For my brother and I to share were elementary-level Chinese-language books, full of cheaply illustrated tales of citizenship and morality, and my parents could never resist commenting, even though they knew it wasn’t fair and they were being stupid, how we weren’t reading Chinese at even that level, despite our being 5-7 years older than the Taiwanese first-graders these books were intended for.

I remember packages of dried squid that smelled the way my hat looked. Dried plums that sucked out all the moisture out of your mouth and glued your teeth to your lips. Dried seeds that looked like African beads. Mushrooms so purple they didn’t seem legal, jars of salty preserved turnips, bamboo shoots with chiles, preserved tofu that always leaked a sour and fermented liquid. I remember long sticks of twisted leaves resembling thin cigars, which my mom would drop into a cup of hot water and pull out 30 seconds later. She’d take a sip and offer it to my dad, then me, and when I said it was gross, my parents would say, in the same tone they took when discussing my Chinese reading skills, how in America I had acquired soft bones, how I expected everything to be sweet and candy-like, and had no concept of the idea of something bitter being good for you. Bitter represented hardship and suffering, and to endure it meant hope, fortitude, strength (yes, all those Chinese characters now inked onto biceps or printed on kitchen trivets), this semi-fluid concept that things will get better. After the bitter comes the sweet. Here in America I did not know of suffering. Mom would joke about forcing me to drink some to teach me something about culture, and then she’d finish her mug, inhaling and exhaling like a bad actor performing a smoking scene.

I didn’t get it then and I still don’t. Must we “endure” this suffering? Outside of China, bitterness doesn’t represent hardship – it is the hardship. It’s nice to think there’s a poetic way to justify suffering, but it’s also naive not to imagine some ancient Chinese empire using the idea of gan to keep the miserable masses from protesting. Throw them a little bone to chew on, stay complacent, wait for it, the sweetness is coming. Tell them it’s OK to be where they are and in the end they will be satisfied – just stay passive. That long stroke at the top of the Chinese character becomes a lid.

What’s bitter? Chicory. Walnuts. The skin of the ginkgo nut. The cherry leaf wrapped around mochi. The inner core of an apricot seed. The inner core of an umeboshi plum. Quinine. Pumpernickel bread, grapefruit pith, and yes, the cookie part of an Oreo … right?

Lettuce when it goes to seed. Lettuce in hot weather. Dandelion crowns, mizuna, mustard greens. Unsweetened chocolate.

But none of those have gan. Gan is not just a taste, it’s an often-eerie sensation that something or someone has come and gone. A little like the way “bittersweet” is used more often in describing a relationship rather than a specific taste. No food actually tastes bittersweet.

Gan is found in ginseng (a rhizome valued for its medicinal properties and resemblance to miniature humans) as well as in licorice root (not the red twisted candy), but not in star anise or anything made with anise oil, which tastes like licorice without the special bitterness. That cool sensation from the first cigarette of the day? Licorice root is used as a flavoring agent in certain tobaccos.