(BCN) — At Apple’s modern spaceship campus in Cupertino, engineers and designers work year-round on the latest iterations of the company’s iconic gadgets, always focused on the future. In a much more plain building just across Wolfe Road, the pace of change is a bit slower. In fact, not much has changed in four decades […]
KQED s Eating Taiwanese in the Bay
is a series of stories exploring Taiwanese food culture in all of its glorious, delicious complexity. New installments to the series will run daily from May 19–28.
I grew up as the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants first in San Jose, and later in a South Bay suburb clocked as having only a 5.1% Asian population in 1990, when I was in elementary school. Other Asian American students were rare, and Taiwanese American students were even rarer; there were no Taiwanese American kids in my day-to-day life, as far as I knew.
Taiwanese cuisine, on the other hand, remained a large part of my childhood. At home I ate light meals of vegetables and fish, with little oil, cooked by my mother. On weekends, my family went to Marina Foods or Ranch 99 for groceries after lunch at Cupertino Village, a mostly Asian shopping and restaurant center where we’d feast on soup dumplings and beef noodle soup, leaf-wrapped zhongzi and spicy string beans limp on