2025 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize – Grand Prize Winner, College Category
From the judges: “Playful and poignant, this submission infuses simple family recipes with deep emotional resonance. A bold and original take on themes of food, family, and inheritance.”
Taiwanese Popcorn Chicken
Ingredients:
2 lbs of boneless childhood (preferably thigh meat, for tenderness)
1 cup of cultural ambiguity (1 part Taiwanese brown sugar, 1 part American corn syrup) ½ cup of Kimlan soy sauce (the gold label one Mom hides behind the black vinegar) 3 cloves of guilt (minced fine)
1 tbsp Sichuan peppercorn (for that numbing displacement)
3 tbsp of mijiu (the same bottle used for moon festival toasts and scraped knees) 2 star anise pods (one for each passport held)
1 tsp of white pepper (for all the words you swallowed)
1 handful of Taiwanese basil (the real marker of home)
500g of “not quite authentic” (fried until golden)
- On Origins
Popcorn chicken doesn’t belong to us. Not really. The Japanese have their karaage––marinated in soy and sake, as crisp as autumn leaves in Kyoto. The Americans claim chicken nuggets as their own––uniform, industrialized, served with plastic thimbles of barbecue sauce. Even the Portuguese brought their own fried chicken to Macau centuries ago, the batter clinging to the meat like colonists to foreign shores.
But something changes when 鹽酥雞 hits the night market wok. The sweet potato starch crust shatters like childhood innocence. The basil leaves crisp into emerald shards. In Taipei, the aunties don’t measure. They listen—for the sizzle, for the basil’s sharp inhale. They fry not just chicken, but context. They know this isn’t just a snack. It’s currency. It’s consolation. It’s memory in a paper bag, eaten with one hand while the other fans the summer sweat off your neck. It’s the only home some of us can still claim.
- The Marination of Memory
Marination is slow work. Like remembering.
Cut your memories against the grain. The tenderest ones come from that summer when you were still small enough to ride on my hip and still call me Jie-jie with your whole chest. Back when I told you popcorn chicken was magic because it turned street smoke into sweetness. You believed me
Slice the chicken into uneven chunks—some large as my guilt when I left for school, some small as my held breath.
I think about the last time we were in Taiwan together. You’d already stopped reaching for my hand in public. But you still sat next to me on the plane. Leaned your head on my shoulder when the movie bored you. That counted for something.
In a bowl, mix:
- ½ cup soy sauce (the kind Mom brought back from Taiwan in her suitcase) ● 2 tbsp mijiu (for the scraped knees you don’t remember)
- 1 tsp white pepper (the dust of ancestral ghosts)
- 1 tbsp minced garlic (because home always leaves its scent on your fingers) The marinade should sting. We mix it all together in a metal bowl, your hands in mine for a moment—coated in sugar, soy, memory.
You say, “This smells right.”
And I believe you.
Let it sit overnight. Let the flavors deepen.
Let the grief deepen too, until it tastes like longing.
- The Coating
1 cup sweet potato starch (not cornstarch, never cornstarch—this distinction matters more than you’d think)
The secret is in the unevenness. We dredge each piece haphazardly—let the coating fall where it may, leaving corners bare like the patch of earth where Ah-gong’s persimmon tree stopped blooming. The starch should cling like:
- Your tiny fingers, sticky from candied hawthorns, wrapped around the hem of my shirt at the night market
- The lilt in Mom’s accent when she’s angry and not trying to hide where she’s from ● The dust of Taoyuan Airport on my first solo flight back
You used to be small enough to fit all your worries into a bamboo steamer basket. You point to certain dishes in the passing metal cart, unsure of their names. The auntie deftly stamps your order sheet and shuffles along. You exist only in the space between your broken Chinglish and your grandmother’s incomprehension. The shards of forgotten words sit on your tongue, poking at the inside of your cheek. You lick your chopsticks slowly.
I shake off the excess. What remains is enough—a dusting of memory, a promise of crunch. This is how we hold on. Not perfectly, but fiercely.
- The Double Fry Method
Heat the oil. This part needs precision.
We don’t talk much. But there’s comfort in the choreography—your hands dredging the pieces in starch, mine lowering them gently into the wok.
The first fry is gentle. 180°C––the temperature of Taipei pavement in July beneath our sandals as we chased fireflies through the alley behind Ah-ma’s house.
The chicken will float like all our unresolved questions about identity. Remove when pale gold, like your fading Mandarin.
Let rest. All good immigrants know the value of patience.
Snapshots from Chinatown: 1) It’s been three days and I have yet to restore New York to its rightful place. Chinatown sighs with relief as its color returns, but my longing still sits in the throat of summer. 2) Mom knew hunger. And snow. She and her family slept shoulder to shoulder on a carpet in a friend of a friend’s basement. Mom was not yet Mom; it was 1985. She was just a yellow girl with slanted eyes and a smelly lunch box. A speck of dust in the great wide wind. She can still trace every thread of sun back to her coarse immigrant blood. 3) I can hear the warm bakeries on Mott Street chortle in their seats. 4) I can still remember a deep yearning for family life.
The second fry is furious. 200°C––the boiling point of teenage shame when you asked why I couldn’t help with your Chinese homework anymore. This is where the crust forms—jagged, defiant, as golden as the hospital lights when I first held you. The oil pops like firecrackers on Lunar New Year.
On Dad’s first Lunar New Year in America, he and our uncle could not afford much. Squatting on a curb in Jamaica, Queens, the two boys split a carton of stir-fried vermicelli for 99 cents. The street food in America did not have the same grit and pride as it did in Taiwan, but Lunar New Year is a time for family, after all.
You flinch, then lean in. This is how it’s supposed to sound.
- The Basil Test
Use only Taiwanese basil.
Not the kind in plastic clamshells at the supermarket. The kind Mom used to grow in old yogurt containers on the windowsill—wide, fuzzy leaves, with a scent that made my throat tighten before I even knew why.
I tear the leaves roughly at first. Out of habit, maybe. Out of resentment for how fast you grew. How one day you just stopped waiting for you to cross the street. How you started walking ahead instead of beside me.
I tear them more gently after that. I remember the summers when you still followed me everywhere. Your plastic sandals smacking against my heels like a heartbeat. Your voice chasing mine:
Ya ya, wait!
Ya ya, look!
The basil only takes seconds. I drop it into hot oil and step back—it spits, crackles, blooms. The scent unfurls immediately—familiar, holy, sudden. It fills the kitchen with something we both recognize but can’t name.
The leaves turn translucent around the edges, curl inward. You pull them out just before they brown. That’s the trick—not letting them lose their green. It’s easy to overdo. To forget how little time it needs. To assume that more heat means more flavor. It doesn’t. When properly fried, the basil should shatter between your teeth—fragile, fragrant, final.
This is the test. Not the starch. Not the seasoning. It’s the basil.
The way it crumbles when held too tightly.
The way it releases everything it’s held onto, all at once.
The way it smells exactly like home—even if no one calls it that anymore. That’s what makes it the real test. Not just how it fries, but how it vanishes—too fast, too tender, too much like growing up.
- Serving
Plate on yesterday’s World Journal. The oil will stain through the headlines. That’s okay. Let it.
Eat with:
- Plastic forks (for American convenience)
- Bamboo picks (for Taiwanese tradition)
- Bare hands (for the messiness of belonging to neither and both)
Chef’s Notes:
- The crust should be jagged with memories, not smooth with assimilation.
- Authenticity is measured in basil leaves per square inch. The more green, the more desperate the claim to origin.
- Leftovers lose their crispness, like second-generation mother tongues.
- No matter how carefully you measure, some flavors can only be learned by burning your tongue.
(Serves: one homesick sister, one not-so-little brother, and all the untranslatable things between them.)
Kelly is a college senior and a second-generation Taiwanese American writer. These recipes are her love letters—to the island her family calls home, to the diaspora we’ve built, and to all the flavors lost in translation.
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