Warning: May contain traces of soy, wheat, lecithin and tree nuts. That you are here strongly suggests that you are either omnivorous, or a glutton.
And that you might like cheese-doodles.
Please form a caseophilic line to the right. Thank you.
It had already been closed for a while when I moved to the neighborhood; a fading poster showed a coming attraction that looked both wholesome and revolutionary featuring a pretty woman. Probably something in which the righteous heroine fights the Japs, struggles with the evil landlord, and the party emerges victorious as steel quotas are surpassed.
Which, now, I'm sad I never saw.
The building went through several lives over time.
Shanghai Theatre from 1911 to 1911 or 1912, then the Kearney Theatre till the early thirties, when it became the Kearney Burlesque, which then became the Teatro Rex in 1945 showing Spanish language films, then Fillipino films. It finally became the Bella Union in 1948. Which showed Chinese movies from 1964 onward (Chinese name: 華都戲院 'waa dou hei yuen'), eventually closing in 1984. The lease was not renewed in 1985. And for years it seemed deserted. A pity, because it had looked so promising.
My best recollection is sheltering there from the rain a few times with my pipe.
It's doubtful that Little Shoe ever knew that it was either the Shanghai (he was from Shanghai) or a burlesque theatre. He would have found that thrilling.
[Little Shoe: well, I can't call him 'tinkle', which is what his Chinese name translates to. And 'little' because he only came up to his blonde girlfriend's shoulders. You can imagine where his eyes were. And where they went.]
That entire area is different now. The three Shanghainese businesses (a basement store with music tapes, a noodle kitchen, and a fun little restaurant with dumplings and hot sauce) have all gone, the hole in the ground where the International Hotel had stood is now Saint Mary's Girls School and a campus for City College, and Clown Alley no longer exists (that space having become Sai's Vietnamese Restaurant recently.
The building is still there. It is much changed.
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A woman in Chinatown asked me if I had been back to Hong Kong. The question is interesting, because we had never discussed Hong Kong, she just assumed that I learned Cantonese over there.
Actually, I learned it mostly from the movies.
Flawless slangy thug accent.
I started going to the Chinese cinema up the street from my residence back in the eighties. There were several theatres still operating at that time -- The World, The Pagoda Palace, Sun Sing, Taai Ming Sing, and the Wah Seng -- and every week each would have a different double bill. Show up whenever, pay your five bucks, stay as long as you want. Watch both movies more than once, as well as the commercials. Eat lovely snackies and smoke cigarettes in the back row.
Fun for the whole family.
Salt plums, dried cuttle fish, red tongue plums, dried mango, licorice plums, toasted sesame sago crisps, white rabbit, haw pastilles, sunflower seeds, fruit-flavour pork jerky......
There isn't a single Chinese movie theatre still operating in the city. It was once a common shared ambiance, now it's a thing of the past.
I met a someone I dated for a while through the theatres. She liked hot chocolate with whipped cream. We went out several times.
She looked cute with whipped cream on her nose.
No. Nothing. I'm just mentioning a fond memory.
Hot chocolate with whipped cream is very nice.
So are little button noses.
Coming from a different background, I associated whipped cream with Irish Coffee. And though I haven't had Irish coffee in a very long time, because it is made very badly in San Francisco (bar coffee, ugh!), I still have that link in my brain. I probably didn't even like Irish coffee very much, but it was something my father and my brother and I had after biriani and korma at the Indian restaurant in Eindhoven.
The Netherlands did not possess much of a restaurant culture back then. Eindhoven had a number of Indonesian and Chinese restaurants, and not very much else, other than places serving deep-fried weird. The very first restaurant where we ate in that town, before we even moved from Naarden, was Restaurant Swatow on the Keizersgracht.
In Valkenswaard we ate at Restaurant Hong Kong on the Luikerweg a few times, as well as at Restaurant Belleveu, and a few others right on the Market Square. It was rather limited in those years.
Rice-stick noodles in soup with roast meats and chives at the houses of friends. Or bami goreng, which is Indonesian-style fried noodles with spicy additions, topped with an egg.
French fries with mayonnaise. And deep fried weird.
I first had a dowsabau (豆沙飽 sweet bean-paste bun) at China Garden in Eindhoven. I was teaching someone there Dutch at the time. The taste was recognizable -- the filling was something I already knew -- but the idea of a steamed sweet bread was novel. A few months later I had a linyongbau (蓮蓉飽 lotus seed paste bun) at the old Tong Ah.
Yes, I was tutoring Dutch that time also. Different student.
Being bi-lingual in English and Dutch had advantages.
Like steamed doughy buns with delicious fillings.
Or fish with peanuts, cilantro, and chilies.
Many other tasty things.
Upon returning to the United States -- a country of which I had almost no memory, having been all of two years old when we left -- everything was new, foreign, and in some cases downright shocking. American coffee, for instance, was a repulsive stale weak beverage with no redeeming feature, tea was insipid and lukewarm, bread was soft spongy non-food, and fries were limp oil-drenched monstrosities.
Peet's in Berkeley had good coffee, the Caffe Mediterraneum had good espresso drinks, the Trieste on Vallejo in San Francisco was a refuge. Tea? No, had to rely on myself for that. Americans drank herbal crap.
The bread is still bloody awful, and most places can't fry a spud if their lives depend on it.
But the Chinese food is excellent.
Still haven't found a place that does poached fish with peanuts, cilantro, and chilies -- that may be a Chekiang or Shanghai dish, judging by the people who prepared it -- but the linyongbau and dowsabau are quite as yummy as they were in Holland, the little flaky pastries with delicious fillings likewise, and the coffee and tea have improved somewhat.
I haven't helped as many people learn Dutch as before. For some strange reason it just isn't one of the things for which there's much demand in the States.
It's getting colder now that summer is over. That suggests a warm movie theatre or similar crowded public place in which to ensconce oneself for several hours, snacky foods, deep fried unidentifiable objects (random examples in Dutch: Frikandel, Kroket, Bamibal; in Chinese: 煎堆 'jin dui', 芋角 'wu gok', 炸粉果 'ja fan gwo'), and hot beverages.
Perhaps even something with whipped cream.
I haven't been back in years.
To the Netherlands, that is.
November in Holland can be horrid.
It's warmish in HK at this time.
Sometimes it rains. Or not.
San Francisco is ok.
及時雨。
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When I still regularly went to the Great Star Theatre (大明星戲院) and the Pagoda Palace (金都戲院) in Chinatown to watch Hong Kong movies, I always thought of people like Cherie Chung (鍾楚紅 'chong cho hong') and Joey Wong (王祖賢 'wong cho yi') as the hottest things on four wheels.
I know that expression makes no sense.
Please don't tell me why.
Just extrapolate.
And, equally dishy, were the men in many HK movies. Just to mention two of them: Chow Yunfat (周潤發), and Andy Lau (劉德華 'lau tak wa'). Many of the other actors and actresses were also yummy. And though some of the actors with star-power were perhaps not quite so fine, they radiated character and maturity in their roles that overwhelmed their regular guy appearances.
If I were a woman, I would have wanted to jump any number of them.
Nothing quite says sexy beast like character.
Which, when you think about it, is exactly the same as regards the female of the species. Most men may ogle the big-breasted muffin head, but the person they want to talk to is the one who has a personality. Trust me on this. At any party or social event, observe who clusters around whom.
The jocks, apes, and corporate lawyers will tend to flock to the voluptuous blonde, whereas the engineers, intelligent humans, and interesting types will pool around the librarian.
People who have expressive faces are infinitely more magnetic than those who merely boast buns, curves, pecs, and boobs.
To prove to you that this is so, here's a picture.
Wang LeeHom
Steaming hot hunk-o-rama, Batman! Just scope-out that well-sculpted handsome face! And so intelligent looking, so aware, so awake!
If you are a woman, you may want to leave the room at this point.
We'll wait untill you come back, sweetheart, don't worry.
Wang LeeHom (王力宏) is a native of New York state, currently based in Taiwan. Possibly as intelligent and talented as the late Leslie Cheung (張國榮 'cheung kwok wing'), but without that sweetly fragile quality.
Never-the-less, that's one magnificent serving of man meat, quite capable of inducing peevish jealousy in men twice his age (me, for instance), and fevered fits of fantasy in women of any age.
Ladies, feel free to briefly leave the room again.
I know that you want to, you're sweating.
Come back when you're calmer.
Dang.
I'm actually rather glad that there are no more movie theatres in San Francisco's Chinatown. When people like mr. Stressed Jeans up there are on the loose, mere mortal men don't stand a chance. I certainly don't need anyone comparing me to the well-defined and thoughtful-looking profile in that picture.
One the other hand, I'm also mighty pleased that I am not a woman.
It must be extremely frustrating with tasty bits like him around.
Again, that handsome alert face, those intelligent eyes.
Apparently he's extremely talented.
And a university graduate.
Williams College
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Late the other night I dined on Japanese crispy objects made by a company in Thailand (Taokaenoi Food & Marketing Co., Ltd.) and distributed in the United States by a Chinese enterprise whose name cannot be found anywhere on the label.
It is delicious with good nutrients from the sea, best served as snack with your favourite drink: tempura seaweed, spicy flavour. Yumminess in a re-sealable bag, invented by a computer game nerd.
Manufacturing facilities are in Nonthaburi and Pathumthani.
Naturally I washed it down with Jameson's Irish Whiskey. Which is a fine product of the Pernod Ricard Company in France, though founded by a Scotsman in Dublin. After which I smoked an English pipe tobacco produced by a factory in Germany.
Life may not be multicultural, but my habits are.
Though you might say "messed up".
I will blame exposure during my mis-spent youth for some of that.
In the mid-eighties I moved to North Beach, which is next to Chinatown.One of the tunes that seemed to be constantly playing in the background all over Grant Avenue and Stockton Street was the theme song from a popular Hong Kong television series starring Chow Yun-fat (周潤發), Ray Lui (呂良偉), and Angie Chiu (趙雅芝).
上海灘 - SHANGHAI BUND
In 1920's Shanghai two young men, Hui Man-keung (Chow Yun-fat) and Ting Lik (Ray Lui), become members of a gang headed by Fung King-yiu (played by Lau Dan 劉丹). Both of them have a serious crush on Fung's daughter, Ching-ching (Angie Chiu). For the next twenty five episodes, things go wrong in great style, ending with the death of Hui (Chow) outside a fancy restaurant on his last night in Shanghai.
You can see Hui being killed in this short clip:
As a side note, to me the scene above highlights precisely why smoking should be allowed indoors again; bad things happen when you have to go outside for a fix.
Of course, back in the eighties you didn't need to do so. You could have stayed inside, safe and out of harm's way. Since then, the non-smoking yutzes have obviously wanted us dead.
The series was a smash hit, and propelled Chow Yun-fat (the smoking gentleman in the photo above) to stardom. You may have seen him in any number of gangster flicks made during the eighties, in which he often played a man on the wrong side of the law, but with a strong sense of morality and ethics. What you probably remembered was the gallantry and likability of the character. A rogue and a crook, but an upright man with an admirable style.
The series also helped speed the end of the chip-on-the-shoulder style of entertainment characterized by every single Bruce Lee movie, most of which are only barely watchable, but only if you read Bruce Lee as a clown of monumental proportions, a veritable master of physical comedy.
By the mid-eighties, Hong Kong movies no longer took themselves quite so seriously, and many of the people involved had realized that as important to the genre as giving the viewers roles to identify with was imparting a sense of mood, and images of style. Shanghai in the twenties and thirties, as an exemplifier of both of those things, become a trope. Many of the classiest gangster films from that era (the eighties) are either set there, or recall that time and place in key ways.
Shanghai during the republican period was indeed all that. At that time it was a world city, and a trend-setter. A hotbed of international commerce and intrigue, filled with wheeler-dealers, crooks, secret agents, tycoons, and smugglers, as well as jazz, nightclubs, restaurants, tailors, and beautiful women.
It was the flash and dazzle of the shiny metropolis which the exiles who ended up in Hong Kong after the war missed most of all. The poverty and desperation of the time there was forgotten, the vibrancy and excitement remained. Shanghai was where China grew up.
Writers, intellectuals, and the Chinese entertainment industry had experienced a golden age.
The Shanghainese sense of pride in their city infected all Chinese, and in the fifties, after twenty years of war and chaos, it seemed like nothing like that would ever come again. The Twentieth century had, on the whole, proven rather miserable, and Shanghai by sheer contrast had seemed such a beacon.
[The video clip above is Chou Hsuen (周璇) singing Yeh Shanghai ('Shanghai at night'). One of my favourite songs by her is Moon Over the Street Corner, which can be heard here: 街頭月. Just open it up in a separate tab or window to listen, as the visuals are static. A television documentary about Chou Hsuen is here: 金嗓子. Probably her most famous song is When Will You Return (何日君再來), recorded in 1937. Teresa Teng sang it in 1979, at which time the communists described it as an obscene pro-Japanese ode, and the Taiwanese government banned it because it could be interpreted as an invitation to the People's Liberation Army. It's actually a plaintive love ballad.]
For the next two decades, things scarcely improved.
Shanghai had been the stage on which the ideals of revolutionary China had had their fullest play, and the arena where all movements had most memorably come to fruition. Nationalists and Communists, Imperialists and Missionaries, all had plotted, manoeuvred, and manipulated in Shanghai for several decades. When the Communists swept to victory on the mainland in 1949, that ended.
Refugees flocked to Hong Kong, and the British kept a tight lid on them for fear that the revolution would take away their European foothold in the Far-East. The exiles found safety in the Crown Colony, as well as stultifying boredom.
[A parting duet evoking exile, and the promise of return, can be heard here: 叮嚀. As with the other links, right-click to open in a new window; static visuals again. Recorded by Chou Hsuen and Yan Hwa (嚴華) in 1939, two years before their divorce. It should be mentioned that they had known each other since their very early teens, when both were part of the Moon Song and Dance Society (明月歌舞團樂社), which produced many performers for the Shanghai movie industry who later became famous. They married in 1938, when she was 18 years old and he was 23.]
But their creativity was not routed into propagandistic insanity, as happened elsewhere; Hong Kong was an island of unexciting calm.
The gilded memory of Shanghai grew more glorious as time passed.
In reality, Shanghai had seen exploitation and bloodshed on an operatic scale, engineered by the Japanese, the warlords and bankers, Nationalists and the Communists, the gangsters of the Green Gang (青帮) headed by Big Eared Tu (杜月笙), as well as the British and French authorities in the concessions, and others. But it had also been China's first modern city.
Life had been more fast-paced, and there had been so many more opportunities for everything, including crime.
By the late seventies, the Shanghai of legend was larger than life; all good things, all style, all greatness and grandness, everything worthwhile in Chinese popular culture, had a place in the myth.
The mainland and Taiwan both failed to offer realities that matched.
And Hong Kong was realizing that it, in part, was the primary heir.
Shanghai as it had been was gone. But there was money to be made off the corpse, and lovingly the authors, actors, and directors mined the material.
It was not so much cannibalism as regurgitation of cultural themes which by that time had become instinctive, an inherent part of their make-up and their welt-anschauung.
Their interpretation was in truth a version more Hong Kong than Shanghai, just as the gangster movies set in the Hong Kong of that day and age also shaded, gilded, and repainted the facts to fit a tale.
The results were often stellar.
Fantasy is, in the final regard, what art is all about.
The Shanghai of the show had never existed in real life, but was built on a sound stage in Kowloon Tong (九龍塘), Hong Kong. None of the main actors have any connection to Shanghai either. Chow Yun-fat is of Hakka ancestry, born on Lamma Island (南丫島), Ray Lui is Chinese from Vietnam, Danny Lau (Lau Dan) is a native of Shantung, Kent Tong is a Hong Kong native.....
Even the singer who made the series theme song famous (Frances Yip 葉麗儀) is local (and like Chow Yun-fat, of Hakka ancestry).
Only the executive under whose aegis the show was produced can arguably even be called Shanghainese: Run Run Shaw ((邵逸夫) was the son of a textile merchant from Chekiang based in that city.
He moved to Singapore when he was nineteen in 1926. He and his brother founded South Sea Film (南洋影片), which later became Shaw Brothers Studio and was headquartered in Hong Kong, in 1930.
When the television series came out in 1980, over a generation had passed since the period portrayed.
What the show represents is a fairy-tale of a different era, one comfortably remote enough that it need not impinge upon the present. Both of the men about whom the stories revolve are in love with the good girl, but only one of them really stands a chance. And although she is the daughter of a gang leader, Ching Ching really does represent an ideal of femininity and Chinese womanhood. She is the one good thing that stands out above all else in the violent and sordid world in which her two suitors by necessity find themselves, and inspires their continuing humanity.
In the tale, successful gangsters and thugs are not always coarse and vulgar, but can indeed represent the same gallantries, idealism, and gentlemanly qualities that Chinese have always aspired to. Circumstance may determine one's station in life, but the person should nevertheless be faithful to what is civilized and worthwhile.
True to the constraints of real life, however, this tale is at times convoluted and messy. After having worked for Fung for several years, Hui (Chow Yun-fat) settles in Hong Kong, later returning to Shanghai. For both the very highest of motives as well as personal vengeance, Hui ends up killing Ching-ching's father, who was co-operating with the Japanese, and whose paid goons had slaughtered Hui's wife and in-laws.
He dies on the night that he was going to leave for France to find Ching-ching, determined to make things right again.
One should always aspire to rectitude, but events may sabotage the attempt. That does not mean that it isn't worth doing, merely that life sometimes really stinks.
Constancy does not necessarily get rewarded.
But it's worth it for its own sake.
Other than casting ideal ethical conduct into a new format, the show also achieved one other remarkable result: anti-heroes who dressed with style and pizzaz, and didn't act like idiots.
These were men that one could emulate, if not in actual life, but in personal behaviour and attitude. Instead of goobers wearing floppy kung-fu pajamas, Hong Kong television and movie screens started showing gangsters and crime-fighters with realistic clothing. The violence and moral questions were still there, but the characters had fleshed-out.
Up till the seventies, Hong Kong cinema had always shown right and wrong simplistically, with few shades of grey. All of sudden (actually, over a period of five or six years) snappy suits and multiple shades of grey became the norm, and the stories more complex and challenging.
Of course, for the juvenile delinquent element black and white was still the most recognizable facet, but they started aspiring to better presentation.
Clothes may not make the man, but they make the man much more.
It's that sense of real people, admirable individuals, rather than strictly two-dimensional epitomes, that made Hong Kong movies during the mid to late eighties worth watching. You might judge the actions reprehensible, but the characters were more complex and understandable in their responses.
And afterwards much of them stayed with you.
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Kwun Tong is different, it isn't as you remember it.
Back in the fifties and sixties this was a newly developed residential and industrial suburb of Hong Kong, one of the very first built-up areas outside of Kowloon. Many apartment buildings were thrown up to provide housing for the influx of people from the mainland and the countryside who came to HK, and a multitude of factories employed many of them at fairly low wages.
You may recall cheap plastic flowers (膠花) in the sixties? They came from here.
This is where the Hong Kong plastic industry found its surest foothold, and most of the companies that remain in Kwun Tong still manufacture plastics, as well as consumer electronics, computer parts, and utilitarian objects.
[Kwun Tong (觀塘): "view ponds", formerly Kun Tong ('official ponds' 官塘). Originally an area of salt pans across the water from Tsimshatsui (尖沙嘴), which is on the western spur of the Kowloon Peninsula (九龍半島).]
Housing estates were built along the upper levels, facing Kai Tak (啟德機場 'kai tak kei-cheung'), but also in the flat zone along the typhoon shelter which separated Kwun Tong from Kai Tak.
The early multi-storey apartment blocks were miserable, horribly small, with shared bathrooms, kitchens, and washing areas. Many people lived crowded together in what were "affectionately" described as 雞寮 ('kai liu'): chicken coops.
During the early years, because of overcrowding and a lack of basic facilities, the roofs of many buildings were used for recreation and as school rooms.
Many of the older buildings have been torn down and replaced, and the airport ceased operating in 1998.
The whole area is now being 'renewed'.
Most of the locals are not very excited about that.
觀塘區 KWUN TONG KUI - KWUN TONG DISTRICT
From Ngau Tau Kok (牛頭角 'cow head horn') to Lam Tin (藍田 'blue field'): from the granite quarries and Amoy Brand Soy Sauce to the salt fields and the Lei Yue Mun (鯉魚門 'Carp Gate') highway interchange.
[Note that Lam Tin used to be called Ham Tin (鹹田): salty fields. Housing estates were built on the cerrito overlooking the coastal flats here.]
The older industrial area is a long grim rectangular stretch alongside the typhoon shelter, right across a narrow body of water from Kai Tak. It consists of fairly narrow streets, multi-storey factory buildings, cement apartment blocks, and broader commercial cross-roads leading to the housing estates on the upper levels. This neighborhood forms what could be called the third point of the triangle, the other points being Ngau Tau Kok and Lam Tin.
Tai Yip Street (大業街) crosses Kai Fuk Road (啟福道) before it turns into Kwun Tong Road (觀塘道). Tai Yip runs from north west to south east, parallel to the harbour and Kai Tak Airport. There's an interruption of three blocks, whereupon as if continuing Tai Yip Street, Hung To Road (鴻圖道) commences in the same direction, parallel to Wai Yip Street (偉業街) and Hoi Bun Road (海濱道), each nearer the water.
Between Kwun Tong Road and Hoi Bun Road, are a huge number of older commercial and factory buildings, within several blocks around the Tsun Yip Street Playground (駿業街遊樂場). The southeastern edge of this zone is the Kwun Tong Bypass (觀塘繞道), where it has turned east and heads towards Lei Yue Mun Road (鯉魚門道). The curve of Kwun Tong Bypass is roughly parallel to the southern end of Kai Tak, where the Kwun Tong Typhoon Shelter (觀塘避風) terminates.
To the immediate south of the area thus demarcated are the Sai Tso Wan Recreation Ground (晒草灣遊樂場) and Cha Kwo Ling (茶果嶺 'tea fruit peak').
There's a Seven Eleven near the corner of Tsun Yip Street (駿業街) and Hung To Road (鴻圖道). Across Tsun Yip is the 'East Harbour Seafood Restaurant' (Tung Kong Hoi Sien Jau Lau 東港海鮮酒樓) on the right hand side (east), and Wing Wah Mechanical Co. Ltd (榮華電工材料有限公司) on the left corner (west).
The area immediately surrounding Nanyang Plaza (南洋廣場) looks grungy as all git-out, although the Nanyang Plaza Building itself is rather impressive. This area mostly consists of multi-storey factories, warehouse and commercial spaces, and electronics businesses. After two long blocks Hung To Road crosses Hoi Yuen Road (開源道), proceeding one more block to King Yip Street, just before the Kwun Tong Bypass. At the end of the block, opposite the Yue Xiu Industrial Building, on the right hand side are two restaurants - the Hap Lei Hoi Sien Jau Ka (合利海鮮酒家), the San Ming Yuen Jau Ka (新明園酒家).
[The Cantonese term 'hoisin' (海鮮) means 'sea fresh'. It is one of the most important expressions in this food-obsessed culture.]
If you wish to park anywhere on the street here, good 你嘅 luck, ha?
It's entirely impossible!
There's a brand new promenade along Hoi Bun Road (海濱道) at the water's edge if you need a break from drear and drab. But getting there takes a little strategizing. And quite a few of the natives haven't ever been there.
You can see Tsimshatsui across the water, and also Central on Hong Kong Island to the south, dimly through the air pollution.
裕民坊與銀都戲院 YUE MAN SQUARE & SILVER CITY MOVIE THEATRE
The centre of town, east of the industrial stretch and north of all the fancy new housing developments and shopping centres is the area around Yue Man Square, where you will find most of the older business patronized by long-time residents.
The entire area is being renewed, and will have changed considerably in a few years, although there is a growing consciousness of the importance of local colour and tradition.
One 'landmark' which bit the dust is the old Silver City Theatre (銀都戲院) on Fu Yan street (輔仁街) at the west side of Yue Man Square (裕民坊), which had a run of forty six years before closing its doors forever in July 2009. Up until the mid-nineties, it showed mostly mainland movies, having no truck with the glib products churned out by Hong Kong studios, but declining attendance, changing audience patterns, and above all video tapes and later discs put paid to what had once been a thriving and beloved entertainment center.
Many old-timers fondly remember sneaking in as children, and occasionally drunks would doss down in the seats to sleep off their liquor.
It, too, is slated for 'renewal'.
上海榮華川菜館 SEUNG HOI WING WAH CHUEN TSOI KOON
The Shanghai Wing Wah Szechuan Restaurant
Ground Floor, 15 Shung Yan Street, Kwun Tong.
[觀塘, 崇仁街 15號, 地下]
This long-established business is small, but quite good. It's on the corner of Fu Yan Street and a nondescript alley way (崇仁街 Shung Yan Street), right were Fu Yan Street turns west, on the ground floor of a twelve or thirteen storey old-style apartment building, right next to a Yunnan eatery, opposite grocery stores and a meat market. This, really, is home turf for many people. The red-topped bus lines go up this street from Yue Man Square.
It's barely a five minute walk from the old Silver City Theatre.
Family run, clean, fast, and often very busy. But the prices are reasonable, and the food is excellent.
Expect to pay between HK$ 30 to 60 for lunch, between HK$ 75 and 150 for dinner.
One thing you MUST try are the Shanghai Soup Dumplings (小籠包). They are known for them.
Shanghai Soup Dumplings are one of those things people will passionately disagree about, but the plain fact of the matter is that speed is the essential quality. If it takes too long to dish them up, the hot broth will have melded into the dough. Either way, there will be a bone-soup taste to the item.
Lovely when hot, gummy when cold.
RECOMMENDED DISHES
豆沙窩餅 Fried Sweet Bean-paste Fold-overs. Very Shanghainese!
東坡肉 Tung-Po Pork (slow cooked long and fragrant, served over tender fresh baby bokchoi).
回鍋肉 Twice-cooked Pork - a superior version.
砂鍋雲吞雞 Clay Pot Wonton Chicken.
擔擔麵 Tan Tan Noodles. Superior, but something I'm particularly fond of.
酸辣湯 Hot and Sour Soup - extremely popular here.
紅燒獅子頭 Savoury Braised Large Meat Balls.
乾扁四季豆 Spicy Dry-fried Stringbeans.
八寶茶 Eight Treasure Tea (hot) - very popular.
糖醋魚柳 Sweet and Sour Willow-fish.
糖醋排骨 Sweet and Sour Spare Ribs.
紅油抄手 Red Oil Dumplings - a famous Szechuanese variation on wonton.
口水雞 Poached & Sauced Chicken.
花雕醉雞 Drunken Chicken (made with Fa Diu ricewine) - very highly recommended.
蒜泥白肉 Garlic Sauce Poached Pork (cold) - very old-fashioned and delicious.
奶油津白 Tientsin Cabbage in Cream Sauce garnished with Chinhua Ham - old school, excellent.
糖醋魚塊 Sweet and Sour Fish Chunks.
麻婆豆腐 Ma Po Toufu - an old stand-by.
雞絲粉皮 Chicken Shred Pale Ribbon Noodle.
宮保雞丁 Kung Pao Chicken - a safe standard.
LAGNIAPPE - THE TSIM CHAI KEE RESTAURANT IN CENTRAL
沾仔記 Tsim Chai Kee Noodle
Shop B, G/F Jade Centre, 98 Wellington Street, Central
[中環, 威靈頓街 98號, 地下]
Black sign, gold characters. Lunch time line outside.
Recommended Dishes:
鯪魚球雲吞 Ling-fish balls with wonton
牛肉河招牌雲吞麵 Beef brisket house special wonton noodles
鮮蝦雲吞麵 Fresh shrimp wonton noodles
A friend came back from Hong Kong, and tells me that while Mak's wonton are good, Jim's shrimp wonton are much better.
Quote: "biggest darn shrimp EVER! Ho taai-ge, ho mei-ge, sahp fan ji sahp SAN-SIEN" (very big, very tasty, one hundred percent FRESH).
I'll take his word for it. Sometime I'll have to try them myself.
But I do wish he wasn't quite so boastful and gloating over his discovery.
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Below is a clip of one of the most splendid scenes with Cherie Chung (鍾楚紅) ever!
It's from Patrick Tam (譚家明)'s movie 'Cherie' (雪兒) made in 1984.
The actor with whom she is paired in this scene is Tony Leung Ka-fai (梁家輝).
No, this scene is probably not entirely suitable for work.
If that made you view the panty paradigm from a whole new angle, you really ought to see her in the 1987 Puma Jeans commercial.
She is still the same as she was then. Quite adorable, utterly charming. Part of it is the way she talks and how she behaves - it's a personality thing.
Cherie Chung, born February 16, 1960, has made over fifty movies in a career that would have been much longer had she not decided to quit the industry in 1991.
In the clip above, you can see precisely what made her a stellar bomb to every romance deprived young man in a Cantonese movie theatre. What you do NOT see is the vulnerability that gave each role a luster and made her memorable, long after she stopped acting.
Tony Leung Ka-fai (b. February 1, 1958), who started making moves in 1983, has made over a hundred movies. He was memorable in 'Prison of Fire' with Chow Yun-fat, among many other movies.
He is hard to type-cast, as he has played the gamut of roles. His most recent movie, as of this writing, is a typical happy comedy made for the Holiday season (that being Chinese New Year).
Sheer dynamite in a tuxedo.
[MOVIE: CHERIE - at the Internet Movie Database: 雪兒]
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This post is for the archive. The Bella Union has not existed for over two decades.
For a long time, the building at 825 Kearney Street was a theatre – locals still remember it, but like all other movie theatres that used to operate in Chinatown it has been closed for several years. Since a bit of remodeling it isn’t even recognizable, and is now used as retail space.
華都戲院 'BIG CITY PLAYHOUSE'
[Also called 大都戲院 if I remember correctly.]
1st. incarnation: Shanghai Theater – till 1913.
2nd. incarnation: Kearney Theater – 1913 till late thirties.
3rd. incarnation: The Kearney Burlesque – till 1947 or early 48.
4th. incarnation: The Rex Theater – till late 1948.
5th. incarnation: From 1948 on The Bella Union.
It is by that last name that most Chinatown English-speakers will know it. But to many people, it will always be the Waa Tou Hei Yuen.
Movies from Hong Kong, many in Mandarin. This was before the HK movie industry swung back to using their native tongue.
A previous generation, however, knew it as a place of live entertainment catering to bachelors from Luzon and the Visayas.
OLD PHILIPPINO UNCLES
Unlike the Chinatown theatres that I mentioned in some of my previous posts, I have never been inside. That is something I regret, as a number of people I know have fond memories of seeing movies there as children.
[For more on C'town movie theaters, click here: 戲院. It will bring up all posts in which Cantonese cinema is mentioned.]
By the time I wanted to go there it had closed – either tail-end of 1985 or the first half of 1986. For another few years it was empty, a fading poster of some mainland movie that looked deliciously tearjerking by the door. That stretch of Kearney Street was rather depressing, as it faced the hole in the ground where the International Hotel once stood.
Manila Town, as the two blocks north from the square were called, had ceased to exist by the eighties.
The lynchpin of that stretch had been the International Hotel, inhabited mostly by elderly retired gentlemen who came to the United States during the era of racial segregation. Hard workers, hard lives. Many had never married.
When the building was bought, the SF city government collaborated with the owners to put all the occupants on the street.
By the mid-eighties most Philippinos had already relocated, though a few eccentric Manongs remained in some of the residential hotels nearby. There were still two or three stores in Chinatown that sold food-stuffs from the islands. Over time they also started disappearing.
Up to the late eighties there was a store on Grant Avenue that carried atsara and banana ketchup, patis, atsuete (annatto seeds, for hueing your food more rubicund), along with bago’ong (“bagaong”), lumpia skins, small redbean-paste confections, noodles, and such like. Plus all the sweet ingredients for halo halo.
It closed a short time after the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Manila Town, such as it presently is, can be found in the vicinity of Moscone Center.
The giant International Hotel hole in the ground existed as a pit of contention for nearly thirty years – through several city governments, and much fighting about development plans, plus changes of ownership.
Now a city college campus is rising on the site, and there’s a Philippino social center on one corner.
California society is different now.
The Manongs have mostly passed away. Their world is gone.
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One of the typical Cantonese terms that you may have heard is gu wak chai (古惑仔) - "anciently confused youngster".
What it means is hooligan or thug, a teenage ruffian, who will likely come to a bad end.
Probably a juvenile delinquent, and a poor student in school. But one with connections to a gang.
Some are dead by sixteen, others become serious criminals.
Yet others go into marketing, religion, or blogging.
香港電影 HEUNG KONG DIEN YING
Except for those last three careers, the subculture is well represented in Hong Kong gangster movies. Many of which are either a complete rock'em sock'em blast of operatic gore and ultra-violence - the oeuvre of Hong Kong director John Woo (吳宇森 Ng Yu-sam) - OR explore deeper themes of honour, trust, friendship, ethical behaviour, gallantry, etcetera (also frequently seen in the oeuvre of mr. Woo).
A key element underlying the genre is 'yi-hei' (義氣): loyalty to and self-sacrifice for one's friends and sworn brothers.
One can often tell who the bad guy is by their lack of that characteristic on-screen. They are flawed, they lack nobility, and worst of all their actions betray a vileness of spirit.
It shows some epic misbehavior, but this clip is relatively safe.
流氓學校
This is why you're all little monsters! Improper rubbish!
The following clip should only be watched by anthropologists, linguists, and mature audiences.
It might prove a wee bit traumatic for sensitive people.
學校風雲
Ten minutes of rumbling in a nightclub, chase scenes, cleavers, and violent death.
That last scene was the ending of the movie 'Hok Hau Fung Wan (學校風雲) - School on Fire (produced in 1988).
[Director: 林嶺東 Ringo Lam (Lam Ling-tung). Bad-ass: 張耀揚 Roy Cheung (Cheung Yiu-yeung). Good girl: 袁潔瑩 Fennie Yuen (Yuen Git-ying).]
The movie narratively details the changing personalities of a bunch of high-school punks as some get further involved in organized crime, others for various reasons have second thoughts. Along the way, some people die, some girls are brutalized.
Roy Cheung is the 'older brother' heading the youth-branch of a larger gang, and runs roughshod over their tender spirits. He epitomizes the flawed character who lacks 義氣 and consequently it is most welcome when in the last minute of the movie he gets what's coming.
You will cheer when his already dying body goes over the edge and plunges to the sharp iron fence spikes below.
Saw the movie at the Pagoda Palace Theatre on Columbus Street several years ago. Even the young hoodlums who customarily hung out there seemed chastened after the movie was over.
It was probably his lack of gallantry, more than the horrific scenes, that quieted them. Older Brother Smart was a right bastard, cruel, vicious, vindictive, and entirely devoid of any 義氣 whatsoever.
Having grown up on both sword-hero (劍俠 kiem hap) and triad (黑社會 hak sei wui) movies, the social environments of which are collectively known as Gong Wu (江湖 rivers and lakes), the various local 古惑仔 aspired to at least a modicum of gallantry.
Right behaviour, even if one is on the wrong side of the law, is an important element in the Cantonese weltanschauung.
做好漢子 TSO HOU-HON JI
What might seem a didactic imposition in a Hollywood flick, and would be crudely overdone besides in the hands of English-speakers, was often a necessary element of the Hong Kong movie - audiences felt cheated if the heroes and heroines did not demonstrate how a person should act.
No matter the situation, some values are universal.
Adhering to a code of conduct proves that one is part of the human family.
And only those who truly grasp what loyalty, gallantry, and decency mean can epitomize right behaviour.
All men are brothers. Those who do not act accordingly put themselves beyond consideration.
後記 AFTERWORD
For a truly classic rendition of the right bastard without a shred of 義氣, you really should watch the movie Gaam Yuk Fung Wan (監獄風雲) - Prison on Fire (1987), also directed by Ringo Lam, with Roy Cheung as the vicious prison officer. This is the movie that established Roy Cheung's reputation as an able enactor of the evil psychopath role. When one of the prisoners, played by Chou Yun-fat (周潤發) bit off his ear, the audience roared their appreciation. The sob deserved it!
我叫你做食屎狗!
Ngoh kieu nei tso sik si gau ('I'm calling you a shit-eating dog').
Prison on fire is worth watching also because the actions of Ah-Ching (Chow Yun-fat) perfectly epitomize the instinctive gallantry so admired by the Cantonese.
He may be a lower-class shlub, but he's got the right stuff - a sense of decency.
義氣
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Probably bad taste, but the only immediate effect of the death of Osama Bin Laden is that all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of American men have rediscovered testicles. Truly a great victory. Yay.
Even better, several million Pakistanis, Gazans, and Dutch people have rediscovered acid-indigestion. And personally that works much better for me. Judging by some of the stuff I've read on the internet today half of the Netherlands is dyspeptic. I'd offer them candy in celebration, but they'd probably spit.
Many Dutch are mourning, in solidarity with their brothers in Hamas.
Others are frankly cynical (a talent of the Dutch).
And there is much to be cynical about.
I've would've liked the body to go on display, just to make a spectacle of the man and still the doubts. Perhaps we could've embalmed him, like Lenin or Mao. At least show the body. Possibly at the next World's Fair. Auctioned it off, maybe.
But the best thing would have been to dump him in a pickling jar and send him to Las Vegas.
"WE CAN'T STOP HERE, THIS IS BAT COUNTRY!"
As the immortal Johnny Depp would've said outside Barstow, if he spoke Dutch, "wij kunnen hier niet stoppen, dit is vledermuis-land!"
The desert does things to you, gringo.
I've only been to Las Vegas once. As you may imagine, someone who works in finance views the Vegas scene with trepidation and despair. We tend to spend our money with greater sense and miserliness than is common there. But we do indeed like the displays of cultural artifacts....... Like that Italian hotel, and the pyramid, and the fabulous surf'n turf buffet. So, a well-pickled Osama would add to the attraction. Provided he was dressed, of course. Nobody wants to see a naked elderly terrorist while eating surf'n turf. It detracts from the experience.
If you want to see anybody naked while dining on steak and lobster, it's probably Leslie Cheung, Cherie Chung, Andy Lau, or Maggie Cheung. Or a reasonable proximile thereof, maybe Rima Fakih or George Clooney. Rolled into one.
Perhaps even Haley Smith or Meg Griffin - both stellar hotties, unlike their dweebus brothers.
It all depends on your tastes, though. Whatever you wish to look at while eating dead moo-cow and sea-floor crustacean is your business. But I'm fairly certain that elderly expired Arab is not it.
Personally, Irene Wan (温碧霞) is very high on my list - I especially remember her as the adorable wife of a eunuch in a movie I saw at the 大明星戲院 back in the late eighties. Yep, that's EXACTLY whom I want to scope out top to bottom while mouthing meat and sea-critter. Yum.
I seem to have gotten off-tangent here. Sorry. It happens. Blame Osama. I guess a lot of people are doing that.
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One of the Hong Kong movie stars of whom many kwailo have heard is Stephen Chow (周星馳), star of such films as 龍在天涯 (lung tzoi tien-ya), 義膽群英 (yi daan kwan ying), 龍鳳茶樓 (lung fung chaa lou), and most especially, 賭聖 (dou seng), in which he was unforgettable as Sing, the simple country boy with a profound gift for cheating at cards.
This last movie propelled him to stardom - he has delighted fans of 無厘頭 (mo lei tau) ever since on both sides of the Pacific.
Truly a genius.
You doubt?
Please scope out the video below.
STEPHEN CHOW PRAISES INTERVIEWER'S MANTAI!
當外國人嘲笑中國人不懂英文之後星爺發火了
Dang ngoikwok yan chausiu chungkwok yan m-tong yingman ji-hau Sing yeh faatfoh-le ("regarding outside country persons sneering at central country persons not understanding hero literature afterwards star lord catches fire").
[Takes time to load - be patient.]
And he does right to catch fire. I would have too.
Sometimes, ngoi kwok yan dei can be real hufters.
Especially when they presume that hero literature is far better than broad prefecture speech. On occasion it isn't. At times it sorely lacks .
MO LEI TAU 無厘頭
Unfounded, without a clear cause. Neither head nor tail. Both a philosophy of life, and a code of conduct.
It is by the juxtapositioning of seemingly random themes and data that a wider comprehension can be achieved.
In the works of Chow Sing-Chi, a predominant concept is the distinction between figure and imagined element.
If neotextual objectivism dominates the subcultural paradigm, narrative is intrinsically dead. Hence a totality of mythopoetical stasis is constructed, then analyzed in terms of language that serves to illuminate the dialectic paradox.
Themes significantly absent from his films are angst, anomie, and introspection.
There is naught existential, it is all consciously deconstructivist.
If you do not understand any of that, good. That is precisely the point.
Mo lei tau. Post-modern humour.
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Saturday I spent nearly the entire day at the office by myself, simply reading and puttering around. The office is where I spend a lot of time now, since Savage Kitten and I broke up. It's not that I hate being in the same apartment as her - far from it - but there is far less at the office to spark regret and moodiness.
There is a lot there to distract me and keep me busy, and I like the quietness.
It's a coping mechanism. It works.
At around six o'clock, not having eating anything all day, I headed over to Chinatown for a snack.
A waitress at a coffee shop remembered me from twenty five years ago, and at a different coffee shop.
平園咖啡店
The Ping Yuen Coffee Shop was a longtime fixture on Jackson Street (昃臣街), about three blocks from where I lived at the time. In those days I always dropped by a coffee shop or bakery after work, to read the newspapers while having a bite.
Ping Yuen was one of the regular places, and they stayed open later. Which meant that I could spend more time reading.
[Newspapers: The San Francisco Chronicle, The Examiner, 星島日報, 國際日報, and of course the 金山時報. That last was strictly local, one of the oldest newspapers on the West-Coast. ]
After coffee I would often go down the street to the Great Star Theatre (大明星戲院) to catch a movie.
去戲院睇電影
The Great Star was where I first saw Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) in The Story of Woo Viet ('Wu-yuet dik gusi': 胡越的故事), The Recruiter ('Liptau': 獵頭) and A Better Tomorrow ('Yinghong pun sei': 英雄本色).
I can't really remember him in the first two movies, but in A better Tomorrow, he made one hell of an impression.
Since then I saw Underground Love ('Dei-haa tsing': 地下情) at the same theatre, as well as City on Fire ('Long fu fong wan': 龍虎風雲). That last one mentioned may very well be the best Chow Yun-fat movie ever made. However it ain't something you want your kids to watch, at least not until they've seen an actual murder or two. City on Fire, together with Tragic Hero ('Yinghong how hon': 英雄好漢), thoroughly epitomize both the Hong Kong crime movie genre as well as the new style of Cantonese cinema that developed during the eighties.
For a quieter and far more all-family acceptable introduction to Chow Yun-fat's work, you might like An Autumn's Tale ('Chau tien dik chongwa': 秋天的童話), in which he plays opposite the stellar Cherie Chung ('Chong Chu-hong': 鍾楚紅) in a gentle romantic story of two people who are rather mismatched.
A lighthearted comedy in which he stars is The Eighth Happiness ('Baat sing bo hey': 八星報喜), and especially charming in its own way is the goofy Diary of a Big Man ('Taai cheung-fu yat-kei': 大丈夫日記), in which he tries to break up with one woman, who takes it as a proposal and accepts, then tries to impart the ghastly news to his other girlfriend, only to end up hitched to both women, neither of whom know about the existence of each other for most of the tale. It's a light-hearted romp about a man who has gotten himself into a bit of a pickle, and is too gentle to be honest with either woman.
I've seen most of the movies Chow Yun-fat has ever made, but I've never seen the television series that first made him famous: The Bund ('Seunghoi tan': 上海灘).
The theme song from that series is, however, indelibly imprinted on my memory ..... 浪奔, 浪流,萬里滔滔江水永不休..... "waves rush, waves flow, for ten thousand miles the river's torrent does not cease", here well sung by Andy Lau ('Lau Tak-wa': 劉德華), who has also been in numerous great movies.
The series-name is sometimes given as 'Shanghai Shoals' - a much better translation of the title.
[Note: theme song to The Bund (上海灘) originally sung by Frances Yip ('Yip Lai-yi': 葉麗儀). Original sound:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM8Y0_OnFgg.Concert performance:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uBkWv8L0eg Note also that the modernized character version of her name looks virtually meaningless:叶丽仪. Seriously, can anyone read that?!? Like Chow Yun-fat and Cherrie Chung, Frances Yip is Hakka.]
[Additional note, March 29, 2013: The link embedded under「浪奔, 浪流」had disappeared. In searching for a new link, I ran across this, which is delightfully strange. Hatsune Miku (a Japanese computer voice program) singing the theme song. Not bad.]
Those were good days. The Taai Ming Sing Hey Yuen closed sometime in the early nineties, the Ping Yuen Coffee shop ceased operations at roughly the same time. Jackson Street has changed a bit.
鄉音無改鬢毛衰
It was quite a pleasant surprise running into someone I knew from that long ago. Extremely flattering that she still remembered me, and could actually recognize me.
My hair has greyed a bit since then, but my voice is still the same.
And I'm still, apparently, one heck of a 靚仔.
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Nothing says good solid entertainment better than an elderly drunk dancing with a sword.
If Billy Shakespeare had ANY sense, he'd rewrite King Lear right now to include that. Seriously. Gotta get the audience's attention, dude.
Oh wait. I just heard. Never mind.
倩女幽魂A Chinese Ghost Story Ning TsoiSan (寧采臣), a rather timid scholar played by Leslie Cheung (張國榮 Cheung KwokWing, 1956 - 2003), is a bill-collector (收帳) travelling through the hinterlands on his rounds. He arrives at a town where no lodging is available, and is advised to go stay the night at a deserted temple in the forest.
A hermit Taoist (道士) who lives there would much prefer that he didn't. Whereas a thousand-year old tree daemon (樹妖) is just fine with the idea - which we don't quite find out for a while, as she sends an enslaved female spirit, 聶小倩 (Nip Siusing), played by the stellar Joey Wong (王祖賢) to seduce him and make him ripe for some serious vital essence draining.
He proves to be too decent a fellow, and then things start going horribly and weirdly wrong. The tale soon becomes a struggle between the Taoist (燕赤霞 Yin Chek-haa - "swallow in the rosy glow of dawn") and the tree daemon, with young master Ning and miss Nip being the starcrossed lovers caught in the middle.
All more or less ends well - Ning TsoiSan and the Yin ChekHaa prevent her from being married off to a daemon king in the underworld, and retrieve her ashes so that she can be reincarnated.
Great movie. Well worth seeing.
Comedy, tragedy, love story, and all round good entertainment.
With a dancing drunk.
The Taoist Yin Chek-haa is played by veteran actor 午馬 (Ng Ma), real name 馮宏源 (Fung Hongyuen).
Who is almost unrecognizable with whiskers and weirdly flaring eye-brows,
In this clip, he practices a strange form of martial art.
I would give full links to the entire movie, but the chances of those links being worthless at some point soon is far too great - posting that material on Youtube is a copyright violation, and such things eventually are pursued, the links taken down, the account holder barred.
Instead, just borrow the movie, or buy it off the internet. You'll be glad you did.
[A CHINESE GHOST STORY - Made in 1987, Hong Kong. The Chinese name of the movie is 倩女幽魂 (Sing Nui Yau Wan - 'winsome girl secluded soul'). Directed by Ching Siutung (程小東), produced by Tsui Hark (徐克).]
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How did I learn Cantonese? By accident. But it was inevitable. Two factors played a strong part, namely partial deafness, and obsessive curiosity.
The curiosity started acting up first.
In the mid eighties I moved to a residential hotel in North Beach (北岸區 Pak On Keui), on Broadway (布律威街 Bo-loh-wai Kai) near the edge of Chinatown (唐人街 Tong-Yan Kai).
It was a convenient location for work, and I didn’t have time to look for real digs – I was working fifteen hour days, six or seven days a week, in a large company down on Market near the Ferry building. My living quarters were barely fifteen minutes away from the office.
That job came to an end when a project deadline was finally finished and most of the people working in that department had had fits and nervous breakdowns.
My next job was on Grant Avenue (Dupont Street: 都板街) near the Chinatown Gate.
Every day I went down Grant to work, walked back up for lunch, back down, back up. After a few weeks I started recognizing some written characters on signs - when you see several dozen bank names all terminating the same way, it isn't hard to figure out that 銀行 (Ngaan hong: 'silver enterprise') must mean 'bank'.
Same goes for restaurants (飯店 fan diem: 'cooked rice shop'; 餐廳 tsan teng: 'dining hall'; 餐館 tsan koon: 'dining establishment'), herbalists (堂 tong: 'large room or hall for a formal purpose'), political parties and benevolent societies (黨 tong: 'party, association, criminal gang'), companies (公司 gong si: 'public managed'), and numerous other signs.
I bought a dictionary (詞典 or 辭典 tsi diem) to look up what I didn't know.
And eventually another dictionary.
One can never have too many dictionaries.
YENG YUEN 影院 MOVIE THEATRES
The partial deafness I mentioned earlier inspired me to go to a Chinese movie theatre. Because the ambient noise in most theatres makes understanding what actors are saying difficult, I prefer movies with subtitles. Chinese cinema is almost always subtitled for distribution in South-East Asia (東南亞洲 Tung-Naam Ya-Chou).
This I remembered from traveling in the early eighties - perhaps, in C'town, the movies were also subtitled?
They were.
Idiosyncratically.
That, too, provided entertainment value.
"Incant you stink old lumps, match all family toppers!"
While the British ruled Hong Kong, there was a legal requirement that all movies be subtitled in English. The style and standard of English, however, was NOT legally specified.
Please imagine a small group of people involved in the making of the film pulling an all-nighter to get the thing subtitled in time for the release date - a few boxes of pizza (比薩餅 peisa beng, perhaps from 必勝客 Bitsaang Hak: Pizza Hut), some containers of instant noodles (方便麵 fongpien mien: convenience noodle - usually called 公仔麵 Gongtsai mien: Prince Noodles, after a well-known HongKong brand), caffeinated beverages, lots of beer (啤酒 peh-jau) .......
And a dictionary that has seen better days. Well thumbed. But not well written. It was cheap. They misplaced the other one. Somebody spilled sugary milktea on it, several pages are stuck.
At five o'clock in the morning, the one person still working translates the villain threatening the hero that he will wipe out his entire family: fit them with coffin lids.
The context makes clear that a hat shop and voodoo are not implied.
Despite the (entirely logical but wrong) English words on screen.
After that first visit to the now defunct World Theatre, I was hooked.
Five bucks for a double bill (one new movie, one older release, several commercials and coming attractions), a full snack bar at affordable prices with interesting foods - dried plums, candied pork jerky, shrimp snacky things, chrysanthemum tea. Come whenever you like, stay as longs as you want, eat drink smoke and play cards in the back row. Watch teenagers doing ... teenagy things.
NO reek of stale popcorn NOR rancid butter flavour - those aren't things that Cantonese people like.
There were five movie theatres in Chinatown in those days.
[Taai Ming Sing Hey Yuen (great Star Theatre, 大明星戲院), Sai Kai Hey Yuen (World Theatre, 世界戲院), Kam To Hey Yuen (Golden Capitol Theatre, 金都戲院), San Seng Hey Yuen (New Sound Theatre 新聲戲院), and also the Wa Seng (China Sound 華聲戲院) on Jackson Street, which sometimes showed Japanese soft-porn dubbed into Mandarin for homesick Taiwanese.]
Each theatre changed their offerings weekly. Sometimes twice. I had no television.
I ended up seeing about two thousand Cantonese movies.
You kinda pick up on the language when you're that exposed.
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You will not like these songs. They probably do not meet your exacting criteria, and they are rather simple and old-fashioned. And they are in a language that is foreign to you besides.
I first heard them at the house of an elderly auntie. She had listened to the songs before the war, at the movie theatre in the Chinese part of town - which her parents had expressly forbidden, of course, because nice girls do not go there.
After the war she bought the records because they reminded her of happier times, before the Jap invasion and the camps.
When she returned to the Netherlands - we say 'returned', because it was called 'repatriation, even though she had never been there - she brought the records with her. During the fifties and sixties she hardly listened to the music, as it did not suit the refined European tastes of the Dutch, and it was embarassing to be 'too Indies'.
In the seventies she lived alone, and started listening again, trying to recapture memories that were fading.
I came back to the US in 1978. For six years I did not hear these songs, or even remember them. Then one day I went to watch a movie at the World Theatre - this was just after it opened, before the owners realized that there is almost no audience for Mandarin oldies in Chinatown.
The next day I bought an entire collection of songs by Zhou Xuan - a set produced in Malaysia, from old recordings - a bit scratchy, a bit warped. Cheap tapes, probably pirated. But it was heaven. I have since acquired better sets, including a remastered cd set. The songs still evoke.
I know most of the songs by heart. Yes, you do NOT want to go to a Chinese Karaoke bar with me.
FIVE LOVELY AIRS SUNG BY ZHOU XUAN [周璇, born August 1, 1918, died September 22, 1957.]
You will note that two of the youtube videos given above are clearly the karaoke versions - the visual for the betelnut song is rather gooberish.
The last two are from the original movie (馬路天使).
Would you care to guess what I saw that day at the World Theatre?
Post scriptum: You may be wondering why I felt moved to post these songs. It could be the mood I'm in, but more likely it is the lilies. You see, Savage Kitten stayed home sick today, so I bought her some lilies from the stand at the foot of the street. They are now on my desk waiting to be taken home, and they smell very old fashioned, very evocative. There's just something about that fragrance.
Savage Kitten NEVER listens to Zhou Xuan's songs, by the way.
She listens to Madonna, disco, Broadway musicals. Some classical music, especially when she is driving.
And songs from Valley of the Dolls.
