Birds Don't Land

by Daniel Wright (Australia)

Making a local connection Taiwan

The steamy summer air mingles with the scents of thirty different types of food at the Hualien outdoor night market, in the south-east of Taiwan. Past vendors selling papaya milk and barbequed corn-on-the-cob, boiled peanuts and bubble tea, we find an almost nondescript little stall. Wood panelling and an under-lit yellow sign reading “Aboriginal Grill House” are a far cry from the garish electric white and greens of the other hawkers nearby, or the scandalously dressed male servers a few stalls away. It exists almost in a little world of its own, in its gentle solemnity, while the market-goers pass it by. Even the menu - “Grilled mountain pork slabs”, written in English - doesn’t garner attention. What draws the eye instead are the two figures within, a stern-looking woman working the grill with determined ferocity, and an older man, chopping meat behind her with a kind of ease at odds with his partner. The man catches our attention and waves us through the stall, to a makeshift seating area behind, red plastic chairs at red plastic tables. A warm breeze blows in from the ocean, just beyond the market. The man plants a pair of plates in front of us; meat and onions topped with generous salt, and a rock-hard tube of something green. “Bamboo rice,” he says, in Taiwanese, rather than the usual Mandarin. “And grilled pork.” We split the bamboo tube open to a soft gout of steam, and ladle the rice within high with tender pork. The flavours - herb-encrusted pork and sweet rice - are heavenly, and for a long moment we sit, enraptured, alone in the seating area, just enjoying. We order another plate and sit while night falls fully across the market. Busses pull up at the main street just nearby, unloading streams of shoppers to peruse the market. Out on the promenade beyond the stall, we can see person after person pass the stall by without even a second glance. Here we sit, enjoying some of the best food of our lives, and no one even notices. The couple comes to join us eventually - he sits, she remains standing, watching the promenade - and brings with them cups of a steaming, nearly-clear tea. It is sturdy and refreshing and calm, brewed from a herb that’s a melange of twigs covered in outsized thorns, grown high in the mountains that cut Taiwan’s east side from the west. We can’t help but laugh when we translate the plant’s name into English as “Birds Don’t Land”. We ask the woman how she learned to cook such delicious food, and she frowns as she tells us it is the way of her people - the aboriginal people. It’s a dying art, she tells us, as more people stroll pass the enticing scents of sizzling pork. She learned to cook growing up in the mountains, gathering what she could. She points down the road leading to the ocean behind us, flanked on one side by a flat soccer field and on the other by a line of apartments. “I could find six plants to cook with just walking down that road to the market,” she says. She picked the Birds Don’t Land herself, in the mountains, but despite its wondrous calming weight, there’s no market for it, no demand. It sits there, in her kettle, behind rows of bamboo tubes and piles of salted meats, waiting. Elsewhere in the market, there is something of a war memorial; an old tank and a decommissioned fighter jet sit just across from the open-air stage where school children bang on drums and warble on flutes. But a pair of twin sentinels watch over the gates just a short distance away; twenty-foot tall sculptures of a man and woman representing Taiwan’s native aboriginal people. She holds a pot of herbs in her hand, he clutches a knife in a scabbard. They face the rear parking lot. A flurry of shoppers stroll between them on their way to carnival amusements and deep-fried delectables. Like the stall, no one seems to notice them. The birds don’t land. But back at the Aboriginal Grill House, there are at least two birds who still appreciate delicious food, and a dying art.