Moving Tastes: Rethinking Taiwanese Food in the New Global

When people think of cherished moments with festivals and holidays, foods and family come to mind. Chinese New Year’s in LA is no exception— it is a time to add meaning to Hemingway’s note of life as a “movable feast”.

 

This talk uses the example of signature culinary creations such as soy milk breakfast, beef noodles, Din Tai Fung dumplings, and pearl tea to tell the story of post-war Taiwan as an embodiment of waves of migration and continuous mingling in taste, from those of continental East Asia, along with elements from South East Asia, on to the continuous fusing choices in North America and beyond. It is a tale of daily life in global history, best accounted for with the ambiance of LA, California.

Professor Hsiung Ping-chen is CIPSH (International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies ) Chair in New Humanities, University of California, Irvine,  Adjunct Professor of Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and President of Asian New Humanities Net (ANHN). She was Professor of History from 2009 to 2019 and served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2009 to 2011, and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Taiwan Central University from 2004 to 2007. Professor Hsiung has served as Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei since 1990, and K.T. Li Chair at Central University in Taiwan since 2006. She holds a B.A. in History from Taiwan University, an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Brown University, and an S.M. in Population Studies and International Health from the School of Public Health at Harvard University. Her research interest lies in the areas of women’s studies and children’s health, gender and family relations, and intellectual and social history of early modern/modern China and Europe. She served as Director of the Humanities Centre at the Central University in Taiwan, and played an instrumental role in founding the interdisciplinary group ‘Ming-Ch’ing Studies’ at the Academia Sinica. Over the years, Professor Hsiung has held visiting professorships at many leading academic institutions in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, including UCLA, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Freie Universitat Berlin, and Keio University, Japan. Her works includes Paediatrics and Early Education: A History of Reproductive Strategies of Chinese Society (Chinese; Taipei: Linking, 2018), A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (English; Stanford University Press: 2005) and Childhood in the Past: A History of Chinese Children (Chinese; Taipei: Rye-Field Publishing, 2000; Publication Grant for Outstanding Scholarly Work, Government Information Office, Taiwan, 2000; Readers’ Choice of the Year, Taiwan, 2000; Golden Tripod Book Award, Taiwan, 2000). She also co-edited Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2007).