Homey foods: Domesticating memories of the martial-law era in Taiwan’s heritage tourism

After the martial law period (1949–1987) ended, Taiwan embarked on democratization, which became interwoven with Taiwanization. Mainlander migrants, who came to Taiwan in the late 1940s with the Chinese Nationalist Party, and their offspring born in Taiwan, have come to be recognized or position themselves as the ethnic group of Mainlanders. Essential to this ongoing identity (trans)formation in Taiwanese society is how to remember the martial-law era. This article examines heritage tourism of two preserved sites built in early postwar Taiwan: the Shihlin Official Residence 士林官邸 of Chiang Kai-shek and the Forty-four South Village 四四南村, one of the earliest military dependents’ villages. More specifically, it investigates how tourist culinary programs and on-site exhibits de-militarize and de-sinicize the heritage sites to create a nostalgic prosthetic memory couched in a discourse of home-building and domesticity, which parallels the mainlanders’ changing foodways with their Taiwanization.

In 1945 the Republic of China (ROC) led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) took over Taiwan from its Japanese colonizers.When the KMT lost the civil war (1946)(1947)(1948)(1949) to the Chinese Communist Party, about one million soldiers and refugees migrated to Taiwan.In 1948, the KMT government promulgated nationwide the Temporary Provisions Effective during the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion 動員戡亂時期 臨時條款.They allowed the president to bypass legal procedures to mobilize resources in the name of suppressing the rebellion and later spawned a series of regulations that legitimized the KMT's stringent political and social controls.The Provisions, among others, enabled the KMT to impose on Taiwan one of the longest periods of martial law  in world history.By declaring the island as a war zone and the KMT's military goal as retaking the Chinese mainland, the martial law put Taiwan in the state of exception and justified the KMT's Sinocentric ideology as well as its restraints on political and civil rights.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), one of the two major political parties along with the KMT in current Taiwan, was founded in 1986 as a result of the political activism of the 1970s.The DPP promoted a distinct Taiwanese identity by (re)narrating local history as one of suffering and resistance against colonial regimes, including the KMT party-state headed by Chiang Kai-shek (1887Kai-shek ( -1975)), whose authoritarian rule during the martial-law era is known as the White Terror.Thus in the post-martial-law era Taiwan's process of democratization has been carried out hand in hand with indigenization/Taiwanization.DPP leaders started to use the terminology "four major ethnic groups" around 1989 to refer to the people in Taiwan, terminology which differentiates mainlander migrants and their children (Mainlanders 外省人) from the other three ethnic groups that had settled in Taiwan prior to 1945 (Hoklo, Hakka, Aborigine) while integrating them into a larger Taiwanese national identity (Hsiau, 2012;Yang, 2021). 1  The making of this group of "Mainlanders" in today's Taiwan is an ongoing and contentious process, in which various political, ethnic, and social forces interact to negotiate mainlanders' place in a multiparty democracy of the post-martial-law era.After martial law was abolished in 1987 and the Temporary Provisions in 1991, Chiang Kai-shek's legacy, especially his political authoritarianism and Sinocentric ideology, was fiercely contested in terms of how it was to be integrated into the public memory of a democratic, multi-ethnic Taiwan.In 2000, the KMT lost the presidential election for the first time since it came to Taiwan to the DPP candidate Chen Shuibian (1950-).In 2008, the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou (1950-) won the presidency, returning the KMT to power.During this period of democratic consolidation and power transition, tumultuous political struggles and public debates were impacted by antagonistic identity politics that harkened back to the martial-law era, when the Mainlanders/Taiwanese dichotomy was distinct.Such politically motivated identity discourses tended to lump together mainlander migrants and their children as the "privileged outsiders" tied with the KMT state power and its Sinocentric ideology (Yang and Chang, 2010: 110), while portraying local Taiwanese as the suffering grassroots.Researchers have shown, however, that these discourses portrayed an oversimplified picture.They argue, for example, that many wives of mainlander soldiers were local Taiwanese women (Lo, 2011;Pan, 1997), 2 younger generations of mainlander families do not necessarily feel connected with the KMT and Chiang (Yang, 2021); and as far as the White Terror is concerned, the percentage of the mainlanders persecuted was higher than that of the total population (Tamburo, 2018).Such a manifold relationship of Mainlanders to local Taiwanese communities and the KMT in the past and the present has created room for Mainlanders and other ethnic groups within Taiwan to form a bond through the communication and perpetuation of common memories and pursue ethnic reconciliation.
Therefore, the Mainlanders' identity (trans)formation is not a case of "Chinese diaspora," but one of mainlanders narrating and asserting a "self-chosen" (Huang, 2021: 1) and "locally based identity as 'mainlander Taiwanese'" (Yang, 2021: 6).Since "[i]dentity and narrative are mutually constitutive and constructive" in Taiwan's cultural politics (Hsiau, 2021: 19), this process involves creating a narrative about the collective experience of the Mainlanders and other ethnic groups in Taiwan, which tells a story about who "we" are, what "we" experienced, and, in particular, what "we" shared in the past (Hsiau, 2012: 276).In this narrative, the controversial yet essential issue of how to remember the long martial-law era must be addressed.Then what kind of narrative about the martial-law era can be put forward-and by whom-to articulate a shared experience of the Mainlanders and other ethnic groups?In the realm of public memory shaped by historiography, literature, visual culture, and museums (Denton, 2021;Hsiau, 2012;Huang, 2021;Yang, 2021), different-sometimes competing-stories have been told about the martial-law era.For example, under the current DPP government (2016-), institutional efforts have been put into researching and exhibiting the martial-law era as the era of the White Terror (e.g.national human rights museum) in search for transitional justice (Chang-Liao and Chen, 2019); Taiwan's cultural heritage tourism, which "revitalizes 活化" heritage sites by introducing commercial factors (Huang et al., 2015;Lin, 2023: 172-173), 3 however, tends to evoke nostalgic, bonding memories of the past to offer the tourist a positive experience.
This article examines how heritage tourism, a combined public and commercial sector, mediates and diversifies the public memory of the martial-law era, facilitating the formation of the category of Mainlanders as one ethnic group within today's Taiwan.It studies two historical sites built in early postwar Taiwan: (1) the Shihlin Official Residence 士林官邸 of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong May-ling (1898May-ling ( -2003)), which was completed in 1949 and categorized as a national monument 國定古蹟 in 2005; (2) the Forty-four South Village 四四南村 built in 1948 by the personnel of the 44th Arsenal of the Combined Logistics Command, one of the earliest military dependents' villages (juancun village 眷村) in Taiwan, which was conserved as a Historical Building of Taipei city 臺北歷史建築 in 2003.I examine how tourist culinary programs at these two heritage sites resonate with the material environment (built architecture, spatial arrangement, exhibits, etc.) and prompt-as well as restrict-the tourists' sensory, emotional, and memorial experiences.By offering "homey foods" purportedly of Chiang Kai-shek and from the juancun village, they mediate a prosthetic memory of the martial-law era couched in the discourse of domesticity and home-building, which de-militarizes and de-sinicizes the past of these sites.This nostalgic memory addresses the contemporary concern of illustrating mainlanders' Taiwanization through their increasingly indigenized everyday life.

Heritage tourism: memories preserved, experienced, and acquired
The Shihlin Official Residence and the Forty-four South Village used to accommodate two groups of mainlanders with drastically different political, social, and economic status.While the former was home to the first family of the KMT party-state, the latter housed families of lower echelon soldiers and craftsmen of the KMT armed forces.Despite their differences, the two heritage sites share a past of militarism that used to legitimize and manifest the KMT's rule as a wartime regime. 4 The ways in which these two sites have been preserved and presented as cultural heritage, however, are a response to Taiwan's political, social, and economic changes in the post-martial-law era and its consequent disappearing and evolving landscapes.These include the removal of most Chiang Kai-shek statues from public spaces as a result of the so-called "de-Chiangification" movement that intended to erase traces of Chiang's personality cult 5 (Matten, 2011;Taylor, 2010), and the demolishment of most of the 886 juancun villages in Taiwan in wake of the 1996 Regulations of Resconstructing Old Military Dependents' Villages of the National Armed Force 國軍老舊眷村改 建條例 (Wenhua Zichan Zong Guanlichu choubeichu, 2009: 6), which sought to optimize the use of land for Taiwan's rapid urbanization.
As a built architecture in public space, a heritage site is supposed to display and assert an institutionalized idea of the past, while its very existence denotes the political and historical processes of the selection, preservation, and exhibition (Denton, 2021: 128;Hayden, 1995: 13).The fact that most tourists of the heritage site do not have direct experience of the history it represents brings to the fore the issue of mediation of historical memory by the preserved site.Alison Landsberg (2004) uses the term "prosthetic memory" to theorize a form of public memory of the past shaped by media technologies, commodification, and the consumer's affective investment.It is "a portable, fluid, and nonessentialist form of memory" (18), which is the result of social and political negotiations and contestations and which relies on technologies of mass culture for production and dissemination.Landsberg demonstrates how genre-specific techniques of memorial forms such as film, literature, and museum, and the consumer's emotional experiences of such, generate and circulate prosthetic memories.Such "privately felt public memories" (19) are acquired, yet they have real impact on one's sense of subjectivity and identity.
Like Landsberg, Christoph Bareither (2021) explores the role of the consumer (tourist) in this mediating process.He conceptualizes the notion of "emotional affordances" to describe the capacities of a heritage site to shape-that is, enable, prompt, and restrict-the visitor's emotional, and ultimately memorial, experiences.The affordances are embedded in practice, that is, in the "close entanglement of material environments, human actors, their perception, their incorporated knowledge and particular practices" (580).In his case study of the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" in Berlin, Bareither shows how visitors use digital photography and social media to capture and circulate their "enacting [of] the place's emotional affordances" (588).He focuses on how the tourist's enactment confirms the institutionalized idea of the heritage site to condemn the Holocaust.
Different from the unambiguous message of the memorial in Bareither's study, the historical meanings of the heritage sites in the following case studies are still in contestation and their managing organizations do not necessarily or completely endorse (or reject) the idea that the martial-law era was an era of White Terror.The exhibits and tourist culinary programs within and around the historical architectures guide and prompt the tourist's experiences of visiting and bodily consumption with their (saleable) highlights and thereby co-shape the emotional affordances of the heritage sites with them.Yet the facts that exhibits alter from time to time and tourist programs are nonpermanent bring changes and instabilities into this process, which foregrounds precisely the prosthetic nature of the memory acquired by the tourist that is invariably impacted by ongoing political and social concerns.This article asks to what extent and through what means such heritage tourism helps to shape the public memory of the martial-law era; and, relatedly, in what ways tourists themselves contribute to the memory-making process.The following analysis illustrates that tourist culinary programs associated with these sites, such as Mr. Chiang's Favorite Meatball Combo and the Taipei International Festival of Beef Noodle Soup, domesticate the public memory of the martial-law era, making it conducive to the Taiwanization of the Mainlanders.

Meatball: consuming Mr Chiang
The Shihlin Official Residence of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling, preserved as a national monument for its association with significant historical events and figures, includes their residence house, a guest house, a private church and a pavilion. 6The heritage site is part of the Shihlin Residence Park open to the public since July 1996, portions of which were constructed under Japanese rule  as part of a horticulture research institute.After the residence house and its security facilities were completed, the Chiang couple moved into the house in May 1950 and lived there until Chiang's death in 1975.While the rest of the Park is managed by the Horticulture Administration Station affiliated with the Public Works Department of Taipei, the heritage site is currently operated by the Zhongzheng Culture and Education Foundation under a renewable contract with Taipei's Bureau of Culture (You, 2016: 196-197).Founded by KMT elites in 1998 to preserve and propagate its party history, this foundation is funded by the KMT.7 One year after the Official Residence obtained the status of national monument in 2005, the Office of President allotted 130.6 million TWD (more than 4 million USD) for its renovation, which was completed in 2009, 8 spanning the presidency of both Chen Shui-bian (DPP, 2000(DPP, -2008) ) and Ma Ying-jeou (KMT, 2008(KMT, -2016)).The residence house started to receive visitors in 2011.
Painted camouflage dark green, the modest two-story house of Chiang's Official Residence is well integrated into the tropic foliage around it, illustrating the wartime concern over security.The displayed spaces and artifacts generate a narrative that domesticates the residence house in two senses: first, it emphasizes the tourist's access to the domestic life of the first family, which was impossible during the martial-law era; and second, it attempts to ensure that the residence house preserves only positive memories of the Chiang couple.The waiting room, the meeting rooms, and the dining room on the first floor witnessed many official receptions and family meetings (You, 2015: 135-140), while the second floor presents the couple's private space: their bedrooms, reading rooms, private dining room, dressing rooms, and so on.What is not open to the public on this floor, researcher You Shu-Yi reveals, is the War Room with built-in maps of the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, and Kinmen islands (about 10 km from the Chinese mainland).This highly militarized space is concealed from the public, You argues, due to the exhibitor's worry that it would confirm the current criticism of Chiang's Sinocentric perception of Taiwan as a place of exile (You, 2015: 178).On my fieldtrip in spring 2023, I noticed that the War Room marked on the floorplan in You's study (150) appears as "storage room" on the displayed floorplan.My inquiry about the War Room to the staff, most of whom were volunteers and hourly paid students, yielded no further information.Though I am unable to assess You's statement, it is nevertheless reasonable to argue that the exhibit of the space in the residence house is highly selective and liable to change.For example, a woman volunteer showed me the newly exhibited content on the first lady's loyal servant and her small room on the second floor, which was not visible when I visited the house in fall 2019.
By seeing the arrangements of their private rooms and learning about family activities such as movie nights, the visitor can feel closer to these lofty figures and their everyday lives.The residence house, however, is not the only factor of heritage tourism that mediates prosthetic memory of Chiang.The Residence Canteen 官邸食堂 opened in 2018 by the Horticulture Management Bureau in the Park took advantage of its proximity to the preserved residence house to sell tourist menu items such as Mr. Chiang's Favorite Meatball, Madame Chiang's Afternoon Tea, and so on. 9Located in a small house in the Park, the Residence Canteen featured an unpretentious inner design that brings to mind the KMT party-state's intervention into food consumption between 1946 and 1962, when it requested that all restaurants be renamed "public canteen 公共食堂," a top-down initiative to advocate a militarized simple life-style-often acted out by the Chiang couple themselves 10 -to deal with the wartime supply shortages (Chen, 2020: 165-171).Furnished with bare wooden tables and chairs, the Canteen was decorated with black-and-white photos of the Chiang couple on its white walls.The interior of the Canteen and the menu items created an artificial, Chiang-saturated setting, which induced but also strongly restricted the tourist's culinary experience as consuming the "homey foods" of the Chiang family.
Standing at the top of the Residence Canteen's menu was Mr. Chiang's Favorite Meatball Combo, which consisted of a large meatball on a bed of napa cabbage, a green vegetable, a small piece of pickled cucumber, rice, and green tea (Figure 1).The tourist's visceral bodily consumption of the tangible food mediates a suturing moment of empathy: despite "the alterity of identification" (Landsberg, 2004: 24), that is, the tourist's realization that their time and food are not the same as those of Chiang, this menu prompts them to imagine having a similar meatball-eating experience as Chiang and consequently perceive the historical figure in terms of the same everyday act of food consumption.In this way, the tourist in the Canteen further enacts the emotional affordances of the residence house as a domestic space of the first family.More importantly, the tourist's culinary experience makes the historical figure Chiang appear "consumable and immediate" (Taylor, 2010: 189), which ultimately refashions him as an approachable and relatable man, an image that potentially revises the strongman deified in his personality cult or the dictator of the White Terror.
The meatball served in the Residence Canteen was most probably inspired by a story cookbook titled Mr. Chiang's Meatball: Recipes and Stories from the Private Kitchen of a Powerful Family, 11 although the meatball in the cookbook is prepared in a time-consuming and elaborate way with clam and ham (Yan, 2006).The narrator of the cookbook Yan Qiuli was the daughter-in-law of Xi Yan 奚炎 (1899-1974), a high-ranking KMT official and a personal friend of Chiang Kai-shek.This connection is repeatedly mentioned in the cookbook to validate her status as a historical witness, which in turn authenticates the book and its story.Given that the publication came out in 2006, when Chiang Kai-shek's political image and legacy were challenged and most fiercely contested (Matten, 2011;Taylor, 2010), it should be seen as a political attempt to recuperate Chiang's image while smoothing out schisms between the Mainlanders and local Taiwanese.
This cookbook relocates Chiang in private spaces-by telling anecdotes about his favorite dishes, his participation in the Xi's family dinners, and the New Year's dinner prepared by the Xi family for the Shihlin Residence.Adopting a non-aggressive, understanding female voice to tell the stories of her recipes, Yan tries to link cooking explicitly with everyday homelife in Taiwan by highlighting her familiarity with Taiwanese local foodstuffs.Describing cooking as a living culture, which deals with ingredients of local fengtu 風土 (literarily meaning "wind and soil"), 12 Yan offers cooking tips that use ordinary ingredients to replace expensive ones and repeatedly praises Taiwanese products, ranging from bamboo shoots and garlic to fresh fish and beef, for improving her original (mainland) recipes.By presenting her cooking as a culinary practice rooted in Taiwan and flattening social hierarchy, Yan intends to demonstrate that the Mainlanders' cuisines have enriched and been enriched by local Taiwanese foodways. 13 A blurb by Shih Ming-teh 施明德 (1941-), the former DPP chairman twice sentenced to life imprisonment during the martial-law era, brings out the political meaning of this cookbook: "The delicious food from the imperial family has come among the people, creating a new culinary culture that appeals to the palate of this [former] prisoner."Shih is known for his call for the Great Reconciliation in 1995, especially the reconciliation between ethnic groups, as a way that Taiwanese society should deal with the traumatic decades of the martial-law era.By asserting his experience simultaneously as one of the most prominent local Taiwanese victims of the White Terror and as a guest of Yan's private kitchen in the post-martial-law era, Shih reiterates his idea of ethnic reconciliation.His comments also try to help Yan shed the tag of the "privileged outsider" when he affirms the cookbook's democratic implication to share the high-class "private kitchen" with its grassroots readers.If Mr. Chiang's Favorite Meatball helps domesticate Chiang Kai-shek's image and Yan's story cookbook presents (changing) foodways to integrate this image with notions of a Taiwanese home without class distinction, then the Taipei International Festival of Beef Noodle Soup appeals to the grassroots culinary memory of the Mainlanders and other ethnic groups to make the noodle eating their shared experience of the martial-law era.

Beef noodle soup: sharing a street food
The juancun village, such as the Forty-four South Village, was a social space different from yet related to the Shihlin Official Residence in that it was home to low echelon mainlanders retreating to Taiwan with the KMT armed forces.Provided for by the KMT party-state and steeped in a militarized everyday life oriented to retaking the Chinese mainland, many residents of the juancun village were Chiang Kai-shek loyalists and staunch KMT supporters.A public settlement built in 1948, the Forty-four South Village epitomizes the so-called kenan 克難 (literarily: conquering difficulties)-style architecture rashly put up to deal with the housing crisis caused by the incoming soldiers and refugees in the late 1940s. 14With the KMT's (false) belief of retaking the mainland in a few years, these simple buildings were meant to be a makeshift solution.A typical kenan-style house was built with bamboo, wood, mud (mixed with straws and husks), and bricks (for the lower parts of the walls) (Li, 1996: 187-191).Only after 1957 did the Chinese Women's Anti-Communist League led by Soong May-ling raise funds to construct more durable houses.
The Forty-four South Village preserves some typical juancun village components, including four original buildings flanking a small plaza (where a similar building used to stand) and the military facilities of pillbox and air-raid shelter.The buildings illustrate the early postwar juancun spatial structure known as "fishbone"-rows of kenan-style houses closely built along a narrow alley (Figure 2).The heritage site is located within the Xinyi Citizen Assembly Hall and the Park of the Juancun Village Culture 信義公民會館暨眷村文化公園 managed by the Xinyi District Office in Taipei.Following the principle of "revitalizing" the heritage site, three buildings (A, C, and D) are used, respectively, for community activities (the Parent-Children Activity Hall) and for shops selling food and souvenirs.The Building B houses a small museum, which displays the history of the 44th Arsenal of the Combined Logistics Command and everyday life scenes in this juancun village.The plaza is frequently rented out for exhibits, community cultural events, and weekend markets (Xin-Yi District Office of Taipei and University of Taipei, 2014).
The conservation of the Forty-four South Village as a Historical Building of Taipei is the result of different political and cultural forces, which recognized the significant role of the juancun village and its culture in shaping today's Taipei.Chen Shui-bian, the DPP mayor of Taipei 1994-1998, presided over a meeting in 1998 that decided to conserve it as a cultural asset of Taipei that illustrates the co-prosperity of various ethnic groups who have made Taipei their new hometown (Xin-Yi District Office of Taipei and University of Taipei, 2014: 69-70). 15In his preface to a photo book on juancun villages (Gu, 1999), Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT mayor of Taipei 1998Taipei -2006, also saw that juancun villages embodied an "unexpectedly successful experience" of community building in postwar Taiwan, emphasizing the contribution of the armed forces and their dependents (from the Chinese mainland) to Taiwan's security and economic miracles (no page indicated).In 2001, "a coalition of social activists, civil servants, journalists, teachers, scholars, and cultural workers" campaigned for the conservation of the Forty-four South Village (Yang, 2021: 250). 16 This heritage site, which started to receive visitors in 2003, and the Hsinchu Juancun Village Museum that was open to the public 1 year earlier, pioneered the commemoration of the disappearing juancun village life. 17 Kirk Denton (2021) observes that the exhibit of the Forty-four South Village offers a nostalgic narrative rooted in the presented (female) individual narration of the hardships of the past, which refrains from reveling in "Nationalist militarism" and thereby allows the nostalgia to "rise above the political fray in a way that other memorial sites in Taiwan cannot" (pp.132-133).I would extend his observation further to argue that this nostalgia is couched in a discourse of home-building that aims to Taiwanize juancun villagers.This is done through de-militarizing the juancun village's past and emphasizing its grassroots nature.The large placard at the entrance of the museum is a case in point, which reinterprets the hardship endured by first-generation mainlanders in the kenan-style housing as an experience of indigenization.It explains that the use of the mostly natural components (bamboo, mud, husk, etc.) in the kenan architecture is a traditional, low-carbon Taiwanese architectural craft, which features excellent adjustment to humidity and temperature.Thus, the kenan-style house is a form of eco-friendly "Taiwanese home" and represents "juancun villagers' wisdom of living with the natural environment." This interpretation of the kenan-style architecture contradicts the memory of juancun villagers: "Our juancun village was built in 1955. . . .There were altogether two public toilets.'Kenan,' [that is] everything had to be kept simple" (Pan, 1997: 309).Each household of the Forty-four South Village, for example, used to possess a room of 3.5 ping (c.11.55 square meters) (Miao, 2020: 24).The exhibit housed in the (renovated) original building shows how the villagers used to divide the room with curtains and built small attics under or above the roof to expand their living spaces.Whereas the cramped space led to close neighborhood interactions-a major source of the juancun nostalgia (Li, 1996: 187-201), it also facilitated political and social control and surveillance Photo by the author, 2023.(Tamburo, 2018).Although the romanticized narrative of nature, assimilation, and indigenization stands opposed to the juancun villagers' lived experience, the rest of the exhibit-maps, texts, and artifacts-does tell a convincing story of how these soldiers, craftsmen and their families set up their homes here in the village: large suitcases of various materials (wood, leather, etc.) testify to their forced displacement from the Chinese mainland; the increasingly diverse household objects (such as electric cooking utensils, sewing machines, and televisions), toys, and snacks, however, evidence the bettering material condition in everyday life that the villagers came to enjoy in postwar Taiwan.The air-raid shelter, another component of the heritage site, bespeaks the constant threat of war looming over the villagers' home-building.It was regularly cleaned, explains the placard in the museum, because "you never know what would happen in the martial-law era." In November 2007, the Taipei International Festival of Beef Noodle Soup (the Festival thereafter) was held on the plaza of the Forty-Four South Village (Xin-Yi District Office of Taipei and University of Taipei, 2014: 56).The Festival is an annual tourist event initiated in 2005 by the Taipei government headed by Ma Ying-jeou (KMT) to boost tourism and was officially financed till 2015. 18It has been held on the location of various Taipei landmarks, such as the Red House, Taipei 101, and Expo Dome, to celebrate the beef noodle soup as a new traditional street food of Taipei-and by extension, of Taiwan.In other words, when the Forty-four South Village was selected as the location of the Festival in 2007, the heritage site-and the juancun village it represents-was integrated into Taipei's culinary landscape of street food.
Chen Yu-jen (2020) has cogently shown how the notion of "Taiwanese street food 台灣小吃" acquired its political implication of indigenization and social meaning of eco-conscious, local food consumption in the post-martial-law era.When the DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian won the presidential election in 2000, his inauguration banquet included two street foods from Tainan (Chen's hometown) to differentiate the new government from its supposedly elitist KMT precedent.The street food was mobilized again in 2004 as part of a state banquet to promote the harmony of the four ethnic groups."Taiwanese street food" has since then been promoted by the government and its content substantiated by ethnographical studies, literature, and cultural events, which textualize, diversify, and display it as the embodiment of authentic grassroots culture and local history (pp. 279-296).Historian-essayist Lu Yaodong (1933-2006) opines that the beef noodle soup could have originated from veterans' cooking in Kaohsiung, who received beef and wheat flour in their rations and made a living by selling the noodle soup. 19Whereas the origin of the beef noodle soup in Taiwan is so far unidentifiable, Lu's speculation was readily adopted, displayed, and consumed as "culinary knowledge" by major tourist programs, such as the Festival (Chen, 2020: 340-343), as well as by conventional knowledge institutions, such as the Hsinchu Juancun Village Museum (Figure 3).
Based on this piece of "culinary knowledge," the website of the first Festival appealed to the tourists' common memory of eating the street food in postwar Taiwan: the beef noodle soup "has brought us satisfaction of warmth and satiety for five decades and become one of the most important tastes in our culinary life." 20(Italics added by the author).The beef noodle soup staged by the Festival on the plaza of the Forty-four South Village endorsed the purported origin and the grassroots image of local street food, which is inexpensive, neighborly, and varied.On social media, tourists reported on the extraordinarily low price of 50 TWD (c.1.6 USD) per portion, compared beef noodle soups cooked with different methods and ingredients, and videoed the cooking process. 21These responses show that the tourists enacted, through their participation in the Festival, the emotional affordances of the heritage site as a grassroots (de-militarized and de-sinicized) Taipei neighborhood.The beef noodle soup thus embodied the prosthetic memory of Mainlanders resiliently surviving their forced exile in postwar Taiwan and becoming part of the city and the nation.In this process, they shared a cozy culinary experience with other ethnic groups, who ate the beef noodle soup as a street food and who equally strove to settle down in Taipei.
This nostalgic narrative of the beef noodle soup as a homey, neighborly food, as promoted by the Festival, however, is unsettled by Li Ang's short story "The Beef Noodle Soup," a literary renarration of Shih Ming-teh's prison experience that appeared also in 2007 (the year of the Festival's location at the Forty-four South Village).By situating the food in the prison of the martial-law era, a space of state violence, Li un-domesticates the beef noodle soup to critically reflect on what is a Taiwanese identity.When detained at the notorious Taiwan Garrison Command in 1962, Shih as a local Taiwanese could receive money from his family and purchase beef noodle soup at his own cost.One day he was finishing his noodle when he realized that his coprisoner Huang Zuyao 黃祖 堯 (c. 1931-1962), a defected communist who was arrested by the KMT as a spy, longed for it.Shih decided to buy Huang noodle soup the next day, only to witness Huang taken out for execution (Shih, 2021).Shih's experience of beef noodle soup is told as a traumatic memory of the White Terror in his memoir, which shows empathy for his coprisoner despite the latter's different origin and political conviction, because both suffered the same arbitrariness and brutality of the KMT party-state.By selecting to include this part of his life experience in his autobiography, Shih questions the dichotomic assumption that the Mainlanders were perpetrators and local Taiwanese were victims and, thereby, promotes his political ideal of ethnic reconciliation.
Li Ang's (2007) short story remediates Shih's memory by centering on how a local Taiwanese's perception of the beef noodle soup has changed.In her preface to the collection in which the story is included, Li posits that culinary memory, like historical narrative, is constantly "updated and edited" (pp.7-8).With its third-person narrating voice, the text positions the reader as an onlooker who is distanced from the narrator's perspective and therefore can critically assess his storytelling underlain by multiple temporalities: the martial-law era when he was in prison and the post-martial-law era when "he became an influential political figure" (p.69).The narrator starts with a strong sense of alienation from the Mainlanders-"the ruling ethnic group that came from the Chinese mainland"-and from the beef noodle soup, whose major ingredients (beef, wheat flour, and chili) were foreign to a local Taiwanese like him.In the prison, however, he enjoyed the beef noodle soup and came to develop empathy for his mainlander coprisoner due to their shared suffering, even though he perceived the latter as "the KMT's own people" (p.76).In the post-martial-law era, he was able to visit the Chinese mainland and then came to realize that the beef noodle soup he ate in prison, which he interpreted as a means of (bodily) control by the KMT regime, was made in Taiwan.The narrator asks: "What on earth is 'Taiwan'?"(p.83).
Li Ang's text weaves culinary memory of the martial-law era into its historical memory and highlights its relevance to the political struggle and social debates in the post-martial-law era.The narrator's story of eating beef noodle soup, for example, raises questions about the degree of his suffering, and implicitly, that of his resistance, in the KMT prison.Most ironically, he found that he had to reinterpret his prison experience with the beef noodle soup after he knew more about it and the Chinese mainland.This text thus asks sharp questions concerning public memory and Taiwanese identity as embodied in food consumption: Would suffering in the martial-law era be sufficient to define what counts as Taiwanese in the post-martial-law era?In what ways does this story of the beef noodle soup show a non-Mainlander's struggle to define a Taiwanese identity over time?

Coda
During the martial-law era, the KMT government ruled Taiwan with authoritarianism and militarism.The memorialization of this period of time remains central to post-martial-law Taiwan in many aspects, among them, the making of the ethnic Mainlander identity in the current multiparty and multi-ethnic context.
This essay critically examines the role of heritage tourism in domesticating public memory of the martial-law era.Commercial actors and factors, as part of Taiwan's revitalization policy of heritage conservation, stimulate and direct the tourist's enactment of the heritage site's emotional affordances and thereby co-shape the historical memory it represents.As the case studies have shown, tourist culinary offers of "homey foods" on the two Mainlander-related heritage sites encourage the tourist to develop a sense of empathy through their culinary consumption with the historical figure of Chiang Kai-shek and everyday people in and outside the juancun village in postwar Taiwan.This elicited, emotional sense of identification, authenticated by the physical architecture and its exhibits, allows the tourist to acquire a prosthetic memory of the martial-law era in terms of shared experiences of domesticity and home-building.
This prosthetic memory argues against the antagonistic identity politics that polarize the Mainlander and local Taiwanese, questions a self-evident or static Taiwanese identity, and contests-or at least diversifies-the institutionalized narrative of the martial-law era as the time of the White Terror.This commercialized commemorative strategy, however, tends to maintain its pleasant, non-confrontational feature by smoothing out historical complexity, and in particular, by neutralizing-that is, de-militarizing and de-sinicizing-these politically charged sites.Li Ang's short story is thus an important intervention into this domestication of culinary/public memory.It suggests that, in addition to promoting ideas of shared foods and sufferings during the martial-law era, local Taiwanese and the Mainlanders still have work to do in collectively confronting the question of what it means to be Taiwanese in the post-martial-law era.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The narrow alley flanked by the kenan-style houses in the Forty-four South Village.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.A diorama in the Hsinchu Juancun Village Museum presents the beef noodle soup as a typical Taiwanese street food from the juancun village.Photo by the author, 2023.