ANAS CHAO

FITTING IN

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For someone that grew up in Saudi Arabia, green leafy vegetables were not part of my usual diet. Although my mom may have made cabbage dishes after we moved back to Taiwan, somehow my memory did not register them. Perhaps those memories were overshadowed by the more flavourful cabbage dishes I had at restaurants.

My parents were, and still are, relatively religious, so we had a pretty strict Halal upbringing. That meant very limited options in Taiwan, and eating out meant rotating between a couple of restaurants. The earliest memory of eating cabbage was at this particular Chinese Halal restaurant in Taipei, stir fried in wok with garlic and chilli, then mixed with white vinegar. That touch of vinegar gave it personality, and the heavy taste made the vegetable dish likeable amongst a spread of meat dishes. It was not invented by that place, not even one of their signature dishes. But it completed my dining out experience that made me feel equal with my Taiwanese peers — we eat out every now and then just as any Taiwanese family.

As I grew older and became more familiar with Taiwanese people and culture, I started going to stir fry restaurants. It's a traditional eatery where most dishes are stir fried and have similar low prices, usually under $5 per dish. People go there to drink and chat, so all food is heavily seasoned to help with drinking. Ordering plain stir fried cabbage became a way to balance the diet, but it also provided me a chance to taste the traditional Taiwanese version. I sometimes suspect they used lard, which is probably true in most cases, but I somehow ignored that and chose not to ask. It just felt too much to ask the waiters at such a busy place, but deep down, it was my attempt to fit in. It was like saying "yeah I can eat whatever you're having, I'm living a similar life as yours, I'm as Taiwanese as you are".

My sister married a Taiwanese man who converted into Islam, and he loved soup. Soup was never part of our daily meals, but it certainly is now whenever my brother-in-law is eating at my parent's place. Their son also turned out to be a soup lover, and that made my mom become especially fond of making soups. The easiest soup, and luckily my nephew's favourite, is cabbage chicken soup. You literally just boil chicken with bones and a bunch of cabbage, tender chicken meat releasing all its umami to blend with the sweetness of crunchy cabbage, just beautiful.

I copied that soup and made it into one of my usual dishes when I started teaching cooking classes at a high school in Taipei. Sometimes as is, sometimes as a base to mushroom soup, or with a bit of bamboo shoots and a little starchy water, it transforms into a thick soup that is one of the most common Taiwanese street foods. These dishes made the students exclaim that I was being "extra Taiwanese", as opposed to my usual dishes that were a mix-and-match of Chinese, Arabic and western cuisines.

When I moved to the Netherlands two years ago, I first lived in a shared house with the most disgusting bathroom and kitchen, I simply could not cook there. In fact, to this day, the housemates still do not know if I can cook a meal or not. I toured around classmates' homes to cook instead, and plain stir fried cabbage seemed like the quickest dish that was tasty and nutritious. But they came out chewy and just tasteless the first few times I made them, then I realised they were of a different variety than the Taiwanese ones, so I had to adjust my Taiwanese cooking method to adapt to what was locally available.

It is funny though. Cabbage was first brought to Taiwan by the Dutch colonisers, and after many years of further colonisation from the Japanese that eventually led to several genetic engineering works, Taiwanese now enjoy various kinds of cabbages that have become essential to Taiwanese cuisine. Yet here I am, readjusting the Taiwanified Dutch cabbage back to its Dutch conditions. Where does the cabbage go when it wants to go home? Is the cabbage home yet?

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