Notes on the corners
of the world
At a Taipei street stall, the lid lifts on a row of xiaolongbao whose pleats are close enough to look uniform, but not quite identical. By the time the sauce arrives, the steam has already begun to disappear and the wrappers have changed.
At a Malaysian table, sambal rarely stays at the edge like ketchup. Rice, grilled fish, noodles, and even vegetables seem arranged to carry a dense red paste into the meal.
In Taipei, Los Angeles, London, and Singapore, the bamboo steamers arrive in the same neat stacks, while each xiaolongbao carries eighteen pleats. The uniformity is visible before the first bite.
On Jalan TAR, a faded green sign marks a shophouse where the first thing placed on a nasi kandar plate is not red sambal or yellow curry, but a thick black gravy. It spreads across the rice like tar, pulling the rest of the meal into its orbit.
At a Taiwan breakfast counter, asking for soy milk can bring either a cold, sweet glass or a hot bowl of vinegar-curdled curds with fried dough, shrimp, and scallions. They share a name, but one behaves like a drink and the other like a soup.
In Kuala Lumpur, nasi lemak arrives as a small triangle of rice, anchovies, sambal, and fried chicken—the kind of breakfast people joke about as a shortcut to weight gain. In London, the same combination can appear as a £15 brunch plate, described with the calm language of health food.
In Taipei, the same red Yonghe Doujiang sign can appear several times within a short walk, while each shop has a different owner and its own version of breakfast. The signs look like a chain’s network, but there is no visible organization holding them together.
At a Taipei street stall, the lid lifts on a row of xiaolongbao whose pleats are close enough to look uniform, but not quite identical. By the time the sauce arrives, the steam has already begun to disappear and the wrappers have changed.
Curry has blurred the fried chicken, egg, and okra into one brown plate, but the cashier names a price almost before it reaches the counter. The judgment leaves no visible calculation—and no receipt explaining it.
