"Sichuanese" beef noodle soup
However, examples like Chen Mei-lien and World Soybean Milk Magnate are the minority. Over the past half-century social change in Taiwan has been rapid, and military dependents' villages are being relocated and redeveloped at an ever-increasing pace, so that these special foods are losing their "habitat." For instance, because Tsoying in Kaohsiung City is home to a naval base and is surrounded by military dependents' villages such as Mingte, Chienyeh and Tsuli, eateries sprang up near Tsoying's Chungshan Hall selling all kinds of foods like northeastern-Chinese pickled cabbage, Nanjing-style ruyicai (a stir-fried mixture of seven or eight different vegetables) and crispy rice balls. The area became a major leisure attraction, but a road widening scheme a few years ago forced the vendors to move away, and the area has lost its previous liveliness, much to the dismay of former patrons.
Due to changing values, second-generation residents of military dependents' villages are not eager to take over their parents' eateries, so that the skills are being lost and businesses are closing for want of a successor. "The older generation were pragmatic and content to be clothed and fed. But the kind of hard work required in this business is second only to heavy manual labor, so few encourage their children to carry on in the same trade. Instead they urge them to study hard and go up in the world. Hence when military dependents' villages are redeveloped, or the chef gets too old to carry on, many close down." So says Feng Chih-jen, owner of Five and Six's Little Shop in Tsoying, which mainly sells xiekehuang.
Happily, however, this does not mean the end of dependents' village snack foods, for their seeds have been quietly spreading to neighboring fields. For instance, among Taiwan's shaobing and soybean milk vendors, many of those associated with Ssuhai Village near Tsoying are Taiwanese Hakka. "The Hakka are no less industrious and willing to endure hardship than Shandong people, but they are even more skillful, so that in their hands these foods often turn out even better," comments Lu Yao-tung, who says that a shaobing and soybean milk shop near his home is run by a Hakka man whose six brothers also all have shops in different neighborhoods.
Today, craft skills can be learnt by many avenues-they are no longer passed down only within families. In former times, to learn a trade which was not practiced in one's own family one had to serve an apprenticeship, working as well as studying, and it would be years before one could become a master craftsman and set up on one's own. Today, more stress is laid on specialization, and there are teachers available to teach all kinds of skills. Anyone can enroll at a catering school or attend cookery classes, and there are both courses and professional services available in everything from cooking and business management to wholesaling.
With some popular foods such as beef noodle soup and various other snacks, restaurant chains and franchise operations have appeared, and naturally these are not restricted to people from military dependents' villages or of mainland Chinese descent. Thus in beef noodle soup restaurants which present themselves as "Sichuanese," the people in the kitchen and serving the customers are mostly southern Fujianese dialect speakers of Taiwanese descent. Meanwhile, when many second-generation mainlanders who grew up in Taiwan go to the mainland to visit relatives or to travel, they find that in Sichuan itself there is no sign of the "Sichuanese beef noodle soup" to which people in Taiwan are so accustomed.
"This is a very important change which has taken place in Taiwan's catering industry over the past several decades," says Lu Yao-tung. "At first you had all kinds of cuisines coexisting, each with its own distinctive flavors. But then they began to draw on each other, and later combined with local Taiwanese cuisine to gradually develop new flavors." Lu says that as food and drink are habitual components of everyday life, they may easily change as the living environment changes. Chinese cuisine itself, over its long history, has undergone countless amalgamations and changes, not only eliminating dietary differences between people but also eroding regional differences, thus making terms such as "authentic" or "traditional" difficult to define.
"Sichuanese" beef noodle soup is a case in point. Lu Yao-tung, who is very partial to this dish, once checked this out. In Taiwan the most popular style of beef noodle soup is Sichuanese, so on a trip to Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital, Lu went out in search of authentic Sichuanese beef noodle soup. But after tramping the city's streets and alleyways for a full two hours, he drew a complete blank-there was no sign of such a dish. He merely discovered that snack foods in Sichuan include small bowls of beef soup, and he surmised that when Sichuanese came to Taiwan years ago they brought with them the recipe for beef soup; later, someone had the idea of adding noodles. If this is so, beef noodle soup may be a purely Taiwanese invention.