In his academic work and his political duties, Presidential Office Deputy Secretary General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) is constantly embroiled in international affairs and external relations. But the area of expertise he is most proud of is his cooking. Indeed, he mastered the art at some considerable personal cost.
"It was like something out of a movie about overseas students. I was studying in the US and working in a restaurant during the summer and winter vacations. I used to observe what the chef did and practice cutting vegetables in my spare time. That was how I cut off about 1cm of my left index finger," Wu recalled.
"There was blood everywhere. But as a poor student, I couldn't take any days off to recover, as I needed the money to cover tuition and living expenses. So I was back in the restaurant the next day to help out with the deep frying," he said.
Wu's experience working in a restaurant while studying for a university degree was one shared by many Taiwanese in the US and Europe during the 1970s and 1980s.
Having been brought up in a home where the kitchen was the sole preserve of women, Wu had never done any cooking before he went to Missouri in 1979 to start on a masters degree. But in order to ensure he had enough money for his second year of studies, Wu applied for work at the Yen Ching Chinese Restaurant in May 1980.
"Although it was supposedly a northern Chinese restaurant, the owners and most of the chefs were either from Taiwan or Hong Kong," Wu said. "And in order to cater to the tastes of local Chinese, many of whom were immigrants or students from Taiwan, there were plenty of southern seafood dishes on the menu, so what it offered was actually mixed cuisine."
Wu began by working as a dish-washer, but he also chopped vegetables, cleaned the food and handled deep-fried foods. The menial work stimulated his curiosity about the culinary arts, so he watched the chefs as they worked -- how they selected ingredients, how they prepared and cooked them. He would then put himself to the test in the restaurant.
"In the end I was authorized to prepare meals for all the staff," Wu said. "The chefs, seeing how eager I was to learn how to cook, would sometimes give me tips."
Within a few years, Wu's cooking skills enabled him to stand in for chefs during the lunch shift.
While he was not given the chance to become a full-time chef, he was already pursuing a niche of his own, having discovered that the actual cooking was secondary to the creation of special sauces. Chefs, he said, were happy enough to show one how to cook a dish, but they were seldom willing to teach one how to make the sauce.
"They would do this during their break between lunchtime and dinner, and when finished, they would put the ingredients back into different places, or remove the labels from the bottles or even throw the empty bottles outside the restaurant so no one could find out what they had used," Wu said.
Wu worked in restaurants for nine years. He recalled working through a St. Louis summer when the temperature in the kitchen hit 46?C -- and often working in the kitchen from 10am until 9pm.
"Taiwanese are able to cope with hardship better than other people," Wu said. "So we can deal with such rigorous training. I even came to like cooking."
"By 1983, when I went to Ohio to study for my doctorate, I could already cook a meal for other Tai-wanese students, who often gathered at my place for a meal over the weekends," he said.
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