It’s eight in the morning on New Year’s Eve, and Yang-Hsing nan (楊幸男) is the only person on the Hochin Guanmiao Noodle (合進關廟麵) factory floor.
Workers, all 15 of them, have been sent home to usher in the new year with family. Only the sprightly Yang, who is in his 70s, turns up to watch over the factory. After all, it’s not too different from home — the business that he set up in 1974 is based on a trade he learned from his father-in-law and is now run by his two sons.
Yang is a man who believes in the next generation. He gestures to a stylish packet of noodles with seasoning — a novelty for the noodle manufacturer.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
“At first I didn’t want to [add seasoning], but my son said that if we don’t, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the times,” he says.
The noodles remain a homespun tradition, mixed from flour, salt and water and sundried over two and a half days, during which they are turned over in their bamboo sieves every two hours.
DAVID AND GOLIATH
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Liberty Times
The noodle-making industry is not without its dramas. There is a sense of David and Goliath about the competition that traditional noodle-makers face from conglomerates.
The answer is to insist on retaining the unique sundried characteristic of guanmiao noodles, says Yang Chin-lung’s (楊欽龍), Yang Hsin-nan’s eldest son.
“The sundrying process is what gives the noodles a particular flavor and fragrance,” Yang Chin-lung says.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
Corporate competitors know all too well the value of the guanmiao name, even as they seek shortcuts to the time and labor-intensive traditional method of making noodles.
Yang notes that some noodle products using the guanmiao brand — which cannot be trademarked, as a place name — are made in other parts of Taiwan and only partially sundried, with the process finished off through baking or frying.
It becomes even more difficult to keep the business afloat when the weather becomes a liability.
Photo: Davina Tham, Taipei Times
Yang says that climate change and extreme weather patterns can cause rains that last for two or three weeks, halting production at the factory.
“What can you do then?” Yang says.
To keep up demand, Yang is courting Din Tai Fung (鼎泰豐) and Tu Hsiao Yueh Tan-tsai Noodles (度小月擔仔麵), famous restaurant chains that have visited Hochin’s factory in their search for noodle suppliers. Netting a partnership with one of these prestige brands would be a big catch that will keep Hochin and its employees well-fed.
He is also trying to improve marketability without sacrificing quality. For example, while some customers — especially Japanese — like that guanmiao noodles are exposed to the elements during the drying process, others have expressed concerns about hygiene. To assuage these concerns, Yang installed golf range netting above the open-air drying area in his factory to keep out airborne pests and birds.
Hochin and other guanmiao noodle producers have started introducing noodles flavored and colored with ground turmeric, red quinoa and even mango and pink dragonfruit, in a bid to amplify the visual, flavor and health quotients all at once. But for locals who grew up on the staple, nothing will replace the original noodle.
A BRIEF HISTORY of GUANMIAO NOODLES
Guanmiao noodles (關廟麵) — named after Guanmiao District (關廟) in Tainan where they are made — have been a staple of the region for generations.
Yang says that locals would bring the noodles with them when they traveled, or give them to friends and relatives. The noodles made ideal gifts as they kept for a long time and were tasty, cheap and simple to cook.
Yang Hsin-nan established Hochin in 1974, having picked up the craft of noodle-making from his father-in-law Li Chin-sheng (李金生), who is credited for being among the first to recognize the commercial potential of guanmiao noodles as a local specialty, establishing the Hsiehchin Noodle Factory (協進製麵廠) in 1952.
Guanmiao’s leading industry used to be the manufacture of rattan products from Indonesian palms. In the 1950s, palm exports ceased as post-colonial Indonesia sought to strengthen domestic manufacturing in pursuit of homegrown economic growth.
“During that time, it so happened that this area had no other industry that people could develop or push,” Yang Chin-lung says. Unmoored from their traditional livelihoods, Guanmiao’s breadwinners began to seek alternatives.
Today, the Hsiehchin brand is shared by three other noodle businesses around town, which belong to the families of Li’s sons. They sustain a peaceful coexistence, bonded by the common challenge of facing off against large-scale mechanized production.
FIT FOR A BANQUET
Guanmiao noodles are used in an assortment of local dishes, but a quintessential form is lu noodles (魯麵) bathed in a thick, starchy gravy topped with meat and vegetables. The firm texture of guanmiao noodles stands up well to the slippery gravy.
Restaurant owner Wang Ya-chun (王雅君) took over the Lin Family Egg Dumplings (林門玉餃) restaurant from her grandfather and mother. The restaurant remains a family affair, using only guanmiao noodles made by two of Wang’s aunts.
On New Year’s Eve, regulars hunch over piping hot bowls of traditional lu noodles topped with sharkmeat nuggets and bamboo shoots.
Wang says that lu noodles would traditionally form the first course in a banquet for early well-wishers to eat their fill. Any leftovers would be packed up and taken home to feed the family.
Ultimately, the taste of home is what keeps the guanmiao noodle-making industry and family-run restaurants in the district going.
Wang says that she still recalls the taste of the lu noodles that she ate as a child. When she finds that flavor from her childhood, she says, “that’s a happy moment.”
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
These are volatile times for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with the party’s founder, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), in and out and back in jail repeatedly, Ko resigning as party chair and naming TPP caucus convener Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) to replace him and an upcoming party leadership vote. How representative of the party’s supporters has the party’s leadership been recently? The TPP caucus in the legislature is so closely aligned — and votes so similarly to — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that they are in effect a pan-blue party now. Billing themselves as the “white force” between the pan-blue and pan-green
RSS