THAT RICHLY DARK SAUCE

Reading matter today included Malayo-Polynesian linguistics, articles about coronaviruses, Netherlandish history, and part of Commentarii de bello Gallico by Gaius Julius Caesar. From one of those: "E-Proteine bezeichnen in der Virologie Strukturproteine, die Bestandteil der Virushülle von Coronaviren sind" (E-proteins mean structural proteins which are components of the viral envelope of coronaviruses). Which is all super exciting stuff! Yes! Yet, remarkably, while napping I dreamed of a Shanghainese place which closed years ago, long before The Bund on Jackson Street shut down. The only Shanghainese foodery in Chinatown now is a dumpling place, of which I am very fond. But Jimmy O. Yang (歐陽萬成) would be disappointed in this city.

For some reason in my dream the Shanghainese place was closed and dark but both doors were unlocked. Which has nothing to do with what I ate recently. Yesterday was something everybody in Hong Kong would know, today it was stirfried beef rice noodles with shrimp sauce (蝦醬牛肉炒米粉 'haa jeung ngau yiuk chaau mai fan'), With dollops of chili paste. Can't get more Canto-Netherlandic-Indo than that. Mie goreng, San Francisco style.
Hah, take that, Gordon Ramsey and Uncle Roger!

Half a dozen years ago my Chinese Indonesian regular care physician tried to persuade me to eat healthier. Dude, I'm a single man with Breughellian food tastes living on the edge of Chinatown. Truly healthy eating might be an impossibility. At best. There's actual food here. Like, real food. It isn't as if I'm torn between deep-fried fast food garbage and a head of lettuce, which explains by the way why people out in the suburbs become vegans.
They're absolutely desperate. I've got choices.

But I no longer eat North Indian food three times a week. Which has the equivalent of a stick of butter in every serving, not counting the lovely tandoori breads which are well slathered to boot. And it has been years since steak-frites-Bearnaise.

Jimmy O. Yang would also find me rather wanting. I've had xiao long bao (小籠包 'siu lung baau') several times but do not regard them as the be-all and end-all of gustatory delights. More partial to lions head meatballs (獅子頭 'si ji tau') and red-stew pork (紅燒肉 'hung siu yiuk'). Soup noodles (苏式面 'sou sik min'with duck on top too.
Plus melty pork fat and soy.


And, of course, everything is better with sambal.



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RABBIT RABBIT JULY 2026

One says "rabbit rabbit" on the first day of the month, per ancient custom dating back oh at least two or three centuries, which is impossibly old by the standards of many barely literate peoples in the British Isles. Long time. My first post (early this morning) was waffling on after the customary late night jaunt through the lower depths with the bookseller last night, and because of stuff in my head I wrote about pig cultures in East Asia after returning from smoking my morning pipe around Nob Hill. So, belatedly, rabbit rabbit.

And here is an illustration of a rabbit to mark it.

Among the first tribes in what is now the Netherlands, where my acestors hail from, were the Kaninefaten, which word is per popular custom translated as "rabbit snatchers", becaause of the mistaken assumption that kanin is the same as konyn, rabbit. This is actually incorrect. It actually refers to leeks and onions as crops. They were a tribe very similar to the Batavi, but not as large a group. They may have enjoyed consuming rabbits, who knows, but that isn't certain. The etymological root of their name is as yet unclear to me.

For a great many years I assumed a connection to rabbits.
Which was totally incorrect.

Leeks and onions.

Inter allium.



Rabbit rabbit.



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THE MIGRATING PIG

So it turns out that Hawaiian and Maori originated somewhere in central southern China. That is to say that the ancestors of Austronesian language speakers migrated from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, then eventually spread from there to maritime South East Asia and Oceania. Some elements of "protoprotoproto" Austronesian culture have been found in neolithic digs, including adzes and black pottery with a high charcoal content, as well as some tools such as bark beaters.

There is also evidence that considerably later, but still in the stone age, some minor spread back into the Chinese mainland occured. Linguistic traces remain in Southern Chinese languages. But the record is slim. By the time of the first Cham inscriptions that area was becoming Sinicised, and far further inland the Tai peoples were already trekking south through Yunnan. The Cham, of course, were in what is now Vietnam.

As an interesting item, here is the the Đông Yên Châu inscription from Simhapura (Trà Kiệu):

Siddham! Ni yang naga punya putauw.
Ya urang sepui di ko, kurun ko jema labuh nari swarggah.
Ya urang paribhu di ko, kurun saribu t'hun dawam di naraka, dengan tijuh kulo ko.

[Translation: "Blessing! This is the sacred serpent of the king. The person that respects it, jewels will fall from heaven. The person who insults it, will remain one thousand years in hell with seven generations of descendants."]

This isn't too very far from modern Malay, sort of intelligible, though a number of words are a stretch. One of the reasons why there is almost nothing like this traceable to their point of presumed origin (coastal central southern China) is the span of time (over four millenia), enormous cultural developments since then, and the erasure of the landbridge to Taiwan by rising seas. One suspects that much evidence has been obscured by the water. Add to that the absorption of other cultural elements, plus ethnic mixing with resident populations along the path of spread, and everything fades to mist. Stone records require social organization and stable rule, leaf and bark manuscrifts turn to dust within a few generations.

Taiwan is where linguistically there are more linguistic strains of the entire language family than anywhere else. Early settlement existed there in neolithic time per the archeologic evidence, indicating ten millenia of prehistory. By the time of the Dapengkeng culture (大坌坑文化 4000 - 3000 BCE) they were cultivating rice and millet, and creating fine pottery. The outward migrations in subsequent centuries from here eventually spread cultural elements and languages over a vast area. It makes for some fascinating reading.


Tentatively influences and commonalities have been noted with cultures in the lower Yangtze region, as well as coastal Guangdong. But it's all still very unclear.



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PRAYING TO A CELL PHONE

The other night, having an impending sense of doom about the soccer match between the Netherlands and Morocco, I got up and listened to 'Sawt El Hassan Inadi' on youtube. It's a song every Maghrebi knows, very stirring. And indeed the Dutch are no longer in the cup. But several Dutch teams still have a horse in this race, as many of the Moroccan players come from their squads.

This is kind of like that World Cup a number of years ago when even though the Dutch didn't stand a Belgian's chance in hell of getting to the top there were five Dutch coaches involved. Russia, Korea, and three other countries.

We're good. Just not that good.


My interest in the event is over till four years from now.


The rest of you can loose your minds over it. The most noteworthy aspects were Scotland drinking Boston dry and people dressed in orange doing a little group dance.
That was fun, it is all over now, everybody go back to sleep.
Please stop playing bagpipes.

Lunch both yesterday and today was exceptional. I went to a restaurant I've started going to again after a hiatus of six years, since the pandemic, which has changed hands but kept substantially the same menu. They've expanded it somewhat, and I was pleased to see a very 'home-town home-cooking' dish offered as one of their lunch specials: salt fish meat patty with rice (咸魚肉餅飯 'haam yü yiuk beng faan').

Not my home town, nor my family -- it is unlikely that my mother would have even allowed any fermented fish into the house -- but never-the-less a favourite of mine.
Totally great with sambal. Dee-licious!


I was still mentally smacking my lips a few hours later waiting for the bookseller and smoking my pipe. There were disturbing howls from a bit further down where the karaoke joint we now seldom visit is located, and a fellow watching a religious broadcast on a pocket device and praying at a nearby corner, not one of the usual neighborhood unstables. Very few tourists or drunken fratboys. Probably too cold for them. It is typical San Francisco summer weather and there is a nasty wind.


You know, if getting all religious about a televised preacher on your cellphone is your thing, in this weather you might want to do that indoors. You can be warm, and much louder. There are no public benches anymore. We hate homeless people and old folks in this city.

I am not religious or homeless, and I won't say that I'm old.
But seating with a backrest would be very nice.
Still. You don't want to encourage me.
Somehow I can tell.



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