Room One Thousand

Forming Tibetan Taipei

On a humid afternoon about five years ago, just off a narrow alleyway bordered by homogenous rows of five-storey apartment structures that line much of the crowded1, subtropical metropole of Taipei City, inside a Tibetan restaurant that occupied the ground floor of one of those narrow buildings, I sat, ostensibly doing ethnography, but really playing with the food I had just ordered. Of course, these two specific events of doing ethnography and playing with food are not necessarily contradictory...