Authenticity is a Threat/East Asian Eating Guide

Image description: A hand in a white kitchen glove picking out a kimchi pancake from a stack of them. Other types of buchimgae (Korean pancakes) sit on the same table in plastic white trays at a food stall. Photograph: Karen Leong.

Words by Karen Leong.

Two days after I arrived back home, all I wanted was fried intestines on a stick. It’s a vision of red — drenched in mustard and hawked for by vendors in the backstreets of Mong Kok and Jordan. Entrails excite me. All and any textural presentations that curl in rivulets snag my eye, and my stomach, ever-prescient, gnaws to follow.

My friend Niamh once said, "The mouth is a grotesque hothouse, a gateway and a gift shop. Transgress its boundaries, and you have fallen to the gutter."

For under a month through East Asia, I let my mouth become the altar at which I learned to eat again. There is a wealth of recipes, exported by diasporic hopefuls, in travel reels that size up restaurants and hawkers alike with a conspiratorial air — now this is the local dive, did you know?—that are primed to grab our interest and attention. All of us live in that divot, where our fleeting attention span and the desire to uncover the next best unknown intersect. We all have gobs that need filling, and as of late, we crave authenticity in all its strokes. I trawled on foot through night markets in Taipei and Seoul to see if I could outwit and outlast the white tourists. I was a thoroughbred raised in Hong Kong, and returning to it, I found that my hunger for the past could only be editorialised like this: I needed to eat the food that fed me.

Immediately recognisable to the gatekeepers of good taste and bespoke hospitality stalwarts are the ornery, mouthfeel cravings, drunken or spontaneous, if not both. Everyone loved Anthony Bourdain. No one faults Alison Roman or David Chang for their respectively manicured or irreverent approaches to cuisine. It’s important to remember this: I have no qualifications or accreditations in the culinary field. I am one woman on a month-long love letter to the Eastern Asiatic who left and came back and left and came back by happenstance.

I mock these precious tendencies, but I am complicit in upholding them when I eat. Words are snappy, snappier yet are the taglines ‘As SEEN ON NETFLIX’, and ‘Time Out rated’, that emblazoned the storefront of many a storefront that slowed our steps. East Asians, in all our iterations, cannot resist an accolade dressed up as a good deal. The consciousness of such tendencies produces an upturned nose-esque reaction to well-lauded eateries, and this, in turn, paralyses us from eating from gut feeling.

Here are four meals that I want to share with you and Colournary that left me with the eagle-eyed understanding that if there is a memory of a taste, it’s a gift I want to share. 

Image description: A dark table strewn with hotpot ingredients in various bowls, including: spinach, lettuce, fish balls, beef balls, tofu skin and puffs, enoki mushrooms, cherries in heart-shaped bowls and some empty wine glasses. Photograph: Karen Leong.

HONG KONG — My mother headed this. Hotpot, a ritual. The weather isn’t cool enough, but I want it nonetheless for the final supper in my home in the city where I started the year off in a stymied, blundering state. The table is crowned by some of the truest pearls: my best friends from Sydney and Hong Kong. We preface the meal with a precursory round of oohing while my mother uncorks a bottle of Champagne. We descend, and I make a dipping sauce for the table: two parts chilli oil, minced garlic, one part vinegar, and a streak of sesame sauce and shallot to boot. A gust of meaty air rises up around our bodies while we dunk coils of fatty beef and shredded tofu skin into the soup. It’s a study in binary: The partition divides two containers of broth: one spiced tomato and one chicken stock.

Image description: A dark table strewn with hotpot ingredients in various bowls and a hotpot, including: condiments like fresh chillies, coriander, thin slices of pork and beef, shellfish and a bottle of wine. Photograph: Karen Leong.

You have to lean close and claw your way through the sediment and soup to find the food you deposited mere seconds ago, dunking the slotted spoon into the blistering depths. It looks a great deal like the goldfish scooping of my childhood, where time was pithy and your net, made of paper, worked against you. Here it is less jostling and more jousting, the quasi-outrage as the beef balls you ladled into the broth mere seconds ago are now half-chewed in someone else’s bowl. After much fanfare comes fruit, but not for me. My own bowl is hallucinogenic-red and streaked with Mala chilli oil. In a moment of heart, we toast to friendship, sinking our cherries into the depths of our Champagne flutes. An act of sisterhood. We are braying with laughter that shakes the table, and my youngest sister tells us to shut up in frenzied rage until we pacify her with the mango pancake bought from the market down the street.

Image description: A white table with two small plates on top of it. The plate on the left holds century egg with spring onions and chopsticks on top, the plate on the right has reddish pigs ears and Karen’s finger rests on it with a blue ring featuring a pearl. Photograph: Karen Leong.

TAIPEI — A sight for sore eyes and a belly full of piss: marinated pig ears and tofu salad, heaped with century egg. I am eating for one; my travel companion, who had chosen to spend the Sunday with the linen sheets over his eyes, left me to my own advances, and I am out for blood. The Taiwanese and the Hong Kongers have a love affair interlaced by their individualistic streaks, and I make sure my Mandarin is passable when I mumble my thank you. The food is cold and silky, and the day, short-lived as it had been, was without a breeze. I have always loved the metal-boot taste of century eggs. From a young age, I was told to be careful not to indulge, for it would turn me dumb. The concentration of ammonia and hydrogen sulphide that gave century eggs their customary grey-black sheen is harmless, but the propaganda had seeped in. I baulked at the sight of one for years, until I snapped during lockdown and started eating them whole with my lunch. It had to be an exercise in era-defining malaise, needling back to my roots like a prolapsed prodigal daughter, when Sydney as I understood it had collapsed.

Now I am gormless; I have no etiquette. When I let myself, I can eat very quickly with no preamble. The simplicity of cold food on a hot day, the elasticity of pig's ears—all of this achieves a grotesque equilibrium towards my baser instincts. Walk into any ‘humble’ eatery in Taipei and you will find the equivalent of a snack trolley laden with cold appetisers. I favour all in the usual line-up: braised gluten with wood ear mushroom, cold chicken, spicy cucumber salad, and, of course, with much fanfare, my order.

Image description: A steel table holds two steel bowls including a small one on the left filled with kimchi, the one on the right has the knife-cut noodles in a soup topped with nori, and two empty white bowls are stacked on top of each other above it. Photograph: Karen Leong.

SEOUL — I’d been to Gwangjang Markets before, almost five years ago. It was that trip to Korea where I had broken my girlhood oath of vegetarianism. Now I am lugging my best friend there in the biting cold, and even at the start of the day, the place is teeming. There are throngs of people trailing from every side under a ceiling festooned with flags of the world. We make many stops — kimchi pancake splat in front of us on a hissing wok, japchae in a little plastic baggie.

Image description: Two rows of various forms of pickled banchan, including a big bowl of kimchi at the bottom of the frame. They all rest on blue stools. Photograph: Karen Leong.

The crowning glory is situated in the heart of the markets, surrounded by benches, where a woman is whittling dough into knife-cut noodles. She is a decorated fellow, if any of the Street Food Netflix signs are to be believed. I think of Bakhtin’s Carnival of the Grotesque and how we are drawn to performance like moths to a flame. The noodles taste so good that I am almost vitriolic at how these normie-lauded accolades are, in fact, correct. The other ajummas (aunties) stationed across her are bowled over in jealousy. We finish our food quickly and bundle out; the line behind us has tripled since we sat down. As we hand the 7000 won to the grizzled uncle/husband/business confidante of the maestro, he runs us over with a quizzical look. Remembering neither of us have eyebrows, I smile back and ready myself for the worst.

"Where are you two from?" His eyeline swivels between us and the flags of the world above our heads.

"Australia," Our voices dip and end at the same time: equal stock reluctance and bravado; we’d be returning soon after all.

"Australia! Oh, beautiful beaches — but you don’t have this." His arms reach up for the sky, and for a split second, I think he’s going to knock my head clean off its shoulders. I can see the space within his arms. The footrush and smattering of oil, the vats of kimchi collecting in fermenty juices on red and blue stools, braised hocks sitting proudly, waiting to be sliced. He’s so pleased with himself that I can’t bring myself to disagree.

Image description: A light green table strewn holds a white plate topped with grilled skewers, fresh red onion and cucumber, to the right is an orange plate with cutlery on it and a roti, to the left is a matching orange bowl filled with a brown curry gravy. Photograph: Karen Leong.

SINGAPORE — We’d just done the inverse: I was one thing, and now I’m living another. The heat of Singapore after a week-long blitz of minus seven degrees had left me with a hunkering desire in the shape of laksa. I was averaging three showers a day, and my hair, already shorn to my chin, dampened with condensation the second I stepped outside. I inherited the fanaticism from my mother, who had joined us for the final leg of our trip. Our mouths were a perpetual ring of orange, and we had our fill of other assortments, the most notable being a particularly outstanding bak kut teh, recommended with gusto by a friend who was a Singaporean native. The pork-rib soup is a humble feat — brimming with medicinal qualities, garlicky to the tongue, and the perfect salve to our spiced noodle mania.

Image description: A hawker stall’s bright green menu featuring various images of dishes, their names and prices. Photograph: Karen Leong.

Predictably, the walls were hallowed. Every inch top-to-ceiling was strewn with images of what I’d presume were Singapore’s elite, and I even craned my head with my mother to see if we could spot any Cantonese celebrities who had graced the place before us. All gummy smiles and thumbs up next to the heavily trademarked sachets of soup. The waiter was serene and zen-lipped as we waxed on about the taste while he refilled our bowls. It was a shirt off no one’s back, an open secret that was dispensable to all who walked in.

My mother bought boxes of it to cart back to Hong Kong. I gnawed on the bone while she continued to trill, "How wonderful! How good it is to share this now with my daughter and later with her friends back home."

It’s become provocative to state the obvious when it comes to eating. The smokescreen before every modern citizen with gourmand sensibilities, the cultural and tenuous connection to the ancestral lands, somehow only mediated now by our claim to knowledge, or appearing knowledgeable. I realise, beatifically, that I don’t need to know. The truest North guide is to listen to my body and coax what I desire out of it.

Image description: A light, speckled table topped with Hainanese chicken on a white oval plate with a bright blue, patterned rim, a bowl of the chicken broth is on the bottom right and a round plate that matches the oval one is at the bottom-left of the frame holding rice. Photograph: Karen Leong.

These vignettes are for everyone and me: A star is a star. A bargain is a bargain. Sometimes, things taste exactly as they seem.