Beef Noodle Soup Solidarity
How to fight polarization and invasion with the rich and messy archaeology of niuroumian.
“In this age of discovery, especially with regard to the early postglacial, every new find can open up new vistas on the ancient cultural-historical scene, and the game of who-is-earlier or who-gives-who-receives cannot be played for at least another ten years.”
K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China
K.C. Chang introduces his memoir, The Story of a Sweet Potato Man, with a rectification of names.
The sweet potato, (Latin: lpomea batatas; Chinese: 番薯 fanshu), he tells us, originated in South America, but spread across the globe after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World, reaching China near the end of the Ming dynasty.
The taro, (Latin: colocasia esculenta; Chinese: 青芋 qingyu), originated in Southeast Asia, and has been cultivated throughout the region for thousands of years.
Chang notes that the physical resemblance of the island of Taiwan to a sweet potato encouraged “native” Taiwanese, -- i.e. those who migrated from mainland China, mostly from the province of Fujian, three-to-four hundred years ago -- to dub themselves “sweet potato people.” The mainlanders who arrived with Chiang Kaishek after the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war to the Communists were referred to as “taro people.”
As made clear by his memoir’s title, Chang, despite his birth in Beijing and not setting foot in Taiwan until he was 15 years old, considered himself a “sweet potato man.” His father, a leading figure in the Taiwanese literary scene during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) was born and raised in Taiwan. (Chang once speculated to a student of his that his family might originally have been low-land Taiwanese aborigines who assimilated with the Han Chinese arrivals from Fujian. Such ancestry would have bestowed truly authentic native Taiwanese street cred on Chang, but he doesn’t mention that possibility in his memoir.)
Chang ends his introduction by pointing out a linguistic illogicality that complicates clear-cut Taiwanese identity politics. The sweet potato was a relative newcomer to Asia, but its nomenclature was deployed to describe the longer-tenured inhabitants of Taiwan, while the taro, which has been in Asia since time immemorial, was applied to the johnny-come-lately mainlanders. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
In the case of Taiwanese identity, “the words taro and sweet potato,” writes Chang, “are examples of symbolic language. And symbols are slippery.” He poses a hypothetical: a family where the father is from Shanghai and the mother is from Taiwan. The son might speak some Minnanyu, (the dialect spoken by the majority of Taiwanese) and perhaps a few sentences of jiahua (“family speak,” in this case probably Shanghainese), or perhaps he can only speak the “national language” of Mandarin. He is occasionally forced by his father to declare himself Shanghainese, “but the majority [of people like him]” writes Chang, “don’t know definitely what kind of person they are.”
Despite Chang’s forthright alignment with the sweet potato people, reading between the lines I sensed a discomfort with the overly facile application of restrictive labels. As Chang’s career progressed, he circulated constantly between the U.S., Taiwan, and China. His fluency in English, Mandarin, and Minnanyu was critical to his success at facilitating cross-border, interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars. He never let ideology get in the way, and never discriminated between his Taiwanese and mainland Chinese graduate students. In a short story he wrote that is included in his memoir, there is a scene in which the protagonist, who is obviously Chang, laughs wearily at an opinion piece in a Taiwanese newspaper demanding that academics lucky enough to enjoy the freedom conveyed by a U.S. passport must still make a final choice between capitalist and democratic Taiwan or socialist China.
Let’s see: the Taiwan that imprisoned Chang for a year as a youth on bogus charges or the China whose anti-rightist campaign and Cultural Revolution destroyed the health and careers of some of his best childhood friends?
The short story leaves the question unresolved. The protagonist doesn’t make a choice. He will not allow himself to be polarized.
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In the middle of working on this essay, I decided to make, for the first time, a bowl of hongshao niuroumian (red cooked beef noodle soup).
This decision was not made lightly. My entire Sichuan journey is rooted in the quest to recapture the taste of a bowl of super-spicy night-market noodles and pork sauce that I used to gobble down in the wee hours of the night, after getting off work as a disco dj at a Taipei nightclub in the 1980s. Beef noodle soup? Not really my thing.
But after spending several mornings contemplating Taiwanese identity and the life of K.C. Chang, attempting the dish seemed symbolically (and slipperilly) appropriate. Although niuroumian incorporates two of the most distinctive elements of Sichuan cuisine, doubanjiang (fermented broad bean chili paste) and Sichuan peppercorns, it is not a classic Sichuan dish. It may even be indigenous to Taiwan. Certainly, over the years, it has been touted as an important culinary symbol of modern Taiwanese identity. One food historian, as recounted in Chen Yu-jen’s fascinating dissertation on the evolving relationship between Taiwanese cuisine and identity, Embodying Nation in Food Consumption: Changing Boundaries of “Taiwanese Cuisine” (1895-2008), went so far as to call it the food equivalent of the Taiwanese economic miracle.
That historian, Lu Yao-tung, hypothesized that the roots of niuroumian can be traced back to the settlement of Nationalist air force military veterans from Sichuan in a juancun (military dependent’s village) near the southern Taiwanese town of Gangshan. Lu’s theory is that, homesick for their native cuisine, these families immediately set about fermenting their own doubanjiang, and then eventually started incorporating it with stewed beef into a unique variety of beef noodle soup.
The definitive inventor of niuroumian has yet to be identified. But a very successful manufacturer of doubanjiang still operating today was indeed founded in 1950 near Gangshan by a former KMT airforce veteran named Liu Mingde. Liu, however, wasn’t Sichuanese! He was a native of Henan who ended up stationed in Chengdu in the 1940s. While there, he and his wife learned how to make doubanjiang.
According to an article published in Next Magazine in 2015 that cites Liu’s son as a source, the elder Liu was actually cashiered from the Nationalist air force for his participation in the Yiguandao cult, a mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism that the KMT associated with Japanese collaborationism. Left without any means of financial support, Liu and his wife started making doubanjiang, and found eager buyers in the Sichuanese families that lived nearby.
I have yet to see any archaeologically convincing evidence that niuroumian actually originated in Gangshan. But never mind that. The point is it that there can be no disputing the fact that hongshao niuroumian is a perfect example of promiscuous border-crossing culinary fusion. Neither sweet potato nor taro, as it were. Henanese-Sichuanese-Taiwanese beef noodle soup. (There’s also a theory that the stewed beef portion of the dish traces its roots to Cantonese cuisine....)
If one accepts the argument that the complexity of Sichuanese cuisine is itself a hybrid mishmash generated by the internal migration of Chinese from multiple provinces of China to Sichuan during the Ming-Qing transition, then niuroumian not only symbolizes the multicultural construction of Taiwanese identity, but it does so by paying faithful tribute to how Sichuanese cuisine came to be in the first place! And even though K. C. Chang moved to the United States well before niuroumian became a nationally recognized symbol of Taiwanese identity, for my narrative purposes the dish neatly captures his fractured identity -- the Beijing-born sweet potato Taiwanren who built a career in the United States shaping the world’s understanding of both Taiwan and China’s prehistory.
And by shaping, I mean complicating.
“This hypothesis deserves careful consideration but must be reexamined as the scope of our data widens.”
K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China
Seek truth from facts! So goes the famous Deng Xiaoping slogan. For Deng, and a post-Cultural Revolution China weary of ideologically-instigated mayhem, the words signified a long overdue repudiation of Maoism. But the slogan also works nicely as a description of the archaeological mindset. For archaeologists, textual history, unless carved into ancient stone or bone or engraved on a three-thousand year old bronze cauldron, is all unreliable hearsay. The truth must be excavated from material culture, from the facts that are buried in the ground.
The funny thing about this, however, is that the archaeological fixation on the physical construction of truth automatically leads, if one sticks to one’s principles, to the unavoidable realization of just how contingent and constructed “the truth” really is. Because one’s current interpretation of the facts must always adapt to whatever is excavated from the next dig.
And there’s always going to be another dig!
K.C. Chang’s quest to excavate the roots of Chinese civilization offers a perfect illustration of this principle.
Chang’s initiation into ancient China came under the tutelage of Li Ji, “the father of Chinese archaeology.” Li arrived in Taiwan after the end of Chinese civil war along with an impressive cohort of China’s first generation of scientifically trained archaeologists. They brought with them a stunning selection of China’s most historically significant artifacts, including thousands of the Shang dynasty oracle bones that provided the world with the first written record of Chinese history.
They also arrived in Taiwan pre-quipped with a rigid mental framework for how Chinese civilization started: Everything began in the Central Plains watered by the Yellow River.
Fresh out of prison, Chang enrolled at Taiwan’s premier university (Tai Da) and started working directly with Li. Li had led the archaeological field expedition that dug up “The Ruins of Yin” --- the last capital of the Shang dynasty. Despite his change in location and lack of access to the mainland, he still remained focused on proving that the “Central Plains” were not only the birthing ground of the “three dynasties” — the legendary Xia, the oracle-bone producing Shang, and the Zhou — but were also the original “nuclear area” where agriculture and everything else central to the definition of “Chineseness” started. The Central Plains were the middle of the middle kingdom. All else was periphery.
Over the course of his career, K. C. Chang methodically set about dismantling this simplistic hegemony. This can be seen most clearly, according to his former student Lothar von Falkenhausen, in the editorial changes made to the four consecutive editions of Chang’s The Archaeology of Ancient China, a classic that Falkenhausen regarded as “the best synthesis of Chinese archaeology available in any language.”
The first edition (1963), wrote Falkenhausen:
“...held that agriculture in China started in a ‘nuclear area’ at the confluence of the Wei, Fen, and Yellow Rivers, and drew a straight line from there to the rise of complex society and dynastic civilization. This centralistic evolutionary model persists, albeit in ever-attenuated form, in the second and third editions (Chang 1968 and 1977). It was abandoned in the most recent, fourth, edition (Chang 1986). Here the author gives equal treatment to early agricultural remains in a number of different regions throughout northern and southern China. To explain the rise of complex society, Chang introduces the concept of a ‘Chinese Interaction Sphere.’ He describes how ‘in both north and south China ... beginning around 4000 BC the several regional cultures, which had indigenous origins and distinctive styles, became interlinked in a larger sphere of interaction.’”
It’s never as simple as patriots or emperors want it to be. It’s always more messy.
The same day that I decided to cook niuroumian for the first time I also went to the library and borrowed a copy of the 1986 edition of The Archaeology of Ancient China.
Despite its eminence, this massive volume was destined for almost immediate obsolescence. The sheer scale of archaeological research that has occurred in China in the forty years since it was published dwarfs anything happening anywhere else in the world. The full appreciation of major, paradigm-smashing revelations -- the discoveries of the extraordinary Bronze Age Sanxingdui culture in Sichuan and the even more ancient jade-crazed Liangzhu “mound civilization” in the southern Yangzi delta -- only occurred after the last edition of Chang’s The Archaeology of Ancient China went to press.
But Chang saw it coming. He kicks off the introduction with a rueful reminiscence about how quickly archaeological textbooks become out of date. He notes that the fast pace of archaeological research in China since the death of Mao in 1976 forced him to rewrite the fourth edition from top to bottom. He is all too aware that the accumulation of new facts will necessitate further revisions. But this does not dismay him. It excites him. The last sentence of the intro:
“The future looks bright.”
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I’ve tried to revisit 1986 -- the year I was slurping down night market noodles in Taipei while K.C. Chang put the finishing touches on his masterpiece -- from K. C. Chang’s perspective. He had personally experienced the Japanese invasion of China, the civil war, and the harsh hand of KMT oppression in Taiwan. But now both Taiwan and China were in the middle of economic booms, with Taiwan swiftly shedding the remnants of martial law repression and China entering into an unprecedentedly relaxed atmosphere of free expression. After decades in which Chang had almost no contact with the mainland, he was now regularly visiting the country, and had been re-united, after a 35-year separation, with his older brother (who had stayed behind in China and joined the Red Army when the rest of the family moved to Taiwan.) He had even helped organize the first international conferences in which Taiwanese and mainland Chinese archaeologists could physically meet and share notes. A cycle of incredible catastrophic upheaval certainly seemed to be over. The future was bright.
The Tiananmen massacre in 1989 drastically disrupted this narrative. Not only did the crackdown postpone a long-planned joint Chinese-U.S. archaeological field expedition that was to be led by Chang, but, according to Falkenhausen, the tragedy inflicted such a huge psychological shock on him that it may even have accelerated the onset of his Parkinson’s symptoms. And as for the dream that the PRC would follow the same path of democratization and liberalization demonstrated by other East Asian nations? Forget about it.
Even so, the era of “reform and opening” still continued in fits and starts. International archaeological collaborations in China were rare but did start taking place. The economic links between Taiwan and China became ever more intimate. By 1998, the year that The Story of a Sweet Potato Person was published, three years before Chang’s death, it was by no means impossible to imagine some sort of eventual de facto peaceful unification of Taiwan and China as the inevitable result of economic integration.
As I watched my beef simmer on the night I made niuroumian, I checked my phone and discovered that Putin had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The news was troubling on multiple levels, but a particular strain of anxiety and fear manifested itself in the social media comments made by people I follow who have a connection to Taiwan. The spectacle of an independent democracy being invaded by a dictatorship which cited historical cultural and ethnic ties as cover for a ruthless attack was a sucker punch striking directly at Taiwan’s sorest spot: the fear that China will eventually use military action to enforce reunification.
Notwithstanding K. C. Chang’s 1998 comments on the complexity of Taiwanese identity, today, the vast majority of residents of Taiwan consider themselves Taiwanese in explicit opposition to mainland China. Not least among the contributing factors to this evolution has been the tenure of Xi Jinping as the PRC’s supreme authority. The relentless tightening of ideological control in China, the crushing of any opportunity for free expression or democracy in Hong Kong, and the encouragement of extremely violent rhetoric (not to mention constant jet fighter flybys) targeting Taiwan has understandably alienated the vast majority of Taiwanese from any desire to be politically affiliated with mainland China. No one has done more to discourage Taiwanese interest in reunification than Xi Jinping.
Xi’s hard line on Taiwan is matched by an equally unyielding effort to enforce control over how Chinese history is interpreted, both at home and abroad. Historians of China have been grumbling for years how access to archives is increasingly dependent on steering clear of any perceived controversy.
Those who point out that, for example, the Qing dynasty was a militarily aggressive empire built on conquest run serious risks.
As the Qing historian Pamela Crossley wrote in an eye-opening Foreign Policy article in 2019:
...Chinese historians are instructed that a history of Qing conquest incites separatist movements in Xinjiang and Tibet, and in Taiwan it encourages those seeking formal independence for the island. Instead of an empire of conquest, Xi has rewritten Qing as a cultural and economic behemoth that awed and charmed the populations of Mongolia, Tibet, Central Asia, and Taiwan into happy submission.
Consequently, one of the first orders of business for Xi’s new administration in 2013 was to mount virulent attacks upon foreign historians of the Qing (including me) that continue today. Foreign historians are derided as imperialists in a new guise; these researchers devalue the uniqueness of the Qing as a Chinese dynasty by comparing it to other empires and imply that overland conquest as a historical phenomenon is more significant than Chinese rule. Articles describe them as “historical nihilists”; their imperialist and cosmopolitan perspectives override historical fact.
The archaeological record is also being manipulated, wrote Michael Nylan, a professor of Chinese history at UC Berkeley, to support narratives that essentialize Chinese-ness in ways that fuel extravagant patriotism. The goal?
(1) to shore up the “sacred” identity of the majority Han Chinese, said to have a uniquely “continuous civilization,” the better to stake a claim of cultural superiority rooted in a “unitary” and “sacred” past; (2) to devalue regional and ethnic identities deemed peripheral to the main story of the Han Chinese (for example, the cultures of the ethnic groups in the so-called Autonomous Regions of the PRC, plus the Taiwanese, are, at a minimum, deemed “unimportant” or “less important”), so that the Han Chinese may “legitimately” assume a “caretaker” role supervising and re-educating them; and (3) to counter regional loyalties, by subordinating local identities to a powerful center.
Of course, Xi Jinping is hardly the only powerful figure in the world trying to fuel nationalism and xenophobia through simplification and top-down ideological mandates. CCP directives banning the denigration of Chinese historical figures bear an uncanny resemblance to the efforts of Republican Party functionaries to control how history is taught today in the United States, or to how the government of Narendra Modi in India tirelessly seeks to valorize Hindu narratives over Muslim.
This is the blight of our times; the conscious manipulation of history to breed polarization. It is the opposite of seeking truth from facts. It provokes mutual hatred and war.
K. C. Chang would not have denied the possibility that cultural continuities can be discerned in Chinese history that may trace all the way back to the Paleolithic era. But I believe that he would have stressed that any such interpretations have to be rooted in the facts in the ground, and not in patriotic dogma. And he would have remained open to the possibility that all interpretations are subject to further, potentially drastic modifications, as we keep digging deeper. The more you research, the more you ask questions, the more complicated things get it.
To make my first niuroumian, I started with the recipe from Cathy Erway’s wonderful The Food of Taiwan cookbook. I biked to my local 99 Ranch to pick up some fatty beef shank and bok choy. I laid out my mise en scene, in the full knowledge that I would be incorporating this adventure in a newsletter post.
Only then did I review the recipe closely enough to see that it called for two to three hours of simmering for the beef chunks. Ooops!
Dinner was late that night. I also made other “mistakes.” The recipe seemed to call for an inordinate amount of water so I cavalierly cut the recommended amount by about a third. I also doubled the suggested quantities of doubanjiang and Sichuan peppercorns.
The result was not soup, but an umami, peppercorn-tingly broth so thick as to really be a sauce. This was not classic Taiwanese niuroumian. This was something else. A Henanese-Sichuanese-Taiwanese-Cantonese-Berkeleyese mishmash.
It was frigging incredible. The beef chunks were as tender and savory as anything I’ve ever put in my mouth. The noodles, coated in a thick and fiery doubanjiang based sauce, were chewy and rich and utterly addictive. After my first bite, I knew I would be making this dish regularly for the rest of my life. That’s a good feeling and it certainly doesn’t happen every time I attempt to break new culinary ground.
As I wallowed in the afterglow, it dawned on me that the dish had not just sated my appetite in stunning fashion; it had also unexpectedly resolved a contradiction at the heart of this entire Sichuan literary project.
My love of Sichuan food impelled me on a creative path to learn as much as possible about Sichuan culture and history. But my ties to Taiwan are far deeper and more personal. My four years in Taiwan created a deep affinity with the nation and its people. When Taiwan is threatened, whether directly by the CCP, or indirectly by Vladimir Putin, I feel threatened.
But my personal connection with Sichuan is paper-thin. Despite visiting the mainland more than a dozen times since 1985, I’ve never lived there more than a couple of months in a row and I’ve only visited Sichuan once. There have been more than a few moments during the last seven years when it has struck me as bizarre that I am devoting so much intellectual capital to Sichuan, when it is Taiwan that both holds my heart and feels destined to a fulcrum point in world history in the 21st century.
My niuroumian scoffed at this paradox. My niuroumian declared that it is possible to build Taiwanese identity with Sichuan ingredients. It’s confusing and contradictory and always subject to further twists and turns... and that’s all OK. I am a mish-mash. Hear me roar.
I now see my decision to grapple obsessively with Sichuan cuisine as a crucial leverage point that, after decades of distraction, seduced me back into reengagement with both China and Taiwan. The years I have spent struggling to read Sichuanese novels have given me the reading comprehension tools to gobble down Taiwanese memoirs and newspaper articles. Curiosity about the role of cooking utensils in the birth of Chinese civilization led me to the full breadth of K. C. Chang’s work. Sichuan food gave me the starting point; from here on out I’m just following the path as it presents itself, keeping an eye out for the rich broth of messy complexity and declaring as anathema all efforts to simplify and polarize, impose and essentialize.
I don’t think I’ll be asking myself any more if what I’m doing makes sense. Because when I took my first bite of that noodle dish I knew that I was exactly where the universe wants me to be.