SMOKY AROUND THE EDGES

Lunch was excellent. I had not been there in a while, there have been some changes. There's a young fellow working there now who speaks better Cantonese than some of his kinfolk, don't know how he is on Mandarin, but Vietnamese and English are probably pretty good too. The hours are still Covid-era weird. I found out the other day that the bookseller likes one of the same dishes at the Vietnamese restaurants that he frequents as I do at mine: barbecued pork spring rolls rice vermicelli (燒豬肉春捲米粉 'siu chyu yiuk chun kuen mai fan').

Where ever you have it, it will be slightly different. This version has slightly less rice vermicilli than the other two places I've gone to in Chinatown. There's a fourth Viet place I also visit, but I don't think I've had it there, and the key thing is the slightly charred pork.
Accompanied by drip-coffee, followed after leaving by a pipe.
The bookseller does not smoke.


The elderly auntie that runs the place has probably gotten used to the Chinatown habit of addressing women colloquially as "pretty gir" (靚女 'leng neui'), which I have rather avoided, as to my ear it seems too familiar, and what with being male and white it could conceivably be taken amiss, especially if it was relatively accurate. But most often the woman in question is at the very least comfortably in her thirties and forties or even far beyond that, so usually it is polite hyperbolic flattery. When someone is younger than sixty I prefer to say miss (小姐 'siu je'), or older than forty, auntie (阿姨 'a yi'). There are, of course, other terms. It can be a fine-tuned approach, as many terms of address imply a theoretical kinship status.

Four languages were in play yesterday, which is something not particularly out of the ordinary in this city, given that we're not in the middle of the hinterland. English, of course, when boarding the bus. After which Dutch and Indonesian, then Dutch again till Chinatown, then Cantonese. The little old Indo woman on the bus, who has a sister living in Amsterdam, was heading over to a Thai restaurant for dinner, so she headed through the tunnel after getting off. We'll probably encounter each other again sometime soon.

Terms of address in Indonesian are an entirely different kettle of fish. When combined with Dutch Indonesian and Indo Dutch there are also gradations. And yes, Thai food does taste rather like home too. That's very important.



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