Chema is living in Taipei (Taiwan) where he teaches Spanish. Before that he was living for 2 years in Tokyo, 1 of them studying Japanese in Takushoku university.

Betel nuts (檳榔 – Binlang in Chinese) is the name use to called, by association, a mixture of the betel leaves with the areca nuts, wrapped in a package and spread with lime and pepper to be chewed together. The mixture produces a strong and bitter juice with a taste a little bit similar to licorice, that gets your mouth tinted in red. The practice of chewing betel nuts is an ancient tradition all over Southeast Asia, including Taiwan, where the betel nuts occupy an important place in the country’s agricultural production.

Betel nuts kiosks are also common throughout the area, but in Taiwan they experienced a particular phenomenon during the 60’s, turning them into an important icon of the modern Taiwanese culture. In that decade, the so called Shuangdong Girls opened a new kind of betel nuts kiosk in Guoxing (Nantou County) using a new “marketing strategy”: the kiosk had a brightly lit glass enclosure so you could see the young female sellers easily from outside wearing revealing clothing. The main consumers of betel nuts were men, so the strategy was such a success that this new kiosks spread throughout the country along with their neon lights.

Nowadays, Betel nuts beauties can be found all along the roads and highways of the country selling betel nuts, cigarettes and drinks. Anyway, although Betel nuts beauties appear also in urban settings, in the cities the most of the kiosks are held by older women or even whole families without any sexual marketing strategy. As you go farther from urban cores, the number of betel nut girls increase gradually.

Any foreigner will see this practice as a kind of exploitation or even as a hidden red light business, but the truth is, despite some critics, debates and timid regulations such as the one made by Taoyuan County Government in 2002 mandating Betel nut beauties to cover up their breasts, bellies, and hips, Taiwanese society doesn’t seem too worried about the issue, and neither the kiosks nor their vendors suffer any kind of discrimination from their neighborhoods.

The Japanese photographer Masato Seto published in 2008 a photo-album called “Binran”.
Eva Tang wrote an interesting article about the issue in culture.tw.

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Related posts:

1. Taiwanese cuisine