The Chinese, some say, take their food with them wherever they go.

Indeed, almost every Chinatown or Chinese quarter--whether in San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, Sydney or Melbourne--got started with food (Chinese restaurants). The impression that most people have of Chinatown is one Chinese restaurant after another, the shopwindows hung full of rows of glistening roast duck, pressed chicken and ch'a-shao pork.

Under a bright light, a chef takes a pressed chicken off its hook in the window, puts it on the chopping block and--whack, whack, whack--dices it into appetizing bits with a few deft strokes of the knife. It makes for a lively scene, especially when the smell of roast and cured meats drifts into the street.

That's the flavor of Chinatown at its most distinctive.

When we moved to Melbourne from San Francisco five years ago, the first thing I did after getting off the plane was to look for food used in Chinese cooking. When I found that the Chinese specialty shops were far less well-stocked than those in San Francisco, it was hard not to be disappointed and even a little depressed. How would I ever get by?

A friend of mine who has lived in Australia for more than 20 years said at the time, with the tone of a person who has paid her dues: "Hey, it's a lot better now than before! There's bak choy and tofu and Chinese chives . . . Why, if we wanted to eat Chinese food back then, all we had was stuff in cans"--the implication being, you don't know how lucky you are!

More and more Chinese specialty shops have opened up here over the past five years, and now there are one or two in every shopping mall. The variety has increased quite a bit, too: There are Chinese foods from Taiwan, mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and Indonesia. But there still aren't many with an authentic, down-home Taiwan flavor, so some immigrant families began improvising.

First there was the person who bought gluten at a health food store, soaked it in water to let it coagulate, squeezed out the moisture, chopped it up, fried it in oil and came up--voila!--with mien-chin (dough lumps). Cooked with wu-hua jou (streaky pork) and lu-tan (eggs hard-boiled in soy sauce), it makes a lu-jou fan (rice with minced meat stewed in soy sauce) no whit inferior to that sold at the Nanking W. Rd. traffic circle in Taipei.

Once the research vogue had caught on, someone else bought yu-chiang (hoysen sauce) at a Chinese specialty shop, spread it on pork strips and cooked them in a soup made of sliced cabbage, carrots, mushrooms and bamboo shoots to make authentic-tasting jou-keng. With vinegar and a dash of pepper and coriander, it's as tasty as any you'll find in a Tainan night market.

And there was someone who mixed no-mi fen (polished glutinous rice powder) with sugar and water, steamed it for 15 minutes, rolled it into round balls and stuffed them with bean paste or peanut powder to make mua-chi (a sweet, sticky pastry). Of course, if the proportions are off the first couple of times around, it'll form into a sticky glob when it's steamed, and you'll have to give it to the kids to use as paste.

These "inventors'' were mostly housewives who made use of their native wits as clever Chinese to do Madame Curie one better. More to the point, though, it was because of their homesickness, of people in a foreign land, having tasted all the flavors there, being forced to adapt: Necessity is the mother of invention.

One of my friends from Taiwan, who has been in Melbourne for three years, says that what she misses most from Taipei is cha-chiang mien (noodles served with bean sprouts, minced meat, cucumbers and a sweet sauce). Actually, the bean sprouts, minced meat and cucumbers are all available in Australia, and even if the noodles aren't la-mien (ramen in Japanese), they'll do in a pinch. But the key ingredient--t'ien-mien-chiang (sweet noodle sauce)--is nowhere to be found. She went to every kind of Chinese specialty store and tried chu-hou chiang (fermented bean paste) from Hong Kong and mo-shih chiang (mushroom-flavored soy sauce) and p'ai-ku chiang (spare rib sauce) from Singapore, but the flavor just wasn't right. Finally, she found a sauce called yuan-shih chiang (ground brown-bean sauce), which is pretty close in flavor, except not sweet enough. But that was easy to solve--she just added sugar and recooked it. Her discovery thrilled her to no end. Besides telling her friends and relatives about it, she ate cha-chiang mien three days straight, to make up for her three years of unrequited love.

In fact, there are a host of unrequited lovers like her. Ever notice how the people in the line for "Items to Declare" at customs in Australian air- ports are almost all Orientals? When Australians go through customs, they can choose to stand in line for either "Nothing to Declare" or "Items to Declare." It works on the honor system, but customs reserves the right to search, and if they find any prohibited or tariffed items being brought in, the passenger has to pay a stiff fine.

The reason Taiwanese head for the inspection line is they're not sure whether the food they're bringing in will pass muster. What comes out of their suitcases are mushrooms, mooncakes, instant noodles, fermented tofu, preserved fruits, dried bamboo shoots. . . . Some of them are hard to explain to customs. They probably can't figure out why Chinese people, coming from thousands of miles away, always bring the same kinds of things with them--or make the connection with all the Australian families that head off to Chinese restaurants on Friday or Saturday night for a big dinner.

When I lived in Taipei, a friend from the U.S. went to the Tung Lai Shun Restaurant and ordered 3,000 chiang shao-ping (sesame seed biscuits with meat) when he was just about to go back after a visit. Fresh from the oven in the morning and carried on board the plane in the afternoon -- how could they ever be eaten in one go, I asked. He said he put them all in the freezer and stayed stocked up for a year and a half.

Recently, it's been popular with quite a few Taiwanese living in Australia to bring back vinegar. Ta Hung Chekiang vinegar from mainland China, Tien Ting sweet vinegar from Hong Kong and locally made white vinegar are available in Australia, but they can't compare in flavor with Chen Chiang vinegar from Taiwan. Now that the fad has caught on, almost everyone from Taiwan brings back a couple of bottles of vinegar instead of Napoleon brandy.

Most of the Oriental specialty shops in Australia are run by Chinese from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia or Hong Kong, and they naturally favor their own varieties of foods. A gourmet from Taiwan sounds very ill used: "I've waited eight years to find decent dried tofu, and meanwhile Chinese people have won several Nobel Prizes. I never would have believed dried tofu was so hard to make."

Some mainland Chinese in Melbourne have recently begun making it though, including spicy, wu-hsiang (five flavors) and lan-hua (orchid) varieties. While it can't compare in quality with the dried tofu sold at South Gate market in Taipei, it's passable in a pinch. Word has spread like wildfire, and families from Taiwan are snapping it up right and left. Guests don't give their hosts Australian wine or chocolates anymore but packs of Chinese dried tofu instead.

A friend who had tried some still wasn't content. He posed another challenge: "Can anybody make kan-ssu (dried tofu strips)?"

Having mentioned kan-ssu, he started to reminisce about the ham and shrimp kan-ssu at the Silver Wing Restaurant in the East Gate district and the kan-ssu in cold sesame sauce at the Hsiu Lan. He went on in rapturous tones, his voice choking with emotion--it was hard to tell if it was the food that was making him nostalgic or his homeland.

That was when the friend who has lived here more than 20 years couldn't resist butting in about the old days:

"Now you've got bak choy, Chinese chives and dried tofu, but when I think of how it used to be for us. . . ."

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(Photo by Arthur Cheng)