AWASH WITH CRUNCH

Both men had remained at the bakery while their wives went grocery shopping. One of them came back first and started talking about a vacation, not to Europe, that was inconvenient, but perhaps Singapore, Malaysia, or Vietnam. Her Cantonese was clear and perfectly intelligible, which indicated to me that she was reasonably educated, probably well-read, and perhaps from Hong Kong. Or maybe that's just what I speak like, which for all I know may be somewhere hinterlandish. Though I describe it as "goomba from Tsimshatsui".

In any case, lovely to listen to.

The other one returned and tried to share her groceries. The first lady refused. No, I do not want any buns. No, I have plenty of bokchoi. No, I will not accept those mantou. Who eats mantou? Repeatedly.

Some Cantonese women have a desperate need to give everyone food, or supply edibles. Friends, neighbors, kinfolk. Sometimes even people they barely know. Both my apartment mate and my landlady are like that, and they're far more American than Canto at this point, as both of them think in English and hardly ever go to C'town. In consequence of which there is dimsum, cooked food, and French pastries in the fridge, and a boxed Italian cake-like thing which I don't know what it is on the kitchen counter.

Yeah okay, I do that too. A mango and some lovely green cabbages like bokchoy for the old Indonesian Chinese woman downstairs, veggies (enough for three to five soupie-soups) for my apartment mate, plus three bags of snackiepoos. Very modern urban Chinese snackiepoos. Metropolitan flavours.

Also, we have cheese. From my apartment mate. As a Dutchman I am the major cheese consumer here. Also, there is a surfeit of cookies in the teevee room. Gotta keep the grumpy Dutchman fed, otherwise he moans and whimpers heartrendingly or something.
Including little lemon flower cookies. Which are delicious.

She shops at Trader Joe's, which is very nearby and everything is in English, whereas I go to Chinatown across the hill and shop in Cantonese. I don't think I've ever used English at my favourite provisioners. And at the groceries where I get fruits and vegetables I would rather not embarass the people working there by requiring them to speak "white". Something tells me that they aren't fluent in that. We'll get along better if we don't.

At the shop where I get Chinese cigarettes they speak English, Cantonese, Toisanwaa, and Mandarin. But for cigarettes I always speak Chinese. Not only because of the brandnames.

[Current brands: Jade Creek (玉溪 'yiuk kai'), Honourabe Smoke (貴煙 'kwai yin'), Five Leaf Deity (五葉神 'ng yip san').
Honourable Smoke has a tangerine peel flavour capsule (陳皮爆珠 'chan pei baau jü') in the filter. Very nice.]


Only a few of my apartment mate's stuffed animals speak Chinese. They sometimes cuss at each other Chinatown style on her bed. Some of them kvetch in English.
Her room can be noisy at times.

None of my stuffed animals speaks Dutch.
Which is odd.



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