Neiwan Theater is a rustic little spot in Hsinchu County that offers Hakka cuisine and a movie.
It’s an old two-story movie theater made of wood, devised without a single beam to prop up the ceiling. A soft light warms the brown walls. Instead of rows of seats, the ground floor and upstairs hold about 20 tables, but the essentials of the theater are still there — a working projector and a respectably wide screen hanging at the front of the room.
The screening schedule isn’t posted, so which old Taiwanese film you see is a matter of chance. Some days, you could get an appetite killer like The Kinmen Bombs (823炮戰). Today, it’s Charlie Chin (秦祥林) whispering to Brigitte Lin (林青霞) in Romance of Clouds (我是一片雲), a love story that quickened heartbeats in the 1970s.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
To go with the film, Neiwan Theater offers about 50 hot dishes created by the local population. Neiwan is a former coal-mining village that today is home mainly to the Hakka people, whose cuisine can be identified by some touchstone adjectives: salty, aromatic, heavy on the oil, economical, creative and sparked up by pickles.
Perfection (十全十美, NT$250) is most of the above. It’s an everyday version of Buddha Jumps over the Wall, a Spring Festival dish that often includes top-shelf animal products like abalone and shark fin, and vegetables like ginseng and Japanese flower mushroom. Neiwan Theater’s humbler variant uses bamboo, taro, vermicelli noodles, bits of cured ham and pork tendon, which looks to be the priciest ingredient. Though without grandeur, each component appears to have been prepared the right way — slowly and separately — so that they are equally soft and redolent with oil. The broth is as saltily rich as the shark-fin version, and Perfection still feels like a feast dish.
Neiwan Theater is famous for its betel nut flowers (檳榔花), a NT$150 dish made with the creamy white tufts growing below the leaves of a betel nut tree. These flowers are crispy and pretty palatable, with a flavor like bamboo. They are stir-fried with shaved carrots, celery, onions and some kind of mushroom, served in a hot heap glazed with a thin and delicately saline layer of oil.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
There is an army of young servers, notably all boys under 20, who form a line outside the kitchen, taking turns collecting a dish and dispatching it in a tidy flurry of industry. This means that with each dish, you meet a new server, who leaves as quickly as he arrives.
The strangest delivery was Egg Explosion (炸蛋開花, NT$150), which are fried eggs, dressed with chili sauce and served in slices like a pizza. The best was chicken soup with mesona (仙草雞湯, NT$150), which came last. This is roughly a quarter of wild chicken stewed with a handful of goji berries and dried mesona — a small thing that imparts a sweet minty freshness and transforms the broth from good to great.
Neiwan Theater also serves most of the familiar Hakka dishes such as salted pork (客家鹹豬肉, NT$150), oiled chicken (客家油雞腿, NT$200) and prawns steamed in a bamboo case (竹筒蝦, NT$200). Classic Hakka ingredients — available to buy at the street market outside the theater — make repeat occurrences on the menu. There’s a lot of white ginger lily, a fragrant flower with a slight cinnamon aftertaste, and some funky preserved vegetables that make an appearance in eggs, soup and meats.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
These preparations are not the most exquisite or ingenious that Hakka cuisine has to offer, but they are better than popcorn. With the reel going, meals here can stretch to three hours or more.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
Not long into Mistress Dispeller, a quietly jaw-dropping new documentary from director Elizabeth Lo, the film’s eponymous character lays out her thesis for ridding marriages of troublesome extra lovers. “When someone becomes a mistress,” she says, “it’s because they feel they don’t deserve complete love. She’s the one who needs our help the most.” Wang Zhenxi, a mistress dispeller based in north-central China’s Henan province, is one of a growing number of self-styled professionals who earn a living by intervening in people’s marriages — to “dispel” them of intruders. “I was looking for a love story set in China,” says Lo,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as