ALL OF IT! BLONDES, WILD WOMEN, AND MEATY BUNS!

It's cute when little girls speak Cantonese. Especially if they're white. And there is at least one such person. She's seven years old, goes to an inner city school where many of the other children are Cantonese-speakers, and she likes cheung chai baau and cheung fan.
Most particularly, sin haa cheung fan.
It's yummy!

Her pronunciation is far better than mine, but, naturally, her vocabulary is less comprehensive.

Her father is justifiably proud of her.


I was having a snack in Chinatown after spending several hours reading about Tanka boat people (蜑家), who are a minority group in Hong Kong and elsewhere up and down the coast, originally of non-Chinese origin (possibly the original population, before the Chinese started moving south two millenia ago to colonize the lands of the Yueh, Lai, Mieu, and She tribals), and yearning for treif after also noting a recipe for crustaceans in butter with lemon juice and Italian seasoning on the Facebook page of 'God Hates Shrimp', which is a group that spoofs Christian religious types, originally founded to get the goat of the Southboro Baptist Church.

When a small Caucasian female asks for specific things in Cantonese, your head snaps. Especially when her father doesn't speak a word of the language. It is remarkable.


[INFORMATIONAL INTERSTICE: Cheung chai baau (腸仔包): a hotdog wrapped in regular sweet bread dough and baked, very popular in Hong Kong and San Francisco. Cheung fan (腸粉): thin rice flour batter poured over a flat surface and steamed, forming a sheet. Usually a bit of something savoury is strewn along one side while it cooks, so that when it is loosely folded over you have tasty nuggets embedded in the pearlescent fresh noodle sheet. It is then slashed to create chopstickable pieces, served cold, with a little soy sauce poured over. Delicious! Sin haa cheung fan (鮮蝦腸粉): rice sheet-noodle with fresh shrimp. Yueh (越): collective term for the original inhabitants of the area south of the passes; their age was decisively over by the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period (三國) . Lai (黎): the unassimilated proto-Thai in Guangdung and Guangxi, and other regions along the frontier. Mieu (苗): an ethnicity dispersed in various areas, extending into Vietnam and Laos. She (輋、畲): an early tribal people that occupied the coast prior to the migration of Cantonese-speakers into the area between the Sui Dynasty period (隋朝) and the end of Sung (宋). There are still numerous She in Fujian and Zhejiang province, altogether over half a million. There are virtually none of them in Hong Kong (香港) and the Pearl River Delta (珠江三角洲).]


On days when I am not scheduled to work, I usually get up around seven -- darn well have to, as my apartment mate is cheerfully noisy by then, bustling around fixing herself breakfast, cursing in Cantonese, and asking me questions -- and, once I am alone in the house again, I have my second cup of coffee and read. Quite often that means visiting the internet. Any informative site naturally prompts looking things up, and one article inevitably leads to another. I cannot remember what brought me to material about the Tanka; several years ago I had read 'The Vermilion Bird' ("朱雀"), by Edward H. Schafer, along with his other books -- a particular favourite is 'The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature' (1973), which is filled with wild imagery -- so there was much there that ab initio intrigued. On that day the same happened as on other occasions; I became so immersed that it wasn't till mid-afternoon that I realized that breakfast and lunch had both passed without sustenance, and it would soon be tea-time.

The single male always pauses for tea.
It's better than any other meal.


GOOFY & NEUROTIC

I was not originally a tea-time type of person. My sensitivities and tastes are not particularly English, being a Dutch-speaking Yank, and the day ALWAYS starts with coffee (unless I run out). Tea is just the method whereby the caffeine altitude is maintained. But reading on the internet means that all resolve not to smoke in the apartment, as a courtesy to my apartment mate who is a fervent abstainer, fades by mid-morning, the windows must be opened and the door to her room shut.
Then I light up while studying.

Coffee or tea on one stack of books. Tobacco on a second. Tray of pipes on a third. The ashtray is to my left, on top of... a stack of as-yet unopened tobacco tins (the topmost tin is 'Artisans Blend', by Ashton, purchased in 2005; underneath that is Escudo).


[FYI: The pipe tobacco tin of current usage reposes on top of a big thick dictionary of Chinese calligraphic forms (中國書法大字典), published by 大通書局 in 台北, in the seventy-fourth year of the Republic). It is at the top because I have much recourse to it. Fascinating stuff! The tray with the cup is on 'Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio' (聊齋誌異), and 'Chinese Bronzes' by Paul Hamlin, et praeter eos multosque alios libros.]


A warm beverage at tea-time in Chinatown, with meaty buns and dumplings. The company of an interesting man and his two charming children (the younger one not quite so fluent in Cantonese yet).
Multiple languages, and a few months in Amsterdam.
Which he loved, and his kids barely remember.
I dawdled longer than I intended.


[MEATY BUNS AND DUMPLINGS: gai baau (雞飽); a steamed bread dough bun filled with chopped chicken, a slice of lap cheung (臘腸 ), and some black mushroom (冬菇). Choi yiuk baau (菜肉飽): this is a steamed vegetable and chopped pork bun. Chyu yiuk siu mai (豬肉燒賣): little open-topped pasta cups stuffed with minced pork, steamed till done; the all-pork version is marked with a small dab of salty egg yolk (一點鹹蛋泥) on the filling. All three are delicious. For a reasonably complete list of similar things, see this post: Dim sum: kinds, names, pronunciation.]


Afterwards I strolled through the alleys smoking. Yes, like many fine pipe tobaccos, this one was of English provenance. Unfortunately the Dutch did not make very good pipe tobacco, most types were rather dull and aromaticised. Nowadays only Stad Ootmarsum ("fijne echte OudHollandsche Pijp Tabak") is the only brand still made there.

A fine blonde, from an unchanging company in Kendall, Cumbria.

Golden Glow -- Broken Virginia Flakes, by Samuel Gawith.
The tin is four years old, and very nicely aged.
It's very very British.
Fruity.

I was standing outside the old Sam Wo when an elderly woman came up and said that I looked very scholarly; the combination of pipe and reading specs apparently creating that impression.
I thanked her for the compliment.

No, I am not 'scholarly'. Just curious, middle-aged, and slightly odd.
Still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
Alive, would be a good guess.

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