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.
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.
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.
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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