The botany of vegetable stalls
ASEAN Square, which is closest to home, is where Wang goes most often. Sometimes he comes here as often as five days a week. Over the past few years, he’s probably paid it more than 500 visits.
The largest market for Southeast-Asian products in Taiwan, ASEAN Square attracts customers mainly from among the nearly 200,000 Southeast-Asian immigrants and migrant workers in Taichung and neighboring Miaoli, Changhua and Nantou. According to Taichung’s Economic Development Bureau, their collective expenditure here amounts to NT$120 million per month.
We start with the produce stalls on Chenggong Road, at the side of ASEAN Square.
The owner of the largest vegetable stall here is Taiwanese born and bred, whereas his wife is Cambodian and the stall’s other workers are likewise from Southeast Asia. It’s the same situation at many of the other businesses hereabouts. Most days the stall’s customers are mainly immigrants, along with a few buyers from Southeast-Asian restaurants. Although the prices aren’t cheap at NT$30‡50 per bunch of herbs, the stall is still mobbed.
Stepping up close, one finds an expanse of green. Yet apart from the water spinach and Thai basil, the varieties would be unrecognizable to most Taiwanese natives. Even after a typhoon recently brought damaging rains to central and southern Taiwan, resulting in poor-quality produce at traditional Taiwanese markets, these vegetables native to tropical climes are unafraid of water and look as healthy and unblemished as ever.
With Wang’s guidance, we move slowly from near complete ignorance toward a better understanding of the Southeast-Asian fruits and vegetables on offer: Apart from lemongrass, pandan leaves, mint, perilla, and galangal, there are also elephant ear stalks, the sewer vine Paederia lanuginosa, ambarella, banana flowers, rambutan, and gac. The herbs that Southeast-Asian cuisines rely on heavily—such as fish mint, Vietnamese coriander, lemon leaves, and rice paddy herb—are also plentiful.
It’s at this point that we realize that the water spinach that is produced in large quantities in the summer in Taiwan is in fact originally from Southeast Asia, and that many foods associated with the tropics here, such as curry, laksa, and krapow, are actually named after plants.