草長鶯飛: Gifts from the Garden
p.s. Wednesday is the last day to order in time for Christmas
This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, sign up here.
This is a personal, dare I say sentimental, letter about the gifts and responsibilities of being a business owner, and how a philosophy of health and beauty in the garden can apply to all parts of life. I hope this note helps make way for your own rest and reflection as we enter the quiet part of the holiday season and continue to confront the collective challenges of our time here on earth.
PSA that Wednesday 12/13 10pm EST is the deadline to order for arrival in time for Christmas. If you miss the deadline and want a sure bet, our store will be open through Friday, December 23rd.
And finally, as a thank you to newsletter subscribers, we’re offering a free bottle of Mama Nyonya Chili Garlic Sauce to any orders $75+, while supplies last (two days? three?). This was my staff pick last week—it’s a Malaysian style sauce made by Taiwanese-Malaysian garlic farmers in Taiwan. Enjoy it on everything.
Everything we reap starts with what we sow, and the best business advice I ever got comes from a book about gardening. Winter is the customary time to reflect on what has transpired in the landscape and how next year’s garden ought to grow. I thought it would be nice to share some treasured words with you as the year draws to a close.
Lessons from the Garden
If you know me, you know I love a garden. If I wasn’t working on Yun Hai, I’d probably be trying to do something with plants (and one day I likely will). When trying to problem solve my own green space, I came across a book called The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden by Roy Diblik. The design of the book communicated that it would be a straightforward volume on low-maintenance landscape design. But it was so much more.
In this book, I found a voice to which I relate strongly. This was unexpected, as Diblik is a Midwestern prairie plantsman and I’m a Taiwanese-American specialty food purveyor. But then again my great-great-grandmother was a master gardener in Nebraska; worlds collide in beautiful ways if you let them. So, please allow this Taiwanese food newsletter a temporary transgression into the world of prairie plants; I’m showing you my other side.
From Diblik’s introduction to his book:
We must abandon the tradition that one method of gardening fits all plantings. We must be more creative with our thinking, our approach, and our participation. And we need to establish new gardening traditions, modeled after the knowledge, awareness, spirit, and joy we bring to each day. So, what should we do in the garden?
Stay involved! Be attentive!
Look to nature, both without and within.
Keep things simple
Dream ahead, and yet recognize the beauty of the present
Redefine the rules
Look for relationships—that’s what holds things together
Share and participate
More than any book I’ve read about actual business, this gardening book illuminated my path as an entrepreneur. What Diblik says we should do in the garden, we should do in life, and I think that’s his subtext, too.
I further quote:
Beauty is in everything, everywhere, and always re-created. Sunrises, rainy evenings, grandchildren, dogs, a nice dinner, a walk, family, friends. That’s how we live.
Art is a habit we should never break. Painting the house, taking pictures of our travels, cooking meals, choosing a new sofa—all tap the creative part of us.
Community awakens us to our place. It’s our culture, where and how we live and relate to all our neighbors and friends. It’s the wonderful diversity of our lives.
Ecology is being aware that we coexist, living lovingly with others. It’s where we are—the sky, this moment, every leaf you’ll ever see—and it’s also the places we cannot see: distant woods, snowy mountaintops, wide oceans, a village in Italy, a small park in Sweden.
Health is what keeps each of us living in the present and looking forward to tomorrow. We all try to make intelligent choices that will keep us well, physically and mentally.
These are many of the same philosophical concepts that drive me, and, to the greatest extent that I can act on them, Yun Hai.
In my experience, desire for success can be the driver of its own manifestation—intensely motivating but also hollow at the end of the day. Have you ever achieved something seemingly impossible only to be instantly depressed the next day, surrounded by the carnage of your efforts? Maybe you haven’t, but I have. For me, it’s more beneficial to think of success as what comes after we’ve sown the right seeds and cared for them to the best of our ability. Failure, then, is simply a garden transforming. No matter what happens in the garden, it’s always there for you to rest in. Your efforts, multiplied, then nurture you.
In the (let’s face it, rotten) capitalistic system we currently operate in, I believe that commerce still has the power to be counter-cultural, if we participate on our own terms. Roy Diblik is not a household name. He’s a nursery owner that has been growing native perennials for forty years in Wisconsin at Northwind Perennial Farm. It’s a business, but it’s also a conduit of knowledge, experimentation, and supply of difficult-to-source plants. The nursery has been influential to landscape designers and native plant gardeners throughout the world, changing what we are capable of in our own yards for the better. He sourced and grew plants for Chicago’s Lurie Garden, a landscape that celebrates the native beauty of the prairie, influencing landscape designer Piet Oudolf (who also designed New York City’s High Line). I aspire to such everyday impact.
The word “participation,” which Diblik uses often, is important. I’ve said it many times before in this newsletter and other places, but “support,” as in “supporting small businesses,” has a subtext of charitable acton—i.e. “I’ll buy from them because they’d struggle otherwise.” On the other hand, “participate” is a much more powerful word, with a two-directional meaning. The consumer is benefactor as well as beneficiary. Involvement here is not just involvement in a transaction, but involvement in one’s own life and the building and functioning of one’s world. When we select which farmers and artisans we work with in Taiwan, we’ve increasingly come to think of it this way.
As Diblik says, “Stay attentive!” We try to involve ourselves with those that we find to be thoughtful and that advance, to the best of their ability, the long-term health and beauty of this world and its peoples.
And now, some thanks are in order, because you all have participated in our business more readily and eagerly than I ever thought possible. You have enabled us to do more and more in Taiwan, with Taiwanese agriculturalists, craftspeople, and designers. Thank you for the gift of your time and attention.
And much gratitude to to my incredible business partner Lillian Lin and our wonderful team—Feng, Ivan, Luke, Ama, Natya, Jasmine, Sunny, Cat, and all those before—who surf the waves of chaos as only the passionate can. It’s not easy working for a small business; the ground shifts beneath us as we grow. Like a garden in July, if it rains one week, the whole thing is overgrown by the next. Beautiful, but in desperate need of a weeding. Or if there’s a drought, it’s a bigger problem. Perhaps we should plant some more perennials.
In the spirit of the garden, I wanted to share a few independently-owned businesses that I adore and respect for the way they conduct commerce with humanity and joy. If you have a business to share or recommend, please leave a note in the comments section, too.
First up, a highlight of a Taiwanese-American bakery that really impressed me a few weeks ago.
The Foundry Bakery
This time last year, I wrote about a cronut I had in Fenqihu, Alishan. It was made by twisting a perfect bar of laminated dough into a round two-part mold and baking it. The butter in the lamination melts, caramelizes, and envelops the whole thing in a crunchy crust, with a moist, flaky interior. It reminded me of a Kouign-Amann, but had a distinct Taiwanese flair to it—something about the tender, sweet, milky flavor.
A year later, I found the Taiwanese Cronut again, but this time in a Taiwanese bakery in St. Louis—The Foundry, located in the inconspicuous suburb of Maryland Heights, which I knew next to nothing about. I was visiting St. Louis for the Thanksgiving holiday and was on a mission to locate the best Taiwanese food in the area. There were three restaurants that I found: Kitchen 95 (which I loved, see our IG post on them), Tai Ke (long waits but ultimately a hit with my Dutch-American in-laws), and The Foundry Bakery.
The bakery was started by Ray, a Taiwan native, and his wife Leah Yeh, who grew up in Ho Chi Minh City. Ray was studying genetics at Wash U when he met Leah, who was working on her MBA there. As he put it to me during our casual chat at the register: he loves the precise and iterative nature of science and research, but longed to do something that would bring people immediate joy. On a mission to share Taiwanese flavors with St. Louis, he applied his science background to baking. His wife Leah joined him, applying her MBA knowledge to running the business, securing great ingredients, and bakery operations.
All the Taiwanese baked goods they offer are made from scratch daily, and with their own original perspective. One of their signature bakes (in a British accent, like Prue) is a laminated egg tart. Egg tarts are one of the most common pastries you’ll see in Taiwan. The Foundry has made it their way, using dough that’s been laminated with 100 layers, shaped to create a deep reservoir for the egg custard. They also make perfectly pale and tender taro mooncakes (taros mashed in house), naturally leavened (!) buns stuffed with red bean and other customary fillings, laminated bollo bao, and even sourdough breads with ingredients like Taiwanese smoked longan, goji berries, shiitake mushroom, and wild harvested black walnuts.
I was extremely touched by how humble Ray and Leah are about their achievements and how excellent their offering is. As an example, take the black walnut sourdough. My father tries to crack the black walnuts that fall from his tree in Texas by running over them with an SUV—the key word here is tries. I need you to know this so you will understand me when I say my eyes popped at “wild harvested black walnut.” This is a labor of passion and comes from the will to create joy for others.
They don’t ship as of now but I hope that at least some of you will be able to find your way there soon.
A Garden-Variety Gift Guide
Here's a list of mostly Taiwanese-American businesses that we here at Yun Hai think are worth your attention. We’re nearing our holiday shipping deadline this Wednesday, and many of these businesses are too, so don’t delay if you’re still in need of holiday gifts.
In no particular order and with so much love:
Wax Apple
one of the first Taiwanese-focused boutiques I encountered, bringing in the best of Taiwanese crafts
Bang Tea
small batch oolong tea purveyor and a close friend of Yun Hai
Felicia Liang
an artist and printmaker that illustrates everyday Taiwanese life and culture
Formosa Chocolates
an artisanal chocolatier in San Francisco influenced by Taiwanese-American heritage and gift-giving traditions
Te Company
tea purveyor and maker of my favorite biscuits and fine cookies. I send a box to my eye doctor every year who literally called me last season to say how astounding these were
Xiao Mi Jiu
Cat Yeh and Cher Lin, who make many of our reels as Off Hour Studio, embarked on a project to ferment aboriginal Taiwanese millet wine
Le Puzz
my friends who make gorgeous puzzles and care deeply about everything they do, funny as all get out and unapologetically themselves
Second Generation Seeds
they’re all sold out, but when Spring comes around, pick up heirloom Asian vegetable seeds from this community-led seed bank
Kitazawa Seed Company
another great source for for Asian heirloom vegetables, serving growers since 1917
Béo Issue
soaps with ingredients and fragrance from a Taiwanese perspective, my new favorite
Onggi
a shop and community hub dedicated to the art and practice of fermentation
Mold Magazine
a gorgeous magazine dedicated to the art, culture, and criticism of food and its production practices, founded by Taiwanese American journalist LinYee Yuan
Ladies and Gentlemen Studio
a Taiwanese-American lighting and object studio, always looking to do good in the world, and the maker of the beautiful light above our store register
lucky risograph
NYC local printmaker and producer of lovely printed matter
mogutable
Taiwanese-owned shop featuring many Asian and Taiwanese handmade ceramics and crafts
Vittles
one of my favorite food newsletters going, heavily focused on British food but offering perspectives that can be appreciated all over the world
AYI
a Taiwanese-American owned clothing store and artspace featuring BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ designers
Yoseka Stationery
a Taiwanese-American owned stationery store bringing the best of Asian stationery into NYC
luck dragon
they don’t ship, but if you’re in Delaware County, NY, this is the best art store in the Catskills, featuring fabrics from Japan, hard to find papers, and many community workshops
Now Serving
an Asian-American owned bookstore featuring all the cookbooks fit to print, with a wonderful emphasis on BIPOC authors
Yu and Me Books
this Asian-American-owned bookstore was destroyed by a fire incident and currently rebuilding, and are now temporarily located in Essex St. Market
If you’re still planning to shop at Yun Hai this season, don’t forget to claim your free Nyonya sauce with an order of $75 or more, automatically added at checkout while supplies last. Or you can pick it up while benefitting a good cause—we’ve donated one to a fundraising auction for Singapore Unbound, an Asian diasporic literary community. Bid here.
Wishing everyone a happy holiday, a restful season, and much time in the garden of the soul. Until next year, then.
In Horto,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉
Research and editorial assistance from Amalissa Uytingco, Luke Miller, Jasmine Huang, and Lillian Lin. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.
Thank you for compiling this incredible list of great places to shop from!