Ha, Sygaldry, I must have seen it before then in some Chinese restaurant, except never tried to eat it (And never seen the can before). Must have mistaken it for black sauce, black bean sauce or soy sauce, none of which I consume. Yes, laugh, but my family hasn’t eaten any of these things for a long time by now ever since my parents got the notion that they were carcinogenic. (The production methods are stomach churning so all these substances were banned.)
I am so turned off by anything I can’t recognize or understand in a Chinese/ Taiwanese restaurant. Especially after 1) consuming months of melamine milk some years ago; 2) the gutter oil scandal.
In recent years in Singapore hot pot has gained notoriety. Basically some construction workers or peasants from Sichuan will come, set up hot pot restaurant, provide expired, substandard trash that sometimes they recycle from previous restaurant patrons (so sometimes the soup has used tissue papers and other refuse inside)… so I never consume any hot pot anymore. If I want it, I make it myself or go to a non-Chinese restaurant eg Korean.
Another trend in Singapore is for local Chinese to consume… Malay food for our daily eats. The queues at Malay Nasi Padang stalls tend to be the longest because it’s a public perception that Malays are less profit oriented and cut fewer corners than Chinese. It’s really a reaction against excessively bad Chinese food. Low end restaurants and food stalls here keep employing peasants from China who can’t cook and it’s so disgusting because they use all kinds of sauces (presumably including the sand in tea stuff) to disguise what’s obviously expired food such as bad tofu.
If you were to look at my spice cabinets, the only traditional Chinese sauce or condiment you could find would be sesame oil. Many visitors to my house have been astounded at my lack of soy sauce. Can’t remember when was the last time I bought it but it was definitely over a decade ago. You’d probably think I were Indian based on the spices that I do keep!
And TP4, if you were having a word association test in Chinese (eg a Chinese language IQ test), what would you associate the name Bullhead with? Maybe these things have been lost in PRC Chinese culture, but if you said牛頭 I would always reply馬面. So to me the brand is terrible and 不吉利. (For those who don’t understand, Bullhead is a Death God in Chinese culture so you don’t want to be eating his stuff.) But of course these are associations that a Taoist or Buddhist would make, whereas a Communist Comrade might think differently. [Just checked Wiki and it says in Taiwan they are actually called 牛馬將軍 so I guess that’s why Taiwanese don’t have the same association.]
This makes me think about a recent alleged gaffe in Taiwan when a UK minister gave a watch to the Taipei mayor. But what’s wrong with giving a watch? It’s not a clock. It’s called Chiu Pio in Minnanese, which isn’t any negative homonym. Furthermore what some Chinese perceive as a Clock, is strictly speaking a Chinese Bell with an external clapper that you might ring during Taoist funeral rites. It shouldn’t apply to something from the West that works differently. Or am I simply too iconoclastic? I’ve given watches to people without incident, and also received watches from other people back in the days when I was a Casio watch geek.
