A few months ago, Witch Cloud (巫雲), a cultural fixture frequented by artists, writers, vagabonds and wannabe rebels in the Shida (師大) neighborhood, quietly moved to a brighter and more comfortable location in the Taida (台大) area. The Yunnan cuisine, the collection of vinyl records and the long-haired, bearded proprietor nicknamed Lao Wu (老五) - who grew up in Myanmar but has called Taipei home for the past 30 years - remain the same.
An old apartment with a small front yard, the new location seems to be a hangout for the idiosyncratic owner's friends. Inside, a wall of pop, rock, jazz and classical LPs, plus 20,000 records out back await their turn under the needle. Curios and antiques decorate the dining space, and the rustic wooden tables and chairs add a homey feel.
Born and raised in a family that came from Yunnan Province, China, Lao Wu is adept at cooking up the region's strong flavors. The menu offers some 20 dishes with exotic names like tea salad (涼拌苦茶) and Yunnan papaya chicken (雲南木瓜雞).
PHOTO: HO YI, TAIPEI TIMES
For first-time patrons, Lao Wu's younger brother and wait staff are likely to suggest letting the chef decide what goes onto the table depending on the number of diners and the degree of spiciness they favor.
On a recent visit, my dining partner and I had the pickles fried with pork (醃菜炒肉), Yunnan pig skin salad (雲南大薄片) and curried chicken (咖哩雞). Not particularly good with spicy food, I felt an explosion of intense flavors with each mouthful, but quickly adapted and was soon wanting more. The curry chicken was notable for its melt-in-the-mouth texture.
Witch Cloud remains open as long as Lao Wu and his friends are enjoying a good meal, conversation and drink. Beers and spirits flow freely into the early hours, and Lao Wu is always willing to bring more dishes out from the kitchen, even well after midnight.
Music aficionados should not be shy as it's easy to make friends with the regulars via the turntable in the DJ booth.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the