches behind me, & when I twirled to open the fridge or slid sideways to open a drawer, they moved smoothly with me exhibiting the precision of a very attentive drill team. Many pictures were taken. Muse says her mother doesn’t let her in the kitchen; she says there is a saying about more than one woman in the kitchen being too many.

Our house is feeling very dorm-ish; cups & papers around, rumpled towels on the rack, all sorts of extra tubes & vials of mysterious Chinese stuff on the edge of the tub. We lurk just beyond the bathroom door, sitting quietly in the kitchen with the alert patience of predators, ready to pounce the instant the bathroom is finally free.

I took them to Uwajimaya a couple of nights ago. That’s an Asian food store down in the intl district. It’s recently rebuilt & it’s like an Asian version of Whole Foods, very flashy & pretty. Reid & I like to go there & try weird candies & other odd things that catch our eyes. Cleo & Muse had a good time & Muse found some gleeful pleasure in pointing out the more startling ingredients, such as a plastic bag filled with hundreds of carcasses of tiny, dried fish, their eyes crinkled & grayed. She said one puts these in bowls of noodles & broth. All I could think of was that once they re-hydrated, you’d have a bowl of what looked like the remains of a bait bucket at the end of a day on the lake. In the spice aisle, she pointed to a jar containing a mix of salt & dried seaweed. “When my father was young & very poor, all they ate was this & rice,” she said. She will go into advertising with her parents, right there in Taipei, no questions asked. You can tell they are done with rice balls.

It was a very fine shopping outing, & I learned a great deal about many items I would have otherwise gone forever without trying, due to the fact that they looked way to gross to ever ingest. Along these lines, Muse convinced me to buy a jar of fermented tofu, then cautioned me not to open it until she could show me how to use it. The next morning, she put some leftover rice in a pan with water & cooked it into what was basically rice porridge. She’d laid a nice table, & put out spicy bamboo sprouts, spicy pickled radishes, & the much talked of fermented tofu on little trays. She had us ladle some rice into our bowls, then pushed the little plate of tofu forward. “Only take a little,” she said, looking at me doubtfully. “You need to mix it in.” And what I have to say here is that I think fermented tofu is a very economical food, because we will definitely have this jar around for a long time. It’s strong, salty, & interesting, but not in a way that makes you want to snork it down by the spoonful. Every culture has some food that is super cheap to buy, but dull as dirt until you add bacon fat or whatever. They start with rice, then use bits of intensely flavored add-ins, like this fermented tofu & the dried fishies. Fair enough. In the south it’s corn, boring on its on but well worth the trip slathered with butter, salt, & pepper.

And I have a new tasty snack to look for  – konjac chews. They brought this bag from Taiwan & man, is it good. Salty & spicy & sweet & chewy & perfect. I have GOT to find this in town. Konjac is a rather obscene looking root grown in parts of Asia. The starch is extracted & then, like corn or potatoes here, it’s turned into a variety of products, like noodles, chews, candies, etc. It’s flavor neutral & lends itself to modifications. It’s a vegan substitute for gelatin. Also it’s high fiber.

Monday update: we have two more Taiwanese! A married couple. Researchers. Muse thinks they are boring. Normal & conventional is what she said. And kind of old. At least 30. Ah, to be 18… I cut a watermelon for lunch & the couple was fascinated. They thought watermelon was mostly a Taiwanese thing. Wow. Speaking as someone from Alabama, my mind was absolutely blown for several minutes. So it’s a full house here. I’m going to get them to write something in Chinese & Reid can take it to class tomorrow for a little show & tell. I’ll be taking them to a thrift store this week, also I’ll fix pancakes for breakfast one day. More on our adventures here on the Taiwan version of Walton’s Mountain as they develop.

Fit folk in Taiwan, except for their teeth.

When I was in Vietnam, I was struck by the total absence of fat people, something I’m certainly never struck by here. There were a few people who were carrying maybe 20 extra pounds, & those tended to be older women, but overall, everyone was quite a reasonable size, in good proportion to their height. It’s really quite striking. After a while you start actively looking for obese people & they just aren’t there.

Not for lack of food, I can tell you. We spent 2 weeks in Taiwan, where we did our level best to eat at least every 2 hours, lest we faint from hunger or offend our hosts. A lot of the time we were on our own, & I know I put forth a strong personal effort to evaluate as many street vendors as was possible. Altho I couldn’t bring myself to go for the splayed out squid on a stick. Eahhh…no thanks. Hey, I did have goose blood mixed with rice, tho I didn’t know it at the time. (Thanks a lot Rodman. I’ll get you for that.) And when we were at the Dream Community, we were fed multi-course elegant meals of the finest Chinese cooking, we were handed plates at the staff lunch & told to dig in, we were treated at the cafe to meals & coffee, we were loaded down with fruit if we encountered Gordon crossing the patio with a basket of it, & visits to the bakery for afternoon coffee often saw the woman there pushing fresh warm bread upon us, which of course we said yes to. One doesn’t want to be rude.

As near as I can figure, the big difference is not how much they eat, because they eat constantly, but rather what they eat. We ate fresh seafood, mostly clams & other bivalves, & shrimp. We’d often have this with plain rice, no butter, or in a bowl of noodles. Noodles have no fat, nor does the rice. Fresh seafood is mainly protein. And there would be fresh veggies, mostly greens. Little curls of baby ferns, seaweed, various lettuces, these adorned our plates & came to us mostly in a raw or barely cooked state. Overall, it was the ideal diet – ultra fresh meat & veggies, very low fat, the main starch was the easy to digest rice. It was fantastic! And fruit! Oh man…they had these things called wax apples. I could eat 3 at a a time. And this weird apply thing with a green skin but with a pit like a plum. Call zouza or something. The fruit was plentiful, totally fresh, practically free, & so succulent. I would have brought back crates of it if I could have.

I did see three fat kids. And it’s a story to make you shake your head. We were walking down a busy street & I saw ahead of me 3 boys of about 13 come spilling out of a door. They were laughing & roughhousing & when one of them, running backward from his friend, swung his umbrella up at me, I had already anticipated it & blocked it with my arm. (I’m a mom of a boy, I see these things coming a mile off.) I had seen no overweight kids at all yet in the country, so my attention was immediately caught by the routundity of these children. I looked at where they’d come from – it was a McDonald’s. Classic, isn’t it. And if you haven’t watched “Supersize Me” yet, go rent it.

Overall an amazingly fit population. I didn’t see sick people. I didn’t see unfit people. But bad teeth! Lots of bad teeth. And I mean bad as in crooked & bad as in just in bad shape. Lots & lots of people had crooked teeth far beyond anything we normally see in the US. I did see one child with braces, but I suspect that’s rare. And I saw an amazing number of people who had very obvious caps on their two top front teeth. Very bad cosmetic dentistry. I don’t know those 2 teeth were so often affected.

I just looked around online & discovered that Taiwan got universal healthcare in 1995. They finance it partly thru copayments based on income, but even unemployed people & kids & elderly have insurance. They allocate money to 4 categories: western med clinics, western med hospitals, chinese med clinics & hospitals, & dental care. Interestingly, & perhaps explaining why I saw a fit population with bad teeth, the budget for the dental category was capped in 1998 to control spending. I imagine that will change in time, as good looking teeth are much revered by the oft-emulated western world. Also, I would think that recent research showing that good tooth health benefits overall health will influence their thinking, since they do seem to be working hard to have a healthy population. Overall tho they are doing much better than the glorious US, where we have the best medical care in the world but only if you have the combined income of renowned wingnuts Paris Hilton & Britney Spears.

In annual surveys, the NHI system usually merits at least a 60 percent user satisfaction rate, which is higher than results of similar surveys in most other countries. The NHI program accounts for about 55 percent of health expenditures in Taiwan. In 2005, overall healthcare expenses accounted for 6 percent of GDP. This compares favorably with most developed countries (chart on page 23). In the United States, for example, despite vigorous cost-cutting by private health insurance companies, healthcare spending accounts for 15 percent of GDP. Correspondingly, per-capita annual health expenditures are much lower–less than US$1,000 in Taiwan compared with more than US$6,000 in the United States in 2005.

So they’re getting somewhere. They all have at least good rudamentary health care available, & that’s far beyond what we have in the US. Why are so many other countries able to provide better health care than the supposedly advanced US?