Betel Nuts and Traffic Jelly, or, "First Time, Maybe Die!"

Welcome to Taiwan.

I arrived in Taipei Saturday afternoon and took a train south to Chiayi with Joe. Fiona picked us up at the train station and brought us to her family's home for the Chinese New Year feast. The feast was already laid out when we arrived, so after some brief greetings and introductions, we sat down to eat. That's when Fiona's brother passed me a betel nut.

BETEL NUT: An Introduction

During my flight from Seoul to Taipei, I figured I'd better start reading up on Taiwan. Out came my glasses and Rough Guide. Betel nut, according to the guide, enjoys "almost totemic status" in Taiwan. Betel nuts are the seeds of the betel palm, and apparently provide a stimulating effect on their chewers (chewees?). The betel nuts here are wrapped up in folded leaves and come in different flavors (mint? anise?). My Rough Guide notes that they are notoriously sold by scantily clad women standing in glass boxes and that truckers are the most devoted customers. Well. (When I ask Fiona later if this is this is true, she says enthusiastically "yes, spicy betel nut sisters!")

The betel nut is chewed but never swallowed. The bright orange juice isn't swallowed either -- it gets spit out. Yuck. And it's apparently a carcinogen. Taiwan has one of the highest rates of mouth and throat cancer in Asia, and the doctors are saying the nut is to blame.

CHEW LIKE GUM, SPIT SPIT SPIT

When we arrived at Fiona's, I immediately noticed that her brother had betel nut teeth. By this I mean that they were orange. He was a chewer. In his pocket, Brother kept a plastic baggie full of beautifully wrapped betel nuts. He passed one nut to me and one nut to Joe, and indicated we should chew away. The mood of the moment suggested it would be rude to decline, so I suggested that we might save them for the end of the meal, and he nodded approvingly. We placed the betel nuts to the sides of our plates.

AN INTERJECTION: After forty-odd hours of travel, I mostly wanted a water bottle and a bed -- not a potentially cancer-causing betel nut.

Midway through the meal, somebody passed me a dish and I heard something fall onto the floor. Could that have been my betel nut? A little while later, I noticed my betel nut was indeed missing. Hmm. I glanced around the floor but didn't see my missing nut. Maybe the whole thing would be forgotten. Maybe nobody would notice.

Wrong. On a trip to the sink, Fiona's sister-in-law came across my missing betel nut half way across the kitchen floor. Damn. But no -- she didn't link it to me, instead she delivered it back to Brother, chiding him him in Taiwanese (presumably for carelessly loosing his nuts). Saved!

Wrong again. Once we couldn't fit any more food into our stomachs (wo bao le! wo bao le!), the table noticed that my betel nut was missing. "I think it fell on the floor..." I admitted. No matter, Brother pulled out another. He said something in Taiwanese. Fiona translated -- "he says you'd better enjoy them, he doesn't give many away."

I stalled for time by asking questions.
"Will I be able to sleep if I chew this? Isn't it a stimulant?"
Nonono, they said, it would just warm me up.
Joe and I looked at each other across the table. He was holding his betel nut between his thumb and forefinger, about halfway to his mouth.
"So I just chew it?" I asked.
"Just chew, don't swallow."
"So I spit? Where should I spit? What do I spit in?"
Somebody handed me a small clear plastic cup.
Great.
Joe and I eyed each other again.
"How long do I chew? Until the juice is all gone?"
"Like gum, just chew, spit, chew! As long as you want!" They were excited about this.

I placed the wad gently in my mouth on the left side. Joe did the same. We bit down. We chewed. Our eyes got big. We spat. We chewed.

Everybody in the room was anxiously awaiting our reactions. After about fifteen seconds of chewing, Joe said "it's getting warm."

Sure enough, my mouth was beginning to radiate heat. I spat another gush of orange juice into my cup. Joe did the same. Fiona began laughing. "Your teeth are orange!" I'm sure they are, I thought.

The heat spread rapidly down into my neck, across the right side of my chest, and the whole way down my right arm. My fingers were glowing within seconds. My whole face felt warm and red. I looked over at Joe and he looked like he might be about to break into a sweat. "It's really hot" he said. It wasn't spicy at all -- it wasn't like that -- it was like plugging in an electric blanket and then swallowing it.

I chewed a little more until I thought I might have a heart attack and then spat the entire wad into my cup. Joe held out for another minute or two before letting go of his wad, too. We asked for water so we could rinse and spit, cleaning out our mouths.

Fiona's sister was laughing. I told her how quickly the heat had traveled through my blood and how quickly I was cooling down since I'd spat out the nut. "Yes," she said in broken English, "your heart will beat very very hard. The juice -- some people die if swallow juice the first time. Heart stops!"

"What?" I cried. "We could have died if we'd swallowed the juice by accident?" She thought my dismay was very funny. "Yes, first time, maybe die!" Fiona agreed with her. The juice wasn't the only danger she and Fiona went on to tell us: any betel nuts harvested growing upside down would kill us, too. Unless you harvest the nuts yourself, you can't be sure you're getting nuts that grew in the right direction.

Well, Joe and I lived, and -- needless to say -- we haven't had any betel nuts since.

Oh -- and traffic jelly... when we got caught in traffic, Fiona said hesitantly "we are in traffic... traffic..."
"Jam," Joe said, "a traffic jam."
"That's right," said Fiona, "not jelly."