Strolling through the quiet lanes near Taipei's Da'an Forest Park, you catch a faint, sweet scent drifting through the air — sweet without being cloying — while two little orange tabby cats meow at passers-by from the roadside. Follow that pastry fragrance a few steps further, and your gaze lands on a low-key yet elegant blue sign, its built-in wall lights casting a warm glow over the bold lettering: PinckyMommy. It feels almost like a living, breathing invitation to step inside.
Tucked away in the alleyways, drifting with the scent of pastry
PinckyMommy
PinckyMommy — real name Chen Hsiang-ling — is the owner of this little shop. The name came about simply because she keeps a dog called Pincky, and people who know her naturally fell into calling her "Pincky's Mommy." She didn't come to diving the way most people do, yet diving has quietly brought about a profound transformation in her life.
Born into a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, she followed her father's arrangement after high school and traveled to mainland China to study at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. After graduating in 2008, she stayed in Beijing, drifting through life in the capital. With no interest whatsoever in Chinese medicine, and facing the reality that her family would no longer support her financially after graduation, she decided on a whim to stay in Beijing and start selling pastries on her own. In those early days she fumbled her way around the newly launched Weibo, arranging hand-deliveries at subway station exits all across Beijing, unfazed by the curious glances from police — boldly challenging a business model whose outcome was anyone's guess. Looking back, even she thinks she was a little crazy. In the end, a friend offered to invest and help her open a proper pastry shop, but homesickness for Taiwan won out, and she chose to close the chapter on her seven years of drifting in Beijing and return home — to Nantou, in the heart of Taiwan.
A compact workspace — the baking corner where her dreams take shape
Still as resistant as ever to inheriting the family trade, even back in Nantou she refused her father's arrangements. Instead, she grabbed a ceremonial offering table, bought an ordinary home oven, and launched her pastry journey right there in the house. Her starting capital was just NT$30,000. She gritted her teeth and began selling online, and still vividly remembers the genuine rush of emotion the first time she saw her savings climb past NT$100,000. In 2013, following her dream, she made the trip north on her own to complete a Western pastry and baking course at the Sino Cereal Research Institute, hoping that more rigorous training would give her dream a stronger foundation.
Every pastry is shaped by her skilled and heartfelt hands
Her encounter with diving came after she had opened her Taipei shop. She headed to Sabah, Malaysia, with a part-time employee and spent two full days snorkeling on the open sea. In addition to meeting countless tropical fish she had never seen before, the more important discovery was that she overcame her fear of the deep ocean — that unnerving feeling of water too deep to touch the bottom — and of the surging waves. Back in Taiwan, she signed up for an entry-level scuba diving course. She still remembers the first time she spotted an entire spawning congregation of bigfin reef squid at the Northeast Coast: an alien world of mysterious life that has stayed burned in her memory ever since. About six months later, she heard about freediving from a friend, and just like that, another window in her life was opened.
She has since completed the AIDA (freediving agency) 4 course — certified to a standard that includes a dive depth of 32 m — making her a professional-level freediver. What changes has diving brought to her life over these two years of learning? She has always lived alone, with a constant stream of practical and emotional pressures. For three to four years her menstrual cycle was highly irregular — but after she started diving, her body seemed to naturally find a balance, and the irregularity resolved completely on its own.
On a psychological level, diving has taught her to honestly confront the fear of the unknown. In scuba diving, because your feet can't touch the bottom, losing control of your neutral buoyancy underwater triggers an inexplicable dread in anyone accustomed to being in full control on land. Freediving, on the other hand, demands that you overcome your body's own discomfort — the prolonged breath-hold, the diaphragmatic contractions (when blood oxygen drops to a certain level, your body triggers spasms of the diaphragm to remind you to breathe). Most people have never experienced any of this before, and the unfamiliar naturally breeds fear. For her, then, diving is about understanding fear, accepting fear, and overcoming fear.
Freediving is a journey of self-discovery — photo credit: 歐大
Scuba diving is about getting to know the ocean; freediving is about getting to know yourself.
Scuba diving lets you stay underwater for long periods with the help of equipment, allowing you to observe ecosystems that are invisible from the surface and to truly experience everything the ocean has to offer. Freediving, by contrast, gives you only a single breath — and in the few minutes of that dive, you need a thorough understanding of whether your breathing is ready, how your weights, fins, and every other piece of kit is performing, because only you know at what moment and at what depth it's time to turn back.
Along the way she has met many fellow divers, and they have gradually come together as a community. As the business grew, the pastry shop had the opportunity to expand into a seating area. She has always wanted her customers to feel the ocean the moment they walk in, so beyond the 20 underwater photographs contributed by various photographers hanging on the walls, she deliberately painted the walls in a gradient — deep blue at the bottom fading to white at the top — mirroring the way color shifts with depth underwater: as you descend, sunlight's red wavelengths are absorbed by the water and the world around you slowly turns blue. When you lie on the floor and look around, the whole environment feels just like being submerged. In this space, she hopes everyone can share their own ocean stories over the simple pleasure of a great dessert.
She simply wants to share with everyone what pastry and the sea have meant to her
To me, the ocean is a therapist. Everyone encounters joy and sorrow in life, but the moment you enter the water, the sea seems to listen to your emotions. There's a saying that the ocean has a healing effect — whether physical or emotional.
When asked about her vision for the future, she just smiles and says simply: "Keep making pastries, keep freediving." She loves the sensation during a freedive of holding a streamlined position, closing her eyes, and continuing to sink — in that moment she feels as though she has become a fish, sensing the gentle glide of seawater across every inch of her skin. Perhaps that is the true magic of freediving.
The story of pastry and the sea will, we believe, keep rising — right there in her little kitchen
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