There’s been no entry here in this blog for about a month, and the reader has my apologies. Too much going on: life never stops in Asia. Well, it was that, and then weeks of depressing rain. There is a fall and a spring rainy season here, and both are irritating. Yes, they do, however, lead to wonderful semi-tropical foliage, so one shouldn’t complain. Also, unlike in our dear old U.S.A., there is no Thanksgiving break, nor even Halloween (although they do celebrate the latter here a bit in the local schools, just for fun). Otherwise, it’s work, work, work...
Since it’s been rather dreary here, and we don’t feel like writing about existentialism or other philosophical topics, we shall turn to lighter subjects... Well, not really that much lighter, since we are going to talk about cheesesteaks.
Cheesesteaks in Taiwan? No way!
But yes.
It was all very odd. A fellow teacher here, from Michigan, had his father visiting. We were heading into Taipei for a day of sightseeing, and as we were sitting there on the bus, the gentleman was talking to me, and heard that I was from Philadelphia. “Hey,” he said, “Isn’t that where they have all those cheesesteak places?” “Yup,” I answered, and I began to explain to him the subtle rivalries and differences between the various cheesesteak places in Philadelphia — Pat’s Gino’s, Jim’s, and so on. All this talk was making me hungry, but before you knew, they we were in Taipei. No cheesesteaks, just noodles and tofu.
We split up, with me heading through the west side of the city to do some errands. But having gotten off the bus, I hadn’t gone more than four blocks, when there it was, as if posited by some Jungian synchronicity, from my consciousness to hard-and-fast culinary reality: a cheesesteak place...
The people working there, though all Taiwanese, wore that same vivid, horrid orange that is the color of one of those cheesesteak places in Philly. It was as if a piece of South Philadelphia had been ripped out and transplanted — through a strange Asian inversion — into Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Inside, there was even a mural of the city of Philadelphia, complete with the Ben Franklin Bridge, Liberty Place, and that awful building next to 30th Street Station.
I went in and tried the cheesesteaks. And you know what? They were pretty good... In fact, they were less greasy than most of the cheesesteaks in Philly, and the french fries were not bad either.
So, what about the title of this entry, “Tutto il mondo è un cheesesteak / 世界很小”? Well, the first part is a riff on the Italian expression, “tutto il mondo è un paese” — that is, “the whole world is one country”. It’s their way of saying, “It’s a small world”, or as we say in Chinese, “/ 世界很小”. Indeed, it’s a very small world, if I can talk about Philly cheesesteaks miles away from Philly, and then somehow they magically appear...
