It was early January, 2016 in Taipei—January 8th, to be exact—and the run for representative for the district of Zhongzheng-Wanhua in the Legislative Yuan, the unicameral legislature of the Taiwan government, was heating up in its final few days.
Incumbent Lin Yu-feng, a man in his middle-sixties and a stalwart of the old-guard Kuomintang (KMT), a party which had fled to the island from China in 1949 at the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, was up against an opponent the likes of which he, nor anyone else, had seen before. That opponent was Freddy Lim.
Then not quite 40 years old, Lim was everything his political sparring partner Lin was not—youthful, idealistic in his longtime vocal support of Taiwanese independence, politically savvy in spite of his relative youth thanks to time served as the head of chair of Amnesty International Taiwan, and the leader of the brand new activism-based New Power Party (NPP). While the KMT represented Taiwan’s grim, authoritarian past, the NPP sought to usher in its progressive future.
For 20 years Lim fronted the politically conscious extreme metal band Chthonic. The band was a vehicle by which he and his corpse-painted band mates, including his wife, bassist Doris Yeh, told stories of Taiwanese culture, faith, and history. It was also their means of voicing unflinching support of full-fledged independence for Taiwan—a de facto independent state, recognized only by a handful of diplomatic allies, that is regarded by neighboring China as a so-called “renegade province.”
Lin’s KMT, which officially refers to Taiwan as the Republic of China, had long favored an eventual unification with China. Meanwhile, the NPP, which refers to Taiwan simply as Taiwan, took the same line as Freddy’s band, calling for Taiwan to be recognized by the international community as an independent nation.
It had been a long, hard-fought campaign. And on January 8th, Lin brought out what he thought were the big guns. Speaking to the media, Lin said that Lim, who sports an impressive silky black mane that he whips and windmills with abandon while performing, had “…hair that is longer than a woman’s and is mentally abnormal.” Lin also, in an aging inner city district famed as a denizen for old-school gangsters with a penchant for black and gray ink (the god of war and the god of hell particular favorites), attacked Lim for his tattoos.
Despite Lin’s seeming ignorance of the demographics of his base, his offensive might have worked in the heavily conservative district—a KMT stronghold—were it not for a husband and wife team of tangyuan makers in Wanhua’s Nanjichang Night Market.
Lin Du-qin, 60, and his wife, Huang Su-qin, 61, had been selling tangyuan—sticky rice balls—in the night market since 1977. In four decades in business, they had developed a hard-won and enviable reputation, patrons lining up down the street from their humble stall during the late-December Dongzhi, or Winter Solstice Festival. During this time, tangyuan are included as part of ceremonial offerings to family ancestors and to Buddhist/Taoist gods, who are prayed to for good fortune in the coming year. The round shape of the tangyuan, says a pair of experts, is the source of their symbolism.
“While tāng yuán are made in slightly different ways from place to place, a common denominator is a belief that the roundness of the balls signifies a complete circle of harmony and unity within the family,” say Steven Crook and Katy Hui-wen Hung, authors of A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)
“It’s a tradition in Taiwan that on the Dongzhi day people worship god,” adds Lin Du-qin, “but they also worship death and ask for blessings for the following year. It’s the shortest day of the year, and every day after that will get brighter and brighter. We started getting busy a week before the festival. During this time, we can only sleep two or three hours a night.”
In the months prior to the Dongzhi Festival in 2016, Lin and his wife noticed a new patron coming in from time to time, long black hair sometimes obscuring his face as he sat down at one of their Formica-top tables for a bowl of red bean or sweet peanut soup with tangyuan, two of their specialties. Later, they found out their new customer was Freddy Lim, their would-be representative, who had opened up his party headquarters nearby.
The three of them got to talking, and Lim told Mr. and Mrs. Lin of the trouble he was having making inroads in a district where the KMT had long held power. Mr. Lin, who says he took to Lim at first because he was “handsome and highly-motivated,” gave the young upstart some friendly advice.
“When Freddy came around, he didn’t tie his long hair back. There are conservative people around here, so I gave him the suggestion to tie his hair, and I think that helped him out,” he says, laughing.
Mr. Lin and his wife have long been known as keepers of the Dongzhi traditions in Wanhua. It’s a day that hearkens to simpler times in Taiwan.
“It’s an important holiday for family gatherings,” says Lin. “When we were still an agrarian society, our relatives lived next door. During the Dongzhi Festival, we would all get together and start making everything from rice, like the rice balls. That day, we would usually take part in ancestor worship and worshiping the gods, and everyone would eat together. Now everyone just comes to a place like this to buy tangyuan, especially in Taipei.”
Taipei, a foodie’s dream and also a city that never sleeps, is a place where you can get whatever you want, whenever you want, from early morning fried noodles and turnip cake to late-night soup dumplings and soy milk. But convenience, says Lin, can also breed apathy, and a withering of the ways of the past.
“In the south, you might still see the old ways, but in Taipei, people don’t even bother to boil their own water.”
Fortunately for Freddy Lim, Lin’s feelings on preserving the old ways didn’t extend to politics. Lim tied his hair back, and Lin took him around the market to introduce him to his erstwhile suspicious potential constituents.
“I took him with me to the stores and helped him get to know all the shopkeepers,” says Lin, adding that being shown around by a pillar of the community (he’s also the leader of the Nanjichang Night Market Association) helped ingratiate Lim to people in the area.
It was grassroots politics at its finest. When Lim’s KMT counterpart launched his attack on his appearance just days before the election, the response in the night market was resounding.
“We thought, ‘Maybe the problem isn’t what he looks like. Maybe it’s you,” says Mr. Lin, referring to Lim’s adversary.
And so Lim, Taiwan’s heavy metal freedom fighter, managed to get elected, topping his opponent by more than 6,000 votes. And he hasn’t forgotten the tangyuan sellers who helped him seal his victory. Even in late 2018, when he was in the midst of stumping for NPP candidates in the throes of the island’s hectic November midterm elections, and a new father to boot, Lim still stopped by for a traditional Dongzhi Festival favorite.
“Freddy still comes here often,” Lin smiles. “We met his baby daughter, and Freddy even gave us a gift of sticky rice when she was born.”
