Hong Kong and Taiwanese Food in the Suzhou SIP that delivers.

While the scene is changing rapidly, western food in Suzhou is more often than not a disappointment and while Sherpas is great in principle, their delivery fee is exorbitant and the food is often a cop-out by the restaurants.

This is why I thought I’d share with you two great Chinese alternatives in the Suzhou SIP that deliver.

佳思多 (Jia Si Duo) Chun Store

www.chunstore.com
苏州工业园区星汉星汉街85号加城花园20懂
85 Xing Hai Jie, Jia Chen Hua Yuan, building 20
62957515

Chun Store is a Taiwanese supermarket chain in Shanghai, Wuxi and Suzhou and Kunshan. They sell their own range of frozen taiwanese soups, balls, baozi, sausages, as well as Taiwanese beer and other grocery items. (check out the pics on their site)

But what makes Chun Store great is that their supermarket doubles as a restaurant serving the best in Taiwanese fast food such as Taiwanese beef noodles and Zhajiang Noodles. Again, don’t take t from me click through to their menu) Take it from a Taiwanese, “it’s good, but not as good as Taiwan”; that means is pretty damn good.

Click here for the menu

ChunStore will deliver within 3km, so don’t forget to throw a few Taiwan Beers or an Apple Sidra into your order to wash it all down.

Jiawang Restaurant 嘉旺茶餐厅

苏州工业园区苏绣路天翔花园124号商铺
Tian Xiang Hua Yuan, 368 Suqiu Lu, SIP
Tel. 62658753, 62658749

Hong Kong and Cantonese fare. Nearly all the clientele are Hongkies (can I write that?) and Taiwanese. They also serve great dim sum, far better than that scum pit, rip-off joint Zen and they do great Wonton noodle soup, barbecue pork, steamed vegetables and pretty much anything you can think off that makes Cantonese food awesome. oh, yeah and they do sweet and sour pork too.

Click here for the menu

Jiawang delivers within 3km.

Ordering from these restaurants, though their menus have pictures and some English, might take a small bit of Chinese, so it pays to dine in to find out what you like and how to pronunce it before you order in.

The Wall Street Journal: The Culture of Taiwan

In my previous post I alluded slightly to the trend of down playing individual Taiwanese indentities in favour of the blanket term zhonghua minzu, or “Chinese people,”  as a means culturally annexing the Island to the Peoples Republic of China.

In case you were wondering what I was babbling about, this nearly hot of the press  Wall Street Journal article underpins my thoughts perfectly.

The Culture of Taiwan
President Ma Ying-jeou’s symbolic gestures matter.

Here’s an excerpt:

By engaging in ritual and rhetorical expressions of Chinese-ness, Ma concretely aligns himself with Beijing’s increasingly culturally based claim that Taiwan is part of China. These actions are a strong reassurance to officials in Beijing, who watch Mr. Ma’s actions closely for any sign that he might stray from the path of annexing Taiwan to China, as well as to the Kuomintang old guard in Taiwan, who also support annexation.

Mr. Ma is not the first Kuomintang leader to do this. The KMT embraced “Chinese-ness” for an entirely different reason: From the 1950s to the 1970s the dictatorial KMT-led regime legitimated its rule over the island by declaring that Taiwan was “Chinese,” brutally suppressing local identities. Acceptance of local identities grew after Taiwan’s transition to democracy in the 1990s.

Check out the authors highly acclaimed blog, The View From Taiwan in the blogroll on the right.

The negligible “soft power” of Taiwanese pop

Screen captue lifted from Shanghaiist.

Last night while exploring the interwebs I stumbled upon this great report on the Taiwanese Pop scene and subsequently tweeted about it.

The report covers the Taiwanese music scene from the “idol” shows on TV, the Taiwanese pop scene (arguably one of Taiwan’s most prolific exports to the Mainland), indie and briefly touches on the “Symphonic Black Metal” band Chthonic’s (閃靈樂團) unique appeal to a subset of politicized Taiwanese youth (mentioning their “F$ck China” stance, which is Rock & Roll speak for pro TW Indepndnce and T1bet.)

Besides Chthonic, the report also introduced me to indie group Sodagreen (蘇打綠) who I’ll defnately be looking into on my next trip to Taiwan.

Today Shanghaiist’s Elaine Chow picked up on the report, ripping it for it’s references to  pop as Taiwan’s “soft power”. As Elaine points out asserting pop as a “soft power” across the straight is irrelevant and futile in a commercial sense, if a group is going to tap into the lucrative Mandarin (read: Chinese) market.

I agree with Elaine that “Taiwan-made music has had its grip in China since the 1970s”, Mainland Chinese have already assumed a degree of ownership over their favorite Chinese stars from Taiwan. The direct influence of Taiwanese music on China is indeed negligible.

Taiwan’s, mandarin megastars aside, though, the value here is in how Taiwan leverages their cultural capital domestically. The relevance is not on how they exert it across the straight, but is in the emerging Taiwanese cultural resistance to ethnic homogenization and the notion that all Taiwanese are Chinese and one in the same. They are not.

It’s needless to say that artists like Chthonic, arn’t going to be cashing in on the mainland market any time soon, nor do they expect to, but it’s about more than that isn’t it?

I’m back, I think, and I brought food.

Chinese Broccoli (芥兰) with Beef.

Been a while since I updated, @thehumanaught introduced me to Twitter an it kind of owned me there for a little while. That coupled with the fact that I’ve been on a bit of a western food binge recently, which isn’t really the focus of this blog, that and working and did I mention twittering?

In the interest of easing myself back into it here’s a photo of one of tonight’s concoctions, jiè lán 芥兰 or Chinese broccoli with beef.

That aside, if you read this, live in Suzhou or need to eat, follow @riceagain on twitter and I promise I’ll update my blog.