This is Run-Bing, a Taiwanese-style fresh spring roll. In southern Taiwan, we eat Run-Bing on one particular day of the year, the Qingming Festival, or National Tomb Sweeping Day. Many people assume that this is a Chinese Han custom that can be traced back 2000 years ago; but actually, this is not true. In Taiwan, the Qingming Festival is a national public holiday because an authoritarian Chinese colonizer, Chiang Kai-shek, died on April 5th, 1975. Since then, people have commemorated their ancestors on the same day.
But this is nothing out of the ordinary because in Taiwan, every tradition was implemented by the ruling government at the time. Like other families, ours has also been taught that every year on April 5th, we should visit the tombs of our ancestors, and after the ceremony finishes, we are rewarded with Run-Bing. This picture was taken on April 5th, 2016. Up until then, I had already gone seven years of not eating Run-Bing as I had been unable to go back to Taiwan during the springtime. Eating Run-Bin is a privilege only for those who stay in their hometown, and in
abroad, I could not find anything similar to the wrapper of Run-Bing.
Making this wrapper requires a special technique. When I was a child, the day before the Qingming Festival, my uncle would bring me to a small shop that was hidden deep within the local market. We usually arrived there at six in the morning, but even that early, the line was already long. This was often the moment when the family story came out.
We start with my father’s side. His grandparents were born in the 1890s, when there was no such country called China, and when Japan had just started their colonization of Taiwan. Their family had lived in Tainan for over 200 years, without any national identity. Just like all children of business families at the time, they were born into arranged marriages. But they resisted and ran away to a small city, Pingtung, my hometown. Fortunately for them, the Japanese colonial government began to regulate household registration during their rule, so they were allowed to get officially married. The colonial government even transferred a baby from a poor family to them. This child, my grandfather, biologically came from a plains indigenous (Pingpu) family. Plain indigenous culture disappeared a long time ago due to Sinicization. However, this fact did not disturb my grandfather, not because he was adopted by a Han family, but because he had been taught that he was Japanese.
When my father’s parents grew up under Japanese colonization, my mother’s mother was undergoing a so-called “modern education” in mainland China. She went to college and dreamed of becoming the first Chinese female missionary. However, in order to survive a series of wars, she married a warlord and became his third or fourth wife. She eventually followed her husband’s army from the north of China to the south, and finally, in 1949, to Taiwan with another million refugees. And their leader, the one whose death created Qingming Festival, occupied Taiwan and told everyone that Taiwan is the only “China,” and we are the “better Chinese.”
When my parents decided to marry, according to my uncle, it was a disaster. My mother’s family could not accept that their highly educated daughter wanted to marry a Taiwanese, non- Christian family which was not only superstitious but also “believed that Japanese government was better than Chinese government.” On the other hand, for my grandfather, having a “Mainlander” family-in-law at the time was shameful. He felt he was betraying his own people. How my grandmother viewed this inter-sectarian marriage of her first son was a mystery, as back then, she had been told that women shouldn’t have their own opinions.
Fortunately, the Qingming Festival was one of the traditions that KMT party created to unite the people on the island. The rule was that no matter where you came from or what kind of religion you practiced, you should sweep all family tombs on that day. Thus, we can all still enjoy the Run-Bing peacefully. This peace has generally been maintained until more recently, when growing Taiwanese consciousness of the next generation began to challenge our parents’ conceptions of Chinese identity.
This could be one of the reasons that drove me to leave my small town, and eventually the island. Although I love my country and have participated in all social movements, from democratization and aboriginal transitional justice to same-sex marriage and anti-Chinese interference, I am also tired of arguing about what Taiwan should be called and who we are. There were over ten years I wandered between East Asia, Europe, and then North America. “Home” hence started to become where I go back to for all those traditional festivals, or the over 20 addresses that I filled in for my Canadian PR application form.
Ten days after the 2016 Qingming Festival, I landed in Canada. When I started to apply for Canadian status, I was also qualified to apply for German citizenship. In deciding to become a Canadian, it was the first time in my family when someone had the opportunity to choose for themselves what national identity they wanted. Strangely, soon after I arrived here, I became a “visible minority” and “colonial settler,” neither of which was my intention. But this is another story.
After I started my new life in Toronto, I learned how to do my own wrappers for Run-Bing and found out that producing wrappers does not require any special technique. I would usually make them on the night before April 5th, and invite other Taiwanese friends to come over for a Run-Bing party. I do not need to “go back to home” to enjoy a Run-Bing anymore. I created a new tradition in my small family and for my community in Toronto, and in doing so, I turned this place into my home.
