The Value of the Taiwanese Caishichang

“Freshly steamed buns! Freshly steamed buns! Three for 50 kuai! Just finished steaming! No need to wait in line!” a fifty-something vendor calls out to passersby on the streets of Taipei in Mandarin Chinese. He lifts the lid off of a tall stack of cylindrical tin steamers to reveal a huddle of buns cloaked in steam. “Assorted fillings. An old, traditional recipe! Three for 50 kuai!”Across the street another voice echoes, this time in Taiwanese: “Guava, 10 kuai! 10 kuai!” A few shoppers turn their attention to the sound of a good deal, and join a growing crowd. Pale green and the size of softballs, the guavas are but one of the many winter tropical fruits being sold at the corner stand today. Next to them sit mounds of waxy mountain apples, persimmons, and red dragon fruit. “10 kuai! 10 kuai! Sweet guava!” The saleswoman repeats in Mandarin Chinese while simultaneously weighing a pink plastic bag of mountain apples for a customer. She hoists the bag to the shopper. “It’s 73 kuai, but 70 is fine.”These scenes are from a daytime street market, colloquially called a caishichang (菜市場, “vegetable market”1), located along a nondescript stretch of six city blocks in an urban-residential neighborhood in Taipei, Taiwan. The phrase “street market” is synonymous with Taiwan. Tourists near and far travel to the island nation to explore the famous night street markets of Raohe or Shilin in search of niche dishes, like Stinky Tofu and Oyster Omelets, and kitschy, cheap toys. But what is lost in this hyper-focus on night markets is what happens when the sun is up.2The words and photographs in this essay come from the perspective of an American-born Taiwanese, or “ABT.”3 Taiwan is the birthplace of my mother, and the same of hers. It is a place I consider my second home. As a youth, I spent summers exploring the busy Taipei streets and city parks during school breaks. As a teen, I caught rides on the backs of friends’ low-powered scooters, puttering to cheap hotpot restaurants and movie theaters. My Taiwan routine has not changed much since. As an adult, while visiting on holiday vacations, I walk the same vibrant streets and laugh with the same family and friends.As an ABT, the lack of international and academic attention paid to the caishichang has always been top of mind—a wrong that felt necessary to right however I could. So, when playing tour guide to friends from the States, the caishichang is always on the to-visit list. And, now, as a researcher, I’m attempting here to rectify this oversight with you.The stories and photographs included in this essay come from a week’s worth of participation-observation at a caishichang located in the central Songshan district of Taipei. It is the exact same market I have wandered through and eaten from for over thirty years. Over the recent rainy winter, I walked a couple of city blocks to this market two to four times a day to watch and document the goings-on. I made these observations in hopes of documenting and understanding if and how the daytime street market is a central ingredient of local Taiwanese foodways, economics, and sociopolitical life, as well as to shine a light on this personally dear space.While the intimacy I have with this caishichang is beneficial in many ways, such as a familiarity with the vendors, foods, language, and schedules, I can’t deny the scholarly disadvantages. There is a blindness that accompanies intimacy that can be hard to overcome as a researcher. What might stick out for someone new to this environment may not for me, and an issue that might for some call for deep interrogation may be a taken-for-granted reality in my eyes. I have tried to minimize these risks by being particularly mindful of what I have seen, captured, and written for you, as well as through the use of existing literature and research. So, despite these potential issues, I hope you come away from this essay understanding the importance of the caishichang to everyday Taiwanese and to ABTs, like myself. And perhaps you will add the caishichang to your must-visit list.Every week, Tuesdays through Sundays, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., the Songshan caishichang evolves into a cacophony of consumption: shoppers on mopeds compete with umbrellaed pedestrians for space. Indonesian and Filipina caregivers push elderly folk in wheelchairs, who socialize with neighbors and pick up daily goods. Street vendors hawk an array of wares—hand-rolled maki sushi, homeopathic remedies for arthritis, dried shrimp and shiitake mushrooms, waist trainers for men, fresh-pressed sugar cane juice, braised pork trotters, and mud-caked fresh lotus root—espousing the high quality and low, low price of their goods. The occasional audacious car creeps down the street, blocked by the crowd’s utter lack of urgency to move out of the way.Taiwanese describe the atmosphere of these markets as renao (热闹), which translates roughly to “lively” or “bustling with excitement.” But the translation fails to grasp the near-literal buzz, the collective effervescence you feel while strolling down the market, eyeing and smelling foods, and bargaining with vendors. The caishichang is an ordered, delicious chaos. A place to socialize and melt into a crowd. And across the nation of Taiwan, there are hundreds of these renao vegetable markets.“Laoban, laoban!”4 a thirty-something petite woman calls out to the owner of a crafts stall specializing in sewing supplies. She waves happily. “You came today!”“‘Course. It’s Saturday,” the older vendor responds as she cuts a roll of elastic bands to size for another customer. “I’m always here on Saturdays—well,” she catches herself, “not every Saturday. But most.”“Did your husband come today?”The vendor shakes her head and turns to another shopper, handing them the bundle of bands. “55 kuai.” Her attention returns. “He’s at Jing Shan today. He—”“Wow! You set up all on your own?”The businesswoman shrugs. “What’s the alternative?”Since well before the start of Taiwan as a nation, the daytime market has been a key player in both local food systems and foodways, acting as the informal central distribution point for food goods, trends, and miscellaneous daily items (Teng 2010). Unlike the United States, where over two-thirds of Americans purchase their fresh and prepared foods from brick-and-mortar retail grocery and wholesale stores5 (USDA–Economic Research Service 2022), in Taiwan, informal street vendors and their stalls reign supreme. A dated, but telling, national survey found, for example, that 84 percent of Taiwanese consumers shopped at vegetable markets from 1998 to 1999, with roughly 50 percent of consumers preferring the markets to formal grocery retail stores (Li and Houston 2001). The surveyed loyalty to wet markets seen in Taiwan matches roughly that measured in the neighboring Asian countries of China (Zhong et al. 2018), Thailand (Gorton et al. 2009), Laos, and Malaysia (Chialue and Moustier 2018), where food systems historically and contemporarily revolve around informal food spaces and middlemen.What sets street markets in Taiwan apart from those of other nations is that they are largely decentralized spaces with mild regulation and policing (Chiu 2013; Taipei City Government 2022).6 Also contrasting are the negative connotations attributed to informal and extralegal vending, which have been observed in Haiti, for example (Beasley 2012), or through the Orientalist Western lens (Cheng 2020; Allison et al. 2021), where stalls are considered “unlawful,” “underground” vectors for disease and associated with other harmful elements. Instead, Taiwanese vendors—permitted or not—and their goods are largely perceived as not deviant, criminal, or nefarious.These positive impressions are due to the political and historical seed from which the caishichang emerged. As journalist Sue-feng Teng (2010) explains in the Taiwan Panorama magazine article “From the Margins to the Center,” street vending was initially considered by the Taiwanese government as an economic opportunity for disadvantaged people with entrepreneurial aspirations. They were thus governed only by mild laws beginning in the 1950s. Reeling from the financial and social impacts of World War II and the Chinese Communist Revolution, this sentiment toward the caishichang remained steadfast for the next several decades. For example, in the 1970s, despite rising living standards, the Taiwanese government required stall owners to “meet one of the following criteria: to be of low income, to have a license or have registered with the police, to be handicapped, or to be certified by their borough chief as having familial responsibilities but no regular employment” (Teng 2010). During this period, most policymakers expected that street markets would gradually and organically cease to exist as the economic conditions of the island improved.But the exact opposite occurred. With organization and time, street market entrepreneurs began to be perceived as vital and in a favorable light. This was in part due to the transformation of vendors by the late 1980s into methodical dues-paying bodies that petitioned and made demands of the local government, as well as established formal structures within markets to dictate business affairs and logistics, such as sanitation standards (Teng 2010). With organization, these purveyors of foods and goods, as well as the marketplace itself, grew in economic, social, and political power, which remains today. There are, of course, caveats to this public perception. For instance, certain types of street vending continue to hold connotations of low socioeconomic status in Taiwan, such as the “Sweet Potato Mama” welfare project for single mothers described in Shang-Huei Liang’s (2021) essay “The Bittersweet Potato in the Taiwanese Imagination.” However, over the latter half of the twentieth century, Taiwanese street vendors and their goods largely rose in status, becoming the pillars of their communities.How did this occur? And what social and economic factors aided in this transformation?Over time, Taiwanese vendors began to be seen as sources of revenue for two key economic players: first, property owners, who could rent out their first-story units (or, at the very least, the nebulous public/private walkway in front of their buildings) for a small income (Teng 2010); and second, the local government via taxes and employment opportunities. This converted vendors from being symbols of economic disadvantage to that of profit making, which persists today. For example, a 2018 survey by the Taiwan National Statistics Bureau found that the 72,500 street vendors of the neighboring cities of New Taipei and Taipei (where Songshan District lies) employed about 119,000 people and generated $5.9 billion USD in revenues (or NT$178.2 billion). Nationally, street vendor revenues reached $17.9 billion USD (or NT$539.5 billion) that year (National Statistics of the Republic of China [Taiwan] 2018).Neighborhood folk appreciated vendors as well, particularly the access to inexpensive goods they supplied. With lower overhead costs and the flexibility to shift stock according to season, trends, and availability, the prices of goods sold by street vendors were significantly cheaper than those found in retail grocery stores. This remains true today: during observations, I found that one cherimoya (or “custard apple”) at the closest grocery store to the Songshan street market sold for 150 percent the average price offered by street vendors (NT$75 and NT$50, respectively).Freshness and local production were other keys to customers’ fondness for the caishichang. The vast majority of the goods sold at market are locally produced and prepared on the day of sale (or the night before) to ensure freshness.7 For much of the daytime market’s history, vendors provided narratives as proof of where ingredients were gathered and by whom. They also killed and butchered livestock (primarily fowl) to order so that customers could see the health and harvest of the animal. (The latter practice ended in 2013 after the Avian Bird Flu (H7N9) outbreak and concerns over sanitation, and now takes place offsite (World Health Organization n.d.). However, recent worries over pork additives, such as ractopamine, have put consumers on notice again, leading most across the nation to go to the caishichang to buy pork that they can inspect and inquire about (Suhandoko et al. 2021).) Vendors also establish evidence of freshness through a regularity and familiarity with the customer (Yang 2020): week after week after week, vendors return to the same locations to sell the same product and, while doing so, form relationships across the neighborhood. They offer samples, field complaints and comments, and answer questions. Consumers know, personally, the monger they purchase fish from and what harbor that day’s catch sailed into. From these connections, trust forms over the quality of goods.This negotiation of quality and familiarity was never more present than on two Saturday mornings, one week apart, when I watched a young man, his hair tied in a high topknot, hawk “Ningbuo rice cakes” (akin to Korean tteok) and “Korean kimchee” from a small cart, attempting to capitalize on the ever-expanding interest in South Korean food and pop culture. But, as a quiet, unknown new kid on the block, customers passed by Saturday after Saturday, unsure of his wares.Like other wet markets around the world, the Taiwanese daytime vegetable market became a space where the partitions of social stratification collapsed in on themselves (Mele et al. 2014), and neighbors of all backgrounds, classes, and ages met and fraternized over pastries and the price of chicken eggs. Understanding the power vendors had within these collapsed spaces of intimacy, trust, and food access, politicians grew to rely on street entrepreneurs as crucial political advocates. Eventually, vendors began to be called “zhuangjiao (樁腳),” meaning, roughly, “political pillars.” The vegetable market itself became a key battle ground, too, as it was (and still is) a necessary everyday locale where constituents of a particular district gathered.8 Such concentrated access to voters is highly advantageous to politicians in Taiwan. As culture researcher Yu-fen Ko (2007) explains, Taiwanese politics and election campaigning rely heavily on informal and traditional networks, such as neighborhood groups that “are not the widely celebrated modern civil organizations but represent more traditional, deep-rooted connections, or guanxi, interpersonal relations based on kinship, neighborhood, and acquaintance. [These groups] consist of interest exchange, power networking, and face, or mianzi” (Ko 2007: 24).Politicians in Taiwan thus continue to utilize daytime market vendors as a key group to curry guanxi and give mianzi to voters. During elections, candidates and their campaign staff travel to the caishichang to shake hands, talk with vendors and shoppers, and pass out promotional items such as napkins, fans, masks, and wet wipes adorned with their faces and slogans.9 After they leave, they rely on alliances with vendors to informally continue their campaigns.10 As a grandmother waits for a few ears of glutinous corn to be bagged, for instance, a zhuangjiao vendor may strike up a conversation about the election and recommend their preferred candidate.Political power was obvious at the Songshan daytime market throughout the week that I visited. With the 2022 local elections having just occurred and a special by-election for a seat in the Taipei City Legislature in January gearing up, campaigners for two candidates—Enoch Wu (吳怡農) and Hungwei Wang (王鴻薇)—traveled through the crowds. Holding signs and wearing special vests, they bowed as they handed out election gifts. “Thank you for your consideration!” one young campaigner said as she gave me a packet of tissues promoting Enoch Wu. Another Wu staff member reminded the crowd, “January 8th! Don’t forget! Thank you for your support!”11As the canvassers lapped the caishichang, they passed by large signs covering the storefront of a traditional Chinese medicine shop that celebrated the earlier election of Wenjia Zhang (張文潔), who was soon to be sworn in as an alderperson in the Third District of Taipei City. The Zhang was with the of in the district 2022), and was being celebrated for two first, the Songshan daytime market was her campaign as her the traditional Chinese medicine and second, had the same For the Zhang with caishichang shoppers and vendors, elderly folk into his store for a and some and faces in the mornings, employed local at his and every handed out New with the family on her the same across the market, was seen as the of his than The was across the caishichang, in people like my grandmother despite being a of the political to much for a woman to a of the vendor as she a and lifts two of the vegetable into were just today. 70 for this customer a to for She the how access to and the are tied to structures of power and culture et al. This is not at all a new But the in which the caishichang has these in Taiwanese have it into a and space that interrogation and have seen how over time, daytime markets and vendors have to themselves and on the of and renao doing so, they have into economic, social, and political than was expected of them when they were seen as and The caishichang has thus a everyday point for with vendors as key pillars of

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