The Bittersweet Potato in the Taiwanese Imagination

Despite its name, the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, is not botanically related to the common white potato, Solanum tuberosum.1 This sweet oval tuberous root was eaten in Europe well before the true potato. Rumor has it that King Henry VIII could eat an incredible quantity of sweet potato pie in one sitting, in the belief that it could induce courage. The Tudors in England also considered the sweet potato to be an aphrodisiac. When Sir John Falstaff greeted Mistress Ford with “Let the sky rain potatoes” in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, he was referring to sweet potatoes (Thomas and Faircloth 2014). Imagine the lovesick Falstaff fantasizing about a sweet potato shower in his day! Whatever the effectiveness of the sweet and starchy tuber as an amorous stimulant, Falstaff’s expression introduced it as a delicious luxury in the same class as delicate confections.Treated as a delicacy upon its arrival on the English scene, the sweet potato later took on a different role and mission when it reached the Chinese mainland in the late sixteenth century. Ming dynasty officials encouraged farmers to grow sweet potatoes in the famine-prone Fujian Province to help feed the country’s growing population (Crook 2019). Beginning in the seventeenth century, when a large number of Han people migrated to Taiwan, drought-tolerant sweet potatoes were widely planted across the western lowlands and on hillsides and soon became a staple food in households that could not afford rice. Above all, over the long run of history, the sweet potato has proven to be a symbol that appears in various cultures as both noble and humble, associated with scepter and crown as well as farmhand and laborer, and that invokes quasi-mystical beliefs while at the same time representing a down-to-earth realism.Today, sweet potatoes have become fantastically versatile and are used around the world in all their glory. In the United States where I live now, for example, glazed sweet potatoes or sweet potato pies are an integral part of the menu at Thanksgiving. Among innumerable sweet potato dishes, my favorite remains those known to most Taiwanese—be it an extra-large bag of sweet potato chips from street vendors, or fried mini sweet potato balls sold in many night markets, or homemade candied sweet potatoes with peanut powder drizzled on top. I still remember fondly my mother cooking me a heartwarming sweet potato and ginger soup when I was down with a cold, or simply to warm me during the coldest days of winter. The recipe was love, Taiwanese style.While a variety of street foods that use sweet potato starch as a key ingredient are delicious (the most famous being the mixture for oyster omelets), sweet potatoes are much more delectable in their original form—simple and perfectly baked. When I was a child in Taiwan, they came either from street vendors’ drum-shaped charcoal ovens or from pits in the earth that I dug myself. I often encountered the former, rain or shine, on the busy streets in towns and cities; the latter was a traditional, time-consuming, and communal cookout activity that I enjoyed so much as a kid. I can vividly recall the singularity of smoky starchy flesh melting on my palate, impossible to resist, a perfect embrace of sweetness that leaves me pining for the land I left.Who doesn’t like the sweet potato? It’s golden. It’s delightful. What’s not to like about it? Every time when I was with my family, while I wallowed in the lusciousness, my parents or grandparents could not help but tell me that in yesteryear they used to eat more sweet potatoes than rice. I imagined that they were all sweet potato lovers like me, as I enjoyed mixing chunks of sweet potatoes with steamed rice. But for my parents and grandparents, that same touch of sweetness in my rice bowl was a reminder of bitterness: The sweet potato had been tasked with the burden of sustaining life, and conjured up memories of meager livelihoods in difficult circumstances. Growing up in the period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (1895–1945), my grandparents on both sides received little formal education. Like my great-grandparents, they were family farmers their whole lives. Born in 1956 as part of the postwar baby boom generation, my father has five siblings while my mother, born in 1959, has six. Population increase was a sign that things were getting better, that there would be more manpower to keep things running at the farm. On the other hand, more people in the household meant a greater likelihood of economic instability, as there were limited resources and too many mouths to feed. Yet since my grandparents and great-grandparents grew rice, how could they end up with little or no rice to feed themselves and their children?During the colonial period, Taiwan was the largest producer of rice within the Empire of Japan. For a long time in my family’s everyday life, rice remained a dominant cash crop and sweet potatoes served as the everyday subsistence crop. In fact, throughout the island’s tumultuous history, the sweet potato was a substitute for the rice that the working poor often could not afford. “Three meals a day, the rich has rice, the poor porridge and sweet potatoes” was mentioned as early as 1835 in the annals of Changhua County, where my family has lived for generations.2 Many families also made dried, grated sweet potatoes in anticipation of a bad harvest. In 1827, when the magistrate Pi-Kuan Hsu was transferred to Taiwan, he observed that people were grating sweet potatoes everywhere, as he wrote in a poem: “From one village to another grater rasping I hear / Under each wrist golden threads finely cut.”3 Back in those days, people didn’t deep-fry these golden threads, as do people making fries today, because cooking oil was expensive. After being sun-dried, the threads usually went into sweet potato porridge—a mixture of water, sweet potatoes, and, if fortunate, a few grains of rice. The poorer the family, the less rice was used and the more sweet potatoes and water were added to cook the porridge. To find just a grain in the soup would be heaven. It was very common for the ordinary people to eat sweet potato porridge or sweet potato soup when they didn’t have rice. Even today, when my mother tries to cheer me up, instead of imparting half-hearted words of encouragement she shares one of her favorite sayings: “You will know what to do when the time comes, just like you will cook sweet potato soup when you don’t have rice.”Memories of sweet potatoes were memories of the harsh realities of country life. Yet as the local proverb goes, “The sweet potato is not afraid of rotting in the mud. It only hopes for its stems and leaves to go on into the next generation.” Sweet potatoes not only preserve memories but also give meaning and continuity to the collective experiences of Taiwanese people. The older generation has tried to keep alive their past experiences by instilling the symbolic imagery of the sweet potato in the minds of youth. The poem “Sweet Potato Map,” written in the late 1970s by the farmer and laboring-class poet Sheng Wu of my parents’ generation, was included in the high school textbook for students to recite as part of their local culture and native language education:Papa from the rough hands of grandpa,Just like grandpa from the ones of great grandpa,Calmly took over the sturdy hoe.Hoeing and hoeing! Thousands of timesHoeing this sweet potato map,Deep into the ground.Papa from the firm shoulders of grandpa,Just like grandpa from the ones of great grandpa,Calmly took over the stout carrying pole.Carrying and carrying! Thousands of timesCarrying this sweet potato map,Its toil and glory.Papa from the inarticulate mouth of grandpa,Just like grandpa from the one of great grandpa,Calmly spread words of wisdom,Telling and telling! Thousands of timesTelling this sweet potato map,Its vicissitudinous history.Yet again, for some unwilling to recall,Even eager to cut offTheir consanguineous relation to this map,Kids! Do not forgetThe heavy footprints of your grandpa, followed by your papa,An arduous path step by step.4The narrative of the poem revolves around the motif of a peasant father teaching his children. The poet repeatedly invokes the sweet potato map and writes affectionately about the land—a land that has nourished generations of peasants. The link between land and labor is pronounced and strengthened through repeated references to the peasant’s body—hands, shoulders, mouth, and feet—through which earth and human existence are bound together like sweet potatoes and soil. The sweet potato’s deep roots in local culture are further accentuated by its shape, which resembles the main island of Taiwan. Ultimately, the Taiwanese convert the sweet potato into bodily energy as well as consciousness not only by eating it but also through subjectively embodying the imagery of sweet potato/land/human forms. While to the Irish mind the connection between the white potato and peasantry might be too disturbingly strong, most Taiwanese are proud to identify themselves as children of sweet potatoes.5Little wonder that the sweet potato should be given such a tribute in the Taiwanese context. In addition to its longer history of saving lives in famine relief and providing food security in Taiwan, sweet potatoes were commonly used, along with their stems and leaves, as hog fodder. Today, my parents still grow sweet potatoes along with other greens in a patch of garden. Unlike most of the greens that require a lot of attention and cultivation, sweet potatoes, once established, require little care. Vegetables do not come more humble than the sweet potato. It is fast growing and rapidly produces ground cover to prevent soil erosion. In an island with typhoons hitting every year, the sweet potato seems designed to survive those pestilential winds and rains, and whatever other ups and downs head its way. In the last four decades, the use of sweet potatoes has been diversified beyond their classification as subsistence, food security, and a famine-relief crop. Rich in nutritional value, nowadays sweet potatoes are eaten in increasing numbers due to advertising campaigns aimed at health-conscious consumers.I can’t stress enough that the best way to have sweet potatoes is baked whole, complete with skin. The most authentic version emerges from an earthen oven, which can be built literally from the ground up. First, you dig a shallow hole and pile chunks of clay to make a dome with a door. Next, stuff firewood into the chamber and burn to heat the clay; once the chunks of clay are blazing hot, pull out the remaining firewood with a handy tool and push in bunches of sweet potatoes. Then destroy the dome and top the collapsed clay with soil to prevent heat loss. The whole process takes skill, effort, and a lot of patience. When baked, the potato body will dribble out its natural juices that first caramelize and then burn. After a couple of hours—here comes the most important part—dig in like a treasure hunter for your hidden goodies, at the same time taking care not to destroy them. This moment of re-unearthing—since sweet potatoes have to be dug up from the ground where they grew in the first place—is the resurrection of the sweet potato! Your sweet potatoes should come out perfectly cooked, tinged by woodsy smoke and charred, and because the aromas and flavors were trapped, the taste should be concentrated and deep. Mind that when you tear into the baking hot flesh the retaining heat is guaranteed to sting your palms and fingers. You might even eat some dirt along the way.With much less effort, baked sweet potatoes are readily available from street vendors’ mobile barrel kilns, many of which are adapted from oil drums. With hot charcoal piled up in the bottom of the kiln and yellow sweet potatoes hung around the rim, those gems appear to glow in the dark as they slowly turn into tender delectables. When I worked in Taipei, during the rainy, dreary winter months, I used to buy baked sweet potatoes as much to warm my hands as to fill my mouth. One of my favorite sources was an old man who rolled a drum oven down the street, which made a constant clacking sound as he strained to push it. The drum oven, plus a bag of charcoal and two or three bags of sweet potatoes, could weigh more than three hundred pounds. I also frequented the sweet potato mama near my workplace in front of a modern convenience store, where grab-and-go sweet potatoes were also available but baked on a relatively tasteless electric grill. The “Sweet Potato Mama” project, which started in 2009 and has persevered throughout the last decade, was an initiative led by the Genesis Social Welfare Foundation. The goal was to help single mothers earn their living independently by providing them with equipment free of charge so that they could set up their own stalls selling baked sweet potatoes. It was not uncommon to witness the sweet potato mamas bringing their young children to work in the streets. They were often not old enough to go to school and yet too young to be left alone. I wasn’t surprised by the sight of a baby sleeping beside a street stand in a bucket of sweet potatoes.In fact, selling baked sweet potatoes has been a traditional small business for those who lack another set of skills to scratch out a living. I think of this street snack as a statement about circumstances and perseverance. No one plans to live in poverty, yet circumstances happen, and the children of sweet potatoes will always have the ability to overcome trying situations. The iconic sweet potato, something that the country has already associated with resilience and humbleness in times of hardship, continues to flourish on modern city streets. The taste of it, enhanced by real people’s hard work and many stories, a reminder of where I came from and who I am, has turned bittersweet in my mind’s taste buds

Aesthetics · Art · Biology · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Horticulture

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