Taiwan Today

While the French may protest that world gastronomy is declining due to the invasion of insipid fast food, people in Taipei know that a quick and easy meal can be just as tasty as a gourmet spread. When there’s no time for a leisurely lunch or for laboring over the stove, they can still enjoy a wide array of delicious foods—both traditional and Western—simply by stopping at one of the city’s vast number of roadside food stands.

In the morning, commuters on their way to the neighborhood bus stop will find a wide choice for breakfast: from steamed bread stuffed with pork, thin pancakes flavored with green onions, and glutinous rice tightly wrapped around fried breadsticks, to hamburgers and ham-and-egg sandwiches. At noon, food stalls abound along the alleyways between office buildings and near schools, offering fried dumplings, boxed lunches of chicken legs or pork chops on rice, noodles prepared in scores of different ways, or even foreign dishes like Japanese tempura and Greek gyro sandwiches. After office hours, friends can simply wander the streets near a department store or mill through a night market to find whatever their taste buds desire, from the simplest fried turnip cakes or roasted sweet potatoes to oyster omelets and fresh octopus salad. Even during the wee hours of the night, revellers can find streets full of small stands for a midnight bowl of noodles, a sack of steamed peanuts, or a plate of shaved ice and fruit.

This is just a minute sampling of the variety of foods offered by roadside vendors. Their facilities are diverse as well, from little more than a gas-fired grill on wheels to several carts and refrigerated stands set up among old tables and wobbly stools arranged on the sidewalk, sometimes with a few lightbulbs strung overhead. One vendor might sell a single item—perhaps small waffle-like cookies or rolls of pressed squid—or dozens of dishes, all boiled or stir-fried to order.

Roadside food is not only quick and nearly always available, but also cheap. And the informal atmosphere has a special appeal. Although Taipei also has an endless assortment of indoor restaurants, vending stands remain one of the most popular places to eat—whether for students, construction workers, or office employees. What’s more, they are a phenomenon of daily life that has far-reaching social and economic dimensions.

For the thousands of people in Taipei who run food stands, it is a way of making a living—although for most an illegal one. According to a 1988 survey by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), less than 35 percent of the 17,000 stands in the city are licensed. And of the 35,000 stands in suburban Taipei county, only 0.4 percent are legal. Most of the legal ones can be found along streets zoned for late-night commercial operations, commonly known as night markets. These vendors open shop at a designated location, pay rent for their stands, and are taxed according to the volume of their business. But it isn’t easy to get into a legitimate night market. “The requirements for a vendor’s license are quite rigorous,” says Feng Chiu-huo (馮秋火), who handles vendor registration for the Taipei City Division of Market Supervision. In issuing licenses, the government gives priority to the handicapped, people with low incomes, and those over fifty with no other means of support.

But these strict requirements are not a problem for the majority of food vendors, who set up shop wherever they think business will be good, pay no taxes, and are prepared to run whenever the police come around to check. They are aptly known as “mobile food vendors.” Most prefer to do business at a fixed place, but from time to time they move their carts, both to follow the crowd and to keep the police from hounding them. As long as a vendor can find a good location, which is not difficult in fast-paced, densely-populated Taipei, it is fairly easy to do a brisk business. According to the DGBAS, about 30 percent of the city’s vendors earn more than US$40,000 a year.

Setting up a roadside stand requires a minimal investment. The cost of equipment varies depending on what kind of food is sold, but ordinarily it will not exceed US$2,000. According to a store keeper who sells vendors’ stands, a basic cart and large stewpot cost about US$230, and a stall equipped with a refrigerator or gas tank can run from $800 to $1,600. Folding tables, chairs, and cooking utensils might add up to another $400.

Mrs. Liu has been selling “Cow-tongue cakes,” pieces of crispy, elongated puff pastry filled with a layer of peanut butter or honey, from her two wheel cart for about eight years. For the first five years, she did business near a long-distance bus station in downtown Taipei, keeping her cart hidden and locked up in a nearby alley when not on duty. When the station closed down several years ago, she moved to her current location a few blocks away. She now operates in a bustling area near two large department stores. Across the street is the Taipei Railway Station, and around the corner a street of cram schools, where high school students take courses to prepare for the college entrance exam. The steady flow of shoppers, rail passengers, and students usually keeps Liu busy from 7:00 AM to 8:30 PM. She sells an average of 150 cakes a day, at about 60 U.S. cents apiece.

Her overhead is extremely low. She spends about US$16 a day for ingredients and gas to heat the flat grill where she heats up her cakes. In addition, she pays a small sum to the drugstore next to where she does business. Although the sidewalk is public property, such payments have become a convention between food vendors and storekeepers. Liu’s net revenues run about US$2,100 a month, although business slacks off in the summer, when most people prefer cold drinks to cakes. “When the weather gets really hot and business gets really slow, I pack up my stall,” she says.

But Liu feels less threatened by the weather than by unannounced police searches. “In eight years,” she says, “I’ve been caught seven or eight times.” Each time, she has had to pay a US$50 fine and several times has had her equipment confiscated as well. But having to buy a new cart and gas tank is not a major expense. What is worse is the disruption in business.

Although mobile food vendors come from miscellaneous backgrounds, many of them, including Liu, are forced into the business because of financial circumstances. She opened her stand after her husband was paralyzed in a car accident. With five children to feed and no unemployment or disability insurance to fall back on, she needed a quick and relatively easy way to make a living. Although four of her children are now grown and can help with the family finances, she still is responsible for her youngest daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, as well as her husband, who is still hospitalized. Adding to her burden, Liu’s illegal business leaves her without health insurance or other benefits.

Tai Po-fan (戴伯芬), a researcher at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University, finds that roadside vending provides many families with an economic safety net, but it also exposes weaknesses in the government’s assistance programs. “An inadequate social welfare system is the main reason for menial laborers engaging in the mobile food stall business,” she says.

Another reason is a lack of appealing job opportunities. “When they have to put up with low pay, long hours, meager benefits, and being otherwise exploited, many workers would rather have their own business,” Tai says. Vending offers a flexible schedule and a chance to work for oneself. Mr. Lin, a forty-year-old vendor who sells oyster noodles, agrees: “The best thing about running a food stall is that you don’t have to see your boss’s sour face every day. And the income is certainly better than for an ordinary job.” Lin previously worked as a chef’s assistant in a large restaurant. He now operates his stand across from a boys’ high school from 6:00 to 9:30 in the morning and 3:30 to 9:00 in the evening. In the interim he prepares the food and takes a break.

Many of those who work as food vendors, including Liu and Lin, are from rural areas around the island. They come to the city looking for better job opportunities and often try out several prospects before they end up buying a cart and setting up business on the streetside. For many of them, a lack of skills and education leave few other alternatives. According to the DGBAS, about 23 percent of street vendors got into the business because they weren’t qualified for any other job and 16 percent because they became unemployed. In this way, roadside vending helps to absorb people who might otherwise become marginalized from the mainstream city population.

Thirty-year-old Miss Wang, who sells whipped tea drinks from a roadside stand, left rural Tainan in the south after junior high school. Initially, she held a job as a hairdresser in Taoyuan, south of Taipei. She then ventured to the capital city hoping to get a better position, but discovered the only opportunities were to be found in roadside vending. “When I first came to Taipei, being so far away from home, without a roof, without friends, without any formal training what kind of business could I do?” she asks. Wang opens her stand from 11:00 AM to midnight and can sell eighty to ninety cups of whipped tea at around US$1.20 each. Her net income in the peak season is about US$1,800 per month.

But food vending is not just for those who suddenly find themselves in financial hardship or unemployable. For many, it is simply the business of choice. The DGBAS survey shows that for 45 percent, food vending was a chance to have more autonomy over their lives, and for 12 percent, the choice was based on the high profit potential.

For the eleven-member Lin family, running a food stand is a stable and profitable enterprise. About seven years ago, the eldest Lin daughter and her two brothers decided that the air-conditioning components factory they were running was too much trouble. “It’s no fun to be a boss when your employees keep wanting higher wages,” she says. “And even if you can pay them well, you can’t always find skilled workers.” They also had to battle with a continual cash-flow problem, since under Taiwan’s banking system, a check deposited in an account must be cleared before it is credited. “We couldn’t withdraw the money for about three months,” Lin says. As a food vendor, all income is in cash.

Lin and her brothers opened their food stand—really a small restaurant—on the sidewalk behind the Tonlin Department Store on Chunghsiao East Road, one of the main arteries of the city. Their cousins also closed down their clothing boutique and joined in the new business. Other family members started helping out as well. Now there are ten of them working in two shifts, from 10:30 AM to 5:00 AM, plus one sister who stays home doing chores and preparing the food. They sell beef noodles, spiced giblets, braised meat, fried vegetables, and about thirty other dishes. Besides their initial investment, they have spent US$4,000 to expand, installing sinks, an oven, gas tanks, tables and chairs. The business takes in about US$2,000 daily, and net profits are 35 to 40 percent.

In order to keep too many competitors from moving in, the Lins also rent the basement of the building next to where they do business and sublet it to a leisure center. At one time they had tried moving their restaurant into the basement, but business dropped. “Customers said they missed the atmosphere of eating at a roadside stall,” the eldest Lin sister says.

Even though their business is not licensed, the Lins could not really be called “mobile” vendors because they keep their stand at the same location. After hours, they simply lock up the stalls and leave them on the sidewalk. They have been fined several times by the police, paying about US$100 each time, but for the most part, staying in one place has given them a sort of legitimacy. “We’ve been here for quite a long time, you know,” the younger Lin brother says. “The police won’t chase us away.” And if they ever do, the Lins figure it won’t be a big deal. Says the eldest Lin sister in full confidence, “We can just suspend business for a while.”

For most food vendors, in fact, the police are only a minor inconvenience. For those like tea vendor Wang, who have small carts that can be quickly packed and moved, it is just a matter of keeping on guard. “Whenever I see a blue uniform, I just run away,” she says. Others have a more cunning strategy, according to a vendor who sells noodles and duck meat behind the Mingyao Department Store. “They set up business on the boundary between two or three police precincts,” he explains. “When a policeman comes along, they just cross the border into the other precinct.”

Many vendors keep the police at bay by joining in large groups, which have come to be known as “mobile night markets.” According to Tai Po-fan, who wrote a thesis on vendors last year, this phenomenon started in the late 1970s. As many as one hundred or two hundred vendors will move collectively from place to place each evening, packing their equipment in individual vans or trucks. They usually travel according to a rotating itinerary, reappearing in the same location about every eight days. Many of the groups operate in small towns, but there are also about eight such groups in suburban Taipei.

A vendor can join at any time, simply by paying a nightly fee of about US$3. The leader of the group uses the money for scouting new locations, setting up out door water and electricity supplies, putting up advertisements, and sometimes paying bribes. They might offer gifts to the police as well as local officials to help keep on the good side of the authorities. If the police do crack down, the group leader will mediate on behalf of the vendors. The leader must also occasionally treat local gang leaders to dinner and drinks—just to show that the vendors know they are in their territory.

Some mobile night markets are highly organized, with about a dozen core members who help maintain traffic order, improve communications among the group, regulate the use of loudspeakers, and oversee the nightly cleanup. According to Tai, however, success depends not so much on the group’s self-discipline as on the leader’s personal contacts with government officials and police.

When vendors do get caught in a police crackdown, the biggest hardship they face is having their equipment seized. The police will occasionally drive a truck down the street and pack everything onto it, although technically they are not allowed to take any food. But this tactic usually leads to trouble. “The vendors often accuse the police of improper confiscation and a fight breaks out,” says sociologist Yu Shuenn-der (余舜德), who has been conducting a study on street vendors for two years. “To avoid a confrontation, the police don’t like to resort to confiscation.” Instead, they charge the vendors with obstructing traffic and issue a minor fine.

The police are also lax in their enforcement simply because of the vast number of vendors that they have to deal with. Especially in recent years, the vending population has mushroomed. From 1982 to 1988, the most recent figures available from the DGBAS, the number of food vending stands on the island nearly doubled, to about 174,000. Add to this the number of street stands that sell clothing or other goods rather than food, and the total is about 234,000, accounting for at least one-fourth of the entire number of retail businesses.

The growing number of vendors has also led to increasing public resentment. People complain that these merchants often obstruct the sidewalks, and sometimes entire streets, and that they add to the city’s congestion and to its garbage and noise pollution. Legitimate storeowners complain that they steal customers, and some businesses say the ease with which a person can set up a vending operation adds to the island’s labor shortage. Some also take issue with the fact that street vending helps to alleviate unemployment. As Yu Shuenn-der points out, with more and more city people taking up vending simply because they can make more money, it will one day lose its function as an economic safety valve.

Still, the government doesn’t seem to consider cracking down on street vendors a matter of high priority. Despite the problems they cause—including lost tax revenues—putting them out of business could cause an even bigger headache for public officials. “The basic problem is that the authorities have an ambivalent attitude toward their existence,” Yu says. But the public is also ambivalent. Despite people’s complaints, they still patronize vendors. When it comes down to it, it’s hard to pass up the convenience and the tasty offerings of Taipei’s movable feast.