As many of Claremont’s students are well-aware, the Ontario International Airport is international in name only. The scarcity of flights makes it an unlikely port of entry or exit for 5C international students. For me, though, there is a hidden gem: Taipei, Taiwan is currently the only direct Asian destination served from the airport — a perfect point of transit.
I am fully Taiwanese on paper: I was born in Taiwan to Taiwanese parents. However, as I grew up in Mainland China, I often felt a kind of in-betweenness in my Taiwanese identity. When I speak Mandarin, my tongue carries no trace of the highly distinguishable Taiwanese accent. I have very little extended family left in Taiwan, and as a result, family reunions have altogether disappeared.
All of these facts, together, have come to make me feel not-so-Taiwanese at many points in my life.
Still, I had a Taiwanese passport, which made the route from Shanghai to Ontario via a layover in Taipei possible. After purchasing the tickets, my mother chirped on about how ideal the itinerary would be. Of course, Ontario’s proximity to campus was a perk. But more importantly, she insisted, this would feel closer to home; after all, the connection was my birthplace.
During the flight, a single slice of guava sat on my meal tray, tucked into a plastic dish alongside an orange and an apple. Before I even peeled back the aluminum foil covering the entrée, I reached for the guava. The fruit was pungent and unmistakably tropical, enveloped in the hazy aura of dog days spent in Taiwan. With one bite, I was pulled back in time, wandering through memories of grabbing at guava slices crowded into glass bowls, served with tiny packets of plum powder for an added tang.
I may not know much of the Taiwanese dialect — my mother was fluent while my father wasn’t, thus it’s never been spoken at home — but I definitely knew how to say “guava.” Ba la. The word for this fruit had always lived comfortably inside our family’s Mandarin, a bite-sized reminder of our origins.
It seemed that this piece of guava was doing something no documentation of citizenship ever had. It grounded me without asking for fluency or familiarity. I was surprised by how clearly that small slice symbolized Taiwan for me, and how I had never been conscious of it before.
Food is, and has always been, a reminder of my Taiwanese roots.
That slice of guava changed everything. Once I began to notice how easily food stepped in where other parts of my Taiwanese identity felt tenuous, I began seeing that pattern everywhere.
Last year — long before I gave thought to that airborne slice of guava — I read “Crying in H-Mart” by Michelle Zauner, a memoir written in devotion to her Korean mother, who passed away from cancer.
Despite our vastly different backgrounds, the parallels between her experience and mine felt shockingly visceral. I was startled to learn that Zauner’s mother and my Taiwanese aunt shared the same rare, aggressive diagnosis.
One passage, however, has stayed with me more than any others: “As we drove away from the city, I found myself looking back at Seoul as if it were a stranger… With Halmoni and Eunmi gone, it felt like it belonged to me a little less.”
Between the deaths of my grandparents, going no-contact with toxic family members, and most recently losing my aunt, Taiwan has begun to feel the same way: like a place that I couldn’t claim.
Coincidentally, I am reading “Crying in H-Mart” again this year for class. This time, as we analyzed food as a central theme, I realized that during my first reading, grief had consumed my attention so fully that I overlooked how constantly food appeared throughout the narrative. Food as memory. Food as inheritance. Food as proof of belonging when everything else feels flimsy.
In Chinese culture, there is a saying: 民以食為天 — food is the people’s heaven. Only now do I fully understand how true that feels.
This newfound sense of belonging through food, however, can be elusive. What happens, I’ve begun to wonder, when the food itself doesn’t quite belong wherever you are? Carrying Taiwan through food sounds comforting in theory; in practice, it can be surprisingly lonely.
I’ve become aware that Taiwanese food itself occupies a strangely specific kind of palate. When I’m with my Mainland Chinese friends, it rarely occurs to me to suggest eating Taiwanese food together. Not because they wouldn’t enjoy it, necessarily, but because it feels too particular in its flavors, too bound up in histories that don’t fully overlap. Taiwanese food asks you to know what you’re looking for before you taste it — like 大腸包小腸, sticky rice sausage wrapped in pork intestine; 米線, thin rice noodles sharpened by black vinegar; or 肉圓, a saucy meat dumpling encased in an elastic skin.
As you can imagine, it’s hard to find those specific flavors in Claremont. I find comfort in the semesterly night markets hosted by the 5C Taiwanese American Student Association, gratefully accepting the bites of 油饭 — sticky oil rice — and popcorn chicken that are plopped into my paper bowl. I also find myself lingering over the pork belly Bao bun that the Hoch serves for Friday lunches; it reminds me of 刈包, even though it isn’t quite the same.
I’ve always thought that it was just the foodie inside of me that craves good eats. After some guava-inspired reflection, though, I can see that I’ve been looking for pieces of my identity in every Taiwanese dish I try. An unexpected series of introspection sparked by one small slice of guava has engendered a deliberate practice of finding my Taiwanese identity in different places.
As my connection to Taiwan becomes less structural — not lived, spoken or bound — food remains my constant connection to home.
Rochelle Lu SC ’28 is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan and Shanghai, China. Her favorite Taiwanese dish is 滷肉飯 (braised pork rice bowl).
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