The Cantonese are unlike other Chinese. This is largely the natural result of their history, which is one of wars, rebellions, and the grand adventure of settling a wild frontier.
Two thousand years ago their homeland was inhabited by savage tribes who were not part of the empire until general Ma Yuan (馬援 maa yuen) subjugated Nanman ( 南蠻 naam maan, "southward barbarians") and Jiaozhi (交趾 gaau ji, "intersecting footprints": extreme southern Kwantung and northern Viet) during the Han (漢朝 hon chiu 206 BCE – 220 CE).
[南蠻: The Nanman tribes included the Bai (白族 baak juk), Kinh (京族 king juk, Vietnamese), Miao (苗族 miu juk, Hmong), and Tai (傣族 daai juk. Thai and Tai), who at that time inhabited Kweichow (黔 Qian, 'Kim'; 貴州 kwei jau),Yunnan (滇 Dian, Tin; 雲南 wun naam), and Szechuan (蜀 Shu, Suk; 四川 sei chuen).]
The two Guangs (兩廣 leung gwong; twin expanses), which are modern-day Guandung ( 廣東 gwon tung; eastern expanse) and Guangxi ( 廣西 gwon sai; western expanse') provinces, along with Fujian (福建 fuk kin'; fortunate builds) and most of Chekiang (浙江 jit gong; twisty river) were at that time considered to be Viet (越 yuet). The term 'Viet' did not then refer to a people -- the Vietnamese are 'Kinh' -- but to a geographic area ('the boundary'), inhabited by various ethnicities of which fairly little trace remains, due to their having been overrun, outnumbered, and co-opted. Both the natives and their area were Sinified over a span of several centuries.
[越: Yuet means 'frontier', and is the first part of Vietnam (越南 yuet-naam, south of the border). The homophone 粵 is cognate, and refers to matters Cantonese. The various ethnicities were Fan (番), Man (蠻), Mang (芒), Mieu (苗), She (輋), and Yao (猺), among others.]
Nevertheless, elements of their cultural traits, and their genetic stock, contributed mightily to the "Chinese" who are today's 'Cantonese'.
The population in Lingnan (嶺南 ling naam; south of the five mountain ranges, in a narrow sense only the Cantonese area) shows a large proto-Thai genetic inheritance, and though they speak the cleanest descendant of the old Tang koine, and do have ancestral roots in the Central Plains (中原 jung yuen), they represent a long stabilized mixture of barbarian racial stock with Han (漢 hon), much like most of the north shows a similar leavening with Turk, Mongol, and Tungusic strains. Their language has been likewise enriched by locutions and phraseology which reflect the ancient tribes, whose racially and culturally mixed descendants were perhaps inclined to express themselves better than the rude colonialist.
All of this, of course, is ancient history. Though their DNA proves the past, in the present they are entirely Chinese. Except for the unassimilated Li (黎 lai) and Zhuang (壯 jong), in Guangxi and Hainan.
The accusation by snooty Mandarin speakers that the southerners are 'not really true Chinese' is as foundationless as the northern assertion that they themselves are 'pure'. Certain surnames betray barbarian ancestors in the heartland, and many dynasties and ruling houses were either part Turk, or entirely foreign; their blood flows in every vein north of the passes.
Like all metropolitan civilizations, China represents an amalgam of genes drawn inward by the magnetism and vigour of a succesful central society.
[Note: The written character for the Zhuang people was originally 獞, composed of the signific 犭(dog) and the phonetic 童 (boy, servant). After the Communists took over, this name was considered demeaning, and first changed to 僮, in which the dog ( or 犭) has been changed to a human (人or 亻). Later it was replaced entirely with a homophonous character (壯) meaning 'strong'.]
For the first several centuries of Chinese rule in the southlands, the barbaric tribes on the frontiers were becalmed by canny administrators who rewarded chiefs with trinkets, status objects, and official ranks, offered to educate the sons of local notables -- thus giving them a language in which they were more literate than they could ever be in their tribal tongues -- and shared the benefits of more efficient rule generously. By the time of Tang (618 to 906) the territories had long been tranquilized, and though still sparsely settled by peoples now wholly 'sinicised' despite their barbarian ancestry, the region presented an inviting prospect for people desperate to get away from excessive taxation, corvee, overpopulation, and the far-too-frequent all-encompassing corruption and moral rot of the central areas.
Lingnan was flooded by smugglers, pirates, dissidents, tax-dodgers, whores, incendiarists, and entrepreneurs, in a stream that continued nearly unabated till the fall of the Ming (朙朝) in the seventeenth century. As they acclimatized, they furthered the co-optation and absorption of whatever tribal elements still remained. Large parts of the southern coast were still barbaric five centuries ago, presently all is "Chinese". Though a few people are only ten or eleven generations descended from a dubious ethnic minority, they are racially and culturally quite indistinguishable from their peers, who often represent older strains of creolization and a longer history of genetic mixing.
Canton and the Cantonese are a cocktail. The dominant liquor is Chinese, but the Vermouth is something other.
誰憐越女顏如玉，貧賤江頭自浣紗
["Who considers the girl from Viet ("粵女") with the jade-like face, washing her silk in solitude at the stream?"]
That line from a poem by Wang Wei (王維 wong wai, 692 - 761) written over a thousand years ago is, perhaps, peculiar today, given that it speaks of a looser and far less Chinese period in Chinese history. The ruling dynasty in his day was half Turk, as were many of the scholar-officials and notable families of the empire, yet many of the natives of the vast southland were never the less considered not quite 'us' by the myopic upper classes.
Wang Wei's metaphor of separation, wildness, and humble circumstance belies the truth that the south was richer and more verdant, and historically the source of luxuries much envied in the arid regions anent the Turco-Mongol wastelands. Lichees and tangerines, as just two examples, were hastened to the imperial court by couriers on horseback, so that the effete aristocrats could indulge. Fragrant woods, pearls, exotic fabrics, and a multitude of culinary delicacies came from Lingnan and were highly prized. It is no wonder that when Tang's successor Sung bent to another barbarian onslaught, the imperial court fled ever south, at last falling to the enemy in the waters off Kowloon.
[When the Mongols invaded, officials took the nine year old prince Zhao Shi (趙昰 chiu si) and his seven year old brother Zhao Bing (趙昺 chiu bing) first to Fuzhou (福州 fuk jau) in Fujian (福建 fuk kin), where the older brother was crowned emperor upon the death of their father in the capital Linan (臨安 lam on, modern day Hangzhou (杭州 hong jau) in 1276. Then, when the Mongols broke through the Sung defences in 1277 and took that city, the court headed to Guangzhou (廣州 gwong jau), finally ending up at Matauwai (碼頭圍) in Kowloon (九龍 gau lung). Upon Zhao Shi's demise from a lingering ailment in 1278, Zhao Bing was enthroned. In 1279 the remnants of Sung perished in the Naval Battle of Yamen (崖山海戰 ngaai saan hoi jin) near Lantau Island (大嶼山 daai yü saan), the tides subsequently depositing hundreds of thousands of corpses on the shores up and down the coast. It is said that the body of the boy emperor was found near Shekou (蛇口 se hau) in Shenzhen (深圳 sam jan) north of Hong Kong, though it is not known where he is buried. There's a memorial rock-inscription commemorating the last two princes of Sung near Matauwai, which was severely damaged by the Japanese (倭 waai, another tribe of fractious barbarians) during WWII.]
TESTICULARITY
Given that past, it should not surprise you that in the present the Cantonese are the most adventurous of the Chinese. Their cuisine is more varied and interesting than anything the north knows, their transplanted representatives have settled in the most distant lands, and their mode of expression veers lyrically between eloquent fantasy, sneering outrage, and ribaldly unprintable invention. The very first fluent sentence an outsider is likely to learn is either a statement regarding the reproductive organ of someone's mother and its noteworthy olfactory characteristic, or a phrase containing an action verb and an elderly maternal relative.
[Such linguistic aptitude is often the reason that the Chinese subtitles for Mandarin speakers underneath Hong Kong movies seem unusually short; was everything even translated, or is Mandarin able to get by with less? The answer is no. The vast toxic flow of verbal filth will have been rendered into the northern tongue with one oblique three word phrase, representing not one whit of the colour and verve with which the native speaker expresses himself. It's rather sad.]
One imagines that the rebels who populate the pages of Cantonese history probably utilized those locutions, as well as ever more creative variants, in their long resistance to all manner of invaders and tyrants from the north. The Canton area has been the birthplace of more revolutionaries and disturbers of faecal matter than anywhere else in the country, and the heroes still sung about today were all at one point wanted men. Perhaps that was inevitable, when for centuries the imperial court used the place as a dumping ground, exiling scholars and officials who did not toe the party line to the far south to succumb to malaria and other tropical diseases.
Su Tungpo, to name just one famous example, was sent south in 1094. After six years during which he did not die, he was finally pardoned - only to perish on the road home. His accomplishments were myriad, his poetry and prose have been a treasure for all the generations since.
The near-constant fertilizing of the territory with literate men who failed to bend has left a tradition of obstinacy and stubbornness in Canton that outshines any amount of pig head rigidity elsewhere. And yet these are the most flexible of individuals, infinitely adaptive to circumstance.
The population of Guangdong are by long inheritance smugglers, scholars, brigands, poets, and pirates. And, it must be said, often remarkably casual about decorum, public order, and legal niceties.
If a crowd of northerners is a mass or a mob, a collection of Cantonese is, quite naturally, a conspiracy.
The typical Cantonese person does not whine about getting caught breaking the law - instead, they'll resolve to be a far better criminal next time.
And, if you're Cantonese, there's ALWAYS a next time.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Showing posts with label 粵. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 粵. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
FIRES ALONG THE BORDER
While the Tang Dynasty (唐朝, 618 CE to 907 CE) is rightly considered one of China’s golden ages, because of the huge amount of art and literature that was created during the long prosperous years of peace under able emperors, there were always pockets of flame flickering here and there in the empire. Not all the barbarians brought under the imperial sway were equally pleased to be part of the most cosmopolitan society that existed on earth, nor were some of them even remotely capable of appreciating the warm embrace of civilization.
THE PESTILENTIAL SCOURGE
This is not surprising, when you consider that many malcontents were Turks. Their ancestors had assaulted the borders for over a millennium, bent on slaughter, rapine, and pillage. It wasn’t till very many generations after the fall of Tang that some Turkish tribes would actually acquire a written language and more acceptable manners.
During the eighth and ninth centuries they were still vicious savages happily despoiling all settled societies within reach.
The Chinese frontier, even during the height of Tang power, always tempted confederacies of horse-borne brigands, who would search out weak spots, and strike at opportune moments. Sometimes they succeeded in breaking through the wall, and laid waste to entire provinces.
Yes, I know. It isn’t politically correct to talk about an ethnic group in such disparaging terms. Even the Turks.
But were it not for their greed, bloodlust, depraved savagery, and brutal opportunism, the thousand mile wall to keep them out would never have been necessary, let alone built. The Great Wall more than anything else preserved China, and persuaded the heathen desert demons to expand westward, where their descendants eventually raped Russia, destroyed the Caliphates, and conquered Byzantium.
Until the extermination of the Zhungar Khanate by the Ching under Chienlung (乾隆帝) in 1755, which served as a splendid object-lesson to the other wasteland terror-ethnicities, the eastern Turks and Turco-Mongols were kept at bay at best, feared as inhuman monsters at worst.
The three thousand year struggle to keep the heartland from being ravaged by the barbarians beyond the wall occupied the government of every dynasty, created an undying cultural memory of threat and immense sacrifice, and also inspired great literature.
That last far outweighs any contribution from the other side.
Whose impact worldwide has been mostly desolation.
Now, having riled up your liberal sentiments, possibly offended you (ESPECIALLY if you are a cultural relativist, a socialist, or simply ignorant), and having also perhaps insulted your ancestors, if you have the ghastly bad karma to actually be descended from the bestial hordes, here are a few lines of poetry from the height of the Tang period that express beautifully what the long frontier meant to the Chinese.
隴西行 LUNG-SAI HANG
陳陶
誓掃匈奴不顧身, 五千貂錦喪胡塵。
可憐無定河邊骨, 猶是深閨夢裡人。
Sai sou hung-nou bat gu san, ng-chien diu-gam song wu-chan;
Ho-lin mo-ding ho pin gwat, yau si sam-gwai mung-leui yan.
THE TURKESTAN CAMPAIGN
By Chan Tou (Chen Tao)
"Sworn to crush the Hsiungnu without considering themselves, five thousand clad in fur and silk lie buried in the Tatar dust;
How pitiable, those bones by the river of shifting sands, that still populate their widows' dreams."
[Notes: 匈奴 hung nou: an ancient term for the barbarians; 'Hun'. 貂錦 diu-gam: sable and silk, metaphorically the splendid accoutrements of imperial service. 可憐 ho-lin: how sad, how pitiable! 深閨夢 sam-gwai mung: dreams in the women's quarters. ]
夜上受降城聞笛 YE SEUNG SAU HONG SENG MAN DAK
李益
回樂峰前沙似雪, 受降城外月如霜。
不知何處吹蘆管, 一夜征人盡望鄉。
Wui lok fung chin saa chi suet, sau-hong seng-ngoi yuet yu seung;
Pat-chi ho chyu cheui lou gun, yat ye jing-yan cheun mong heung.
AT NIGHT HEARING A FLUTE ON THE CITY WALL AT SHOU-HSIANG
By Lei Yik (Li Yi)
"The sands before Hui-Le Peak seem like snow, beyond Accept-Surrender city the moon shows frost;
Not knowing from where the flute sound comes, all night long recruits think of home."
征人怨 JING -YAN YUEN
柳中庸
歲歲金河復玉關, 朝朝馬策與刀環。
三春白雪歸青塚, 萬里黃河繞黑山。
Seui-seui gam ho fu yuk gwaan, chiu-chiu maa-chaak yu dou-waan;
Saam cheun pak suet gwai ching chung, maan lei wong ho yiu haak saan.
A SOLDIER'S RESENTMENT
By Lau Jung-yung (Liu Zhongyong)
"Year upon year returning to the Jade Pass, age after age of horsewhips and sword hilts;
Three springtimes now snow has blanketed green graves, for a thousand miles the Yellow River girds Black Mountain."
[Notes: Dense visual imagery posed in contrast - snow versus the grasses growing on tombs, as ceaselessly the troops come to guard the frontier; though just the latest recruits in this eternal war, the writer states that for three years they has seen the seasons shift here, but the heartland (Huang Ho: 'Yellow River') will remain constant and timeless.]
AFTERWORD
The phonetic transcription I have given is based on the Cantonese language. This is fitting not only because many of the Chinese in San Francisco speak Cantonese, but also because the Cantonese are the only group to refer to themselves as 'Men of Tang' (Tong yan: 唐人), and their language as 'Tang-speech' (Tong-wa: 唐話).
It is also suitable, because the poetry of that era still mostly rhymes when voiced in their language, the last and greatest descendant of the koine of Tang
The barbarians are yet at the gates, by the way. But they are vastly outnumbered now, and have become rather less relevant since the conquest of Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang: 新疆) by the Ching Dynasty.
Other than occasional outbursts of irredentist violence, they have no significance.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
THE PESTILENTIAL SCOURGE
This is not surprising, when you consider that many malcontents were Turks. Their ancestors had assaulted the borders for over a millennium, bent on slaughter, rapine, and pillage. It wasn’t till very many generations after the fall of Tang that some Turkish tribes would actually acquire a written language and more acceptable manners.
During the eighth and ninth centuries they were still vicious savages happily despoiling all settled societies within reach.
The Chinese frontier, even during the height of Tang power, always tempted confederacies of horse-borne brigands, who would search out weak spots, and strike at opportune moments. Sometimes they succeeded in breaking through the wall, and laid waste to entire provinces.
Yes, I know. It isn’t politically correct to talk about an ethnic group in such disparaging terms. Even the Turks.
But were it not for their greed, bloodlust, depraved savagery, and brutal opportunism, the thousand mile wall to keep them out would never have been necessary, let alone built. The Great Wall more than anything else preserved China, and persuaded the heathen desert demons to expand westward, where their descendants eventually raped Russia, destroyed the Caliphates, and conquered Byzantium.
Until the extermination of the Zhungar Khanate by the Ching under Chienlung (乾隆帝) in 1755, which served as a splendid object-lesson to the other wasteland terror-ethnicities, the eastern Turks and Turco-Mongols were kept at bay at best, feared as inhuman monsters at worst.
The three thousand year struggle to keep the heartland from being ravaged by the barbarians beyond the wall occupied the government of every dynasty, created an undying cultural memory of threat and immense sacrifice, and also inspired great literature.
That last far outweighs any contribution from the other side.
Whose impact worldwide has been mostly desolation.
Now, having riled up your liberal sentiments, possibly offended you (ESPECIALLY if you are a cultural relativist, a socialist, or simply ignorant), and having also perhaps insulted your ancestors, if you have the ghastly bad karma to actually be descended from the bestial hordes, here are a few lines of poetry from the height of the Tang period that express beautifully what the long frontier meant to the Chinese.
隴西行 LUNG-SAI HANG
陳陶
誓掃匈奴不顧身, 五千貂錦喪胡塵。
可憐無定河邊骨, 猶是深閨夢裡人。
Sai sou hung-nou bat gu san, ng-chien diu-gam song wu-chan;
Ho-lin mo-ding ho pin gwat, yau si sam-gwai mung-leui yan.
THE TURKESTAN CAMPAIGN
By Chan Tou (Chen Tao)
"Sworn to crush the Hsiungnu without considering themselves, five thousand clad in fur and silk lie buried in the Tatar dust;
How pitiable, those bones by the river of shifting sands, that still populate their widows' dreams."
[Notes: 匈奴 hung nou: an ancient term for the barbarians; 'Hun'. 貂錦 diu-gam: sable and silk, metaphorically the splendid accoutrements of imperial service. 可憐 ho-lin: how sad, how pitiable! 深閨夢 sam-gwai mung: dreams in the women's quarters. ]
夜上受降城聞笛 YE SEUNG SAU HONG SENG MAN DAK
李益
回樂峰前沙似雪, 受降城外月如霜。
不知何處吹蘆管, 一夜征人盡望鄉。
Wui lok fung chin saa chi suet, sau-hong seng-ngoi yuet yu seung;
Pat-chi ho chyu cheui lou gun, yat ye jing-yan cheun mong heung.
AT NIGHT HEARING A FLUTE ON THE CITY WALL AT SHOU-HSIANG
By Lei Yik (Li Yi)
"The sands before Hui-Le Peak seem like snow, beyond Accept-Surrender city the moon shows frost;
Not knowing from where the flute sound comes, all night long recruits think of home."
征人怨 JING -YAN YUEN
柳中庸
歲歲金河復玉關, 朝朝馬策與刀環。
三春白雪歸青塚, 萬里黃河繞黑山。
Seui-seui gam ho fu yuk gwaan, chiu-chiu maa-chaak yu dou-waan;
Saam cheun pak suet gwai ching chung, maan lei wong ho yiu haak saan.
A SOLDIER'S RESENTMENT
By Lau Jung-yung (Liu Zhongyong)
"Year upon year returning to the Jade Pass, age after age of horsewhips and sword hilts;
Three springtimes now snow has blanketed green graves, for a thousand miles the Yellow River girds Black Mountain."
[Notes: Dense visual imagery posed in contrast - snow versus the grasses growing on tombs, as ceaselessly the troops come to guard the frontier; though just the latest recruits in this eternal war, the writer states that for three years they has seen the seasons shift here, but the heartland (Huang Ho: 'Yellow River') will remain constant and timeless.]
AFTERWORD
The phonetic transcription I have given is based on the Cantonese language. This is fitting not only because many of the Chinese in San Francisco speak Cantonese, but also because the Cantonese are the only group to refer to themselves as 'Men of Tang' (Tong yan: 唐人), and their language as 'Tang-speech' (Tong-wa: 唐話).
It is also suitable, because the poetry of that era still mostly rhymes when voiced in their language, the last and greatest descendant of the koine of Tang
The barbarians are yet at the gates, by the way. But they are vastly outnumbered now, and have become rather less relevant since the conquest of Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang: 新疆) by the Ching Dynasty.
Other than occasional outbursts of irredentist violence, they have no significance.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
STRANGE STUFF THAT COMES OUT OF CHINESE PEOPLE'S MOUTHS
As many of my readers know, I live with another person.
For two decades we were in a relationship.
That ended over a year ago.
We're still living together because we still like each other, and we trust each other.
We get along rather well.
I'm white and a little deaf.
She's Chinese and remarkably soft spoken - which most Cantonese people are not.
Yesterday I heard her say "I'm starting to really dislike white pubes".
You can imagine my surprise. Twenty years with me.
And she's now seeing another Caucasian guy.
Bit late for that to be an issue.
"I'm starting to dislike white pubes"
I can somewhat understand the sentiment, but it does seem a little strange.
You might think that she would've had that stark realization before now.
Maybe she saw the two exhibitionists that join protests in this city?
They're unmistakably white, and visually unrewarding.
That could've been the final drop.
As it turns out, she didn't mean 'white pubes'.
What she actually said was "white Buddhists".
You know, Caucasians going all gooey spiritual and sh*t.
Mantras, chanting, beads, butterflies, and all kinds of meaningful.
I don't know if I should be glad it wasn't what I thought.
White Buddhists are far worse than most white pubes.
Some white pubes are kind of nice.
Won't get too detailed, but...
We can all agree on that.
"I'M TALKING STOP SNEEZING!"
Simple, straightforward, and utterly berserk. Obviously, if the child is sneezing when the mother is speaking to it, the child is doing it deliberately. Disobedient!
The woman then accused the kid of learning that in school.
Sneezing classes, hah!
Teenagers!
YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!
The bus going into the downtown was absolutely packed, we were jammed in cheek to jowl. Every time somebody need to get off they had to struggle to get to the door. Morning bus rides are an adventure. Heck, just trying to breathe on the municipal sardine tin in the morning means you're rudely pushing against someone.
Riders are understandably tense and grumpy.
Half the passengers were elderly Cantonese heading into Chinatown, the rest were commuters going to work in the financial district.
When we stopped at Stockton Street, the old Toishanese gentleman behind me loudly addressed the bus.
"Your attention now please! All Chinese get off bus here. Everyone with blonde or brown hair have to stay behind, go work, pay lotsa taxes, and support the government, big corporations, war in Iraq. Thank you!"
It lightened the mood considerably.
Probably exactly what he intended.
And the bus was much less full when it started moving again also.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
For two decades we were in a relationship.
That ended over a year ago.
We're still living together because we still like each other, and we trust each other.
We get along rather well.
I'm white and a little deaf.
She's Chinese and remarkably soft spoken - which most Cantonese people are not.
Yesterday I heard her say "I'm starting to really dislike white pubes".
You can imagine my surprise. Twenty years with me.
And she's now seeing another Caucasian guy.
Bit late for that to be an issue.
"I'm starting to dislike white pubes"
I can somewhat understand the sentiment, but it does seem a little strange.
You might think that she would've had that stark realization before now.
Maybe she saw the two exhibitionists that join protests in this city?
They're unmistakably white, and visually unrewarding.
That could've been the final drop.
As it turns out, she didn't mean 'white pubes'.
What she actually said was "white Buddhists".
You know, Caucasians going all gooey spiritual and sh*t.
Mantras, chanting, beads, butterflies, and all kinds of meaningful.
I don't know if I should be glad it wasn't what I thought.
White Buddhists are far worse than most white pubes.
Some white pubes are kind of nice.
Won't get too detailed, but...
We can all agree on that.
"I'M TALKING STOP SNEEZING!"
Simple, straightforward, and utterly berserk. Obviously, if the child is sneezing when the mother is speaking to it, the child is doing it deliberately. Disobedient!
The woman then accused the kid of learning that in school.
Sneezing classes, hah!
Teenagers!
YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!
The bus going into the downtown was absolutely packed, we were jammed in cheek to jowl. Every time somebody need to get off they had to struggle to get to the door. Morning bus rides are an adventure. Heck, just trying to breathe on the municipal sardine tin in the morning means you're rudely pushing against someone.
Riders are understandably tense and grumpy.
Half the passengers were elderly Cantonese heading into Chinatown, the rest were commuters going to work in the financial district.
When we stopped at Stockton Street, the old Toishanese gentleman behind me loudly addressed the bus.
"Your attention now please! All Chinese get off bus here. Everyone with blonde or brown hair have to stay behind, go work, pay lotsa taxes, and support the government, big corporations, war in Iraq. Thank you!"
It lightened the mood considerably.
Probably exactly what he intended.
And the bus was much less full when it started moving again also.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
I AM NOT AH SOOK!
She used to work at the store around the corner. Because one has to be a certain age even to work part-time, she must have been at least sixteen when she started. But she didn't look it at all. Forgive me for saying it, but rather than suggesting a young lady in the first blush of woman-hood, she reminded me of nothing so much as a bug - a delicate creature with iridescence, poised awareness, bright eyes, and thin elegant limbs.
As well as a face that reflected a remarkable sense of humour and a keen intelligent character.
She was extremely attractive - people look so much more exciting, appealing and desirable even, when they are bright and have an active interest in things around them.
I once surprised her at the check-out stand while she was stuffing her face.
She looked utterly charming at that moment - blushing, stuttering, embarrassed, and guilty as sin.
I never knew that noodles being shoveled in with chopsticks were a wicked pleasure.
I learned something then.
[She indulged in the naughtiness of noodles several times over the years. Not a constant, but on lucky evenings I would see her inhaling long slirts of pasta with a blissed-out look on her face, eyes half-closed, smiling...... and there's something innocent yet enchanting about feminine hands wielding chopsticks.
Fortunately I am a very sober man.]
The smallest women always have the biggest appetites. It's probably the sheer buzzing energy level which keeps them from growing, as it must take immense amounts of noodles to fuel that frenetic activity, spark the constant intellectual curiosity.
She worked there for nearly six years. I'm guessing final years of high-school and all the way through college.
No, I didn't go to the store more often because of her, as I've always been blessed with a great lack of foresight.
Every evening I needed something that I ran out of.
Smoked clams, that's it - I am desperate for some smoked clams.
And another bottle of hot sauce. A man can never have too many bottles of hot sauce.
As well as a five pound bag of sugar, I'm collecting the set!
All of the check-out clerks who work there now are married women.
Married women do not inculcate a need for hot sauce.
Even though I used up my reserves of sugar (five pound bags, multiples) years ago, there has been no need to acquire another stockpile.
It is unlikely that there will be another sugar crisis like there was in the mid-nineties.
She understood me when I spoke Cantonese. One of the few people who could automatically grasp which crucial word was being mangled.
It's a talent.
Married women lack that skill. Or the curiosity that spurs perspective.
Even the round-faced one who works there now, most evenings, just sticks to the normal phrases of interaction. Ney ho. Mai mat-yeh? Go-di ho kwai ga! Ney chan chong-yi ni di ah?
Thank G-d she doesn't address me as 'ah-sook'.
The cute little one who ate noodles didn't address me as ah-sook either, even though she had much more justification to do so if she had. Age difference and all.
It is VERY endearing when a young miss entirely unselfconsciously does NOT address one as ah-sook. Charming, in fact.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
As well as a face that reflected a remarkable sense of humour and a keen intelligent character.
She was extremely attractive - people look so much more exciting, appealing and desirable even, when they are bright and have an active interest in things around them.
I once surprised her at the check-out stand while she was stuffing her face.
She looked utterly charming at that moment - blushing, stuttering, embarrassed, and guilty as sin.
I never knew that noodles being shoveled in with chopsticks were a wicked pleasure.
I learned something then.
[She indulged in the naughtiness of noodles several times over the years. Not a constant, but on lucky evenings I would see her inhaling long slirts of pasta with a blissed-out look on her face, eyes half-closed, smiling...... and there's something innocent yet enchanting about feminine hands wielding chopsticks.
Fortunately I am a very sober man.]
The smallest women always have the biggest appetites. It's probably the sheer buzzing energy level which keeps them from growing, as it must take immense amounts of noodles to fuel that frenetic activity, spark the constant intellectual curiosity.
She worked there for nearly six years. I'm guessing final years of high-school and all the way through college.
No, I didn't go to the store more often because of her, as I've always been blessed with a great lack of foresight.
Every evening I needed something that I ran out of.
Smoked clams, that's it - I am desperate for some smoked clams.
And another bottle of hot sauce. A man can never have too many bottles of hot sauce.
As well as a five pound bag of sugar, I'm collecting the set!
All of the check-out clerks who work there now are married women.
Married women do not inculcate a need for hot sauce.
Even though I used up my reserves of sugar (five pound bags, multiples) years ago, there has been no need to acquire another stockpile.
It is unlikely that there will be another sugar crisis like there was in the mid-nineties.
She understood me when I spoke Cantonese. One of the few people who could automatically grasp which crucial word was being mangled.
It's a talent.
Married women lack that skill. Or the curiosity that spurs perspective.
Even the round-faced one who works there now, most evenings, just sticks to the normal phrases of interaction. Ney ho. Mai mat-yeh? Go-di ho kwai ga! Ney chan chong-yi ni di ah?
Thank G-d she doesn't address me as 'ah-sook'.
The cute little one who ate noodles didn't address me as ah-sook either, even though she had much more justification to do so if she had. Age difference and all.
It is VERY endearing when a young miss entirely unselfconsciously does NOT address one as ah-sook. Charming, in fact.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
BEST CHINESE FOOD IN SAN FRANCISCO: SWEET AND SOUR PORK
I can see you scratching your head, after reading the title of this post.
"What", you are wondering, "is he on about this time?"
And perhaps you are thinking that I have really lost it.
After all, sweet and sour pork is such a cliché.
Waspy people who live far from any large Chinese-American communities eat sweet and sour pork.
Large spongy white people with Scandinavian or German accents from the vast interior order sweet and sour pork.
Fercrapssakes, tourists in Chinatown LOVE sweet and sour pork!
Along with chow mein, chop suey, and egg rolls.
It's a glow-in-the-dark feast!
Perfect with fried rice, too!
Well, yes.
But sweet and sour pork is also probably the very first Chinese-American restaurant dish.
Imagine a bunch of nineteenth century Cantonese gentlemen in the High Sierras deciding that panning for gold may not be as rewarding as they once thought. And, having subsisted on some of the weirdest long-distance muck in their lives for over a year, deciding that what was really missing in that particular place was decent food.
So they open a restaurant.
Big Gold Mountain Refined Eats (大金山垃圾嘢食方).
This is the situation:
They're surrounded by miles and miles of barbarous waste.
No soy sauce. No hoisin sauce or oyster sauce - neither of those products had been standardized yet in the eighteen sixties.
No plum sauce. No rice wine. No sesame oil.
No fermented black beans, toban jeung, lajeung, or suen choi.
[Soy sauce: si yau (豉油). Hoisin sauce: hoisin jeung (海鲜酱). Oyster sauce: hou yau (蠔油). Plum sauce: suen moei jeung (蘇梅醬). Rice wine: wong jau (黄酒). Sesame oil: jee ma yau (芝麻油). Fermented black beans: dau si (豆豉). Toban jeung ('bean ferments' sauce): 豆瓣醬. Lajeung (hot sauce): 辣酱. Suen choi (sour vegetable): 酸菜.]
In fact, almost every comestible or flavouring ingredient that Cantonese people would like to have in their kitchen is singularly missing. California is still a sparsely populated and primitive place in that era, and both Chinese and European food-stuffs are brought in by clippers from across the Pacific or around the horn. Consequently, very few non-local ingredients are available.
The history of 'cuisine' in this state is the tale of Chinese and Japanese farmers and their market-gardens adding variety to the diet, plus all immigrant groups eventually manufacturing the necessary products for their own cooking styles.
But the very first Chinese American restaurants predate those developments.
大金山垃圾嘢食方
TAAI KAMSAN LAPSAPYEH SIKFONG
The Cantonese gentlemen of our tale are very far from civilization indeed.
They have a pig (yat jek fei chyu 一隻肥猪).
Plus sugar (tong 糖), salt (yim 鹽), vinegar (tsou 醋), lard (fan yau 葷油), and clothes' starch (fan jeung 粉漿).
[Don't ask why they have clothes' starch - complicated story.]
And there's a huge horde of hungry sweaty white men outside the door!
" 嘩, 外便有好多鬼佬嘅喎! 咁臭啊! "
You can see where this is going, can't you?
Desperation prompts invention.
甜酸肉
TIEM SUEN YIUK
A simple dish, in which meat is made magic by the addition of very common-place ingredients.
Nothing strange or unusual, no risk-taking by the customers required.
Along with a nice hearty plate of chow-mein you've got everything a gold miner freezing his tuchus off would want.
Flavoured and texturized animal protein, plus a savoury fried starchy substance.
The only thing missing is whiskey.
For nearly a century following that simple act of culinary prestidigitation, Chinese-American food advanced by inventing variations on the theme.
Tomato Beef, Lemon Chicken, Orange Peel Duck.
Fried Rice, Chow Mein, Chow Fun.
[Tomato Beef: fan-keh ngau-yiuk (番茄牛肉). Lemon Chicken: ning-mong kai (檸檬雞). Orange Peel Duck: chan-pei ngaap (陳皮鴨).
Fried Rice: chao fan (炒飯). Chow Mein: chao mien (炒麵). Chow Fun: chao f'n (炒粉) .]
The key to all these dishes is that they are essentially white folks food.
Very Anglo, in fact.
Meat sauced slightly sweet and tangy, and greased-up starch.
Plus one or two additions, for garnish and excitement.
The hamburger (漢堡包) that we all love embodies the same concept.
And like the previously mentioned dishes, the only thing missing is whiskey.
[Whiskey: waisikei jau (威士忌酒). One glas of whiskey: yat pui waisikei (一盃威士忌).]
Only Chop Suey (雜碎) is more American.
And it, too, is thoroughly familiar to everyone, including those who avoid strong drink.
MAKING IT, EATING IT
To make sweet and sour pork, simply stirfry sliced pig with chopped bellpepper, onion (洋葱) and celery (芹菜), then sauce it with diluted vinegar and sugar, plus the usual corn starch and water solution.
Red food colouring, ketchup, and pineapple may be added to taste.
Soy sauce is optional and may be omitted - most white folk will drizzle it over their fried rice in any case, so its absence from the entrée will not be noticed.
The meat can be coated first: eggwhite and water whisked together with a pinch of salt, meat therein, rested in the refrigerator for an hour, then dusted with cornflour, and evenly browned. Cook the meat, remove to a plate, then stirfry the vegetables.
Taste the sauce mixture before adding it to the pan - adjust the flavour with either sugar or vinegar. Pour it into the pan with the vegetables, dump in the meat, and heat through.
But to really enjoy this dish in its native environment, head up to Grant Avenue and look for a restaurant with a whole bunch of happy white people inside.
If they look big, pink, and corn-fed, so much the better!
AFTERWORD
Several years ago we were at a Chinese restaurant out in the avenues.
The menu had a six or seven pages of seafood dishes, and there were tanks with live fish and crustaceans along two walls. It was very obvious what they were proud of, and the several tables of happy Chinese American families feasting on poached, braised, fried, or stewed finned food were abundant testimony that such pride was justified.
Three Caucasians came in, sat down, and spent ten minutes poring over the menu.
Then they ordered three servings of sweet and sour pork over rice.
Doesn't that prove how deservedly appreciated this dish is?
Bon appetit!
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
"What", you are wondering, "is he on about this time?"
And perhaps you are thinking that I have really lost it.
After all, sweet and sour pork is such a cliché.
Waspy people who live far from any large Chinese-American communities eat sweet and sour pork.
Large spongy white people with Scandinavian or German accents from the vast interior order sweet and sour pork.
Fercrapssakes, tourists in Chinatown LOVE sweet and sour pork!
Along with chow mein, chop suey, and egg rolls.
It's a glow-in-the-dark feast!
Perfect with fried rice, too!
Well, yes.
But sweet and sour pork is also probably the very first Chinese-American restaurant dish.
Imagine a bunch of nineteenth century Cantonese gentlemen in the High Sierras deciding that panning for gold may not be as rewarding as they once thought. And, having subsisted on some of the weirdest long-distance muck in their lives for over a year, deciding that what was really missing in that particular place was decent food.
So they open a restaurant.
Big Gold Mountain Refined Eats (大金山垃圾嘢食方).
This is the situation:
They're surrounded by miles and miles of barbarous waste.
No soy sauce. No hoisin sauce or oyster sauce - neither of those products had been standardized yet in the eighteen sixties.
No plum sauce. No rice wine. No sesame oil.
No fermented black beans, toban jeung, lajeung, or suen choi.
[Soy sauce: si yau (豉油). Hoisin sauce: hoisin jeung (海鲜酱). Oyster sauce: hou yau (蠔油). Plum sauce: suen moei jeung (蘇梅醬). Rice wine: wong jau (黄酒). Sesame oil: jee ma yau (芝麻油). Fermented black beans: dau si (豆豉). Toban jeung ('bean ferments' sauce): 豆瓣醬. Lajeung (hot sauce): 辣酱. Suen choi (sour vegetable): 酸菜.]
In fact, almost every comestible or flavouring ingredient that Cantonese people would like to have in their kitchen is singularly missing. California is still a sparsely populated and primitive place in that era, and both Chinese and European food-stuffs are brought in by clippers from across the Pacific or around the horn. Consequently, very few non-local ingredients are available.
The history of 'cuisine' in this state is the tale of Chinese and Japanese farmers and their market-gardens adding variety to the diet, plus all immigrant groups eventually manufacturing the necessary products for their own cooking styles.
But the very first Chinese American restaurants predate those developments.
大金山垃圾嘢食方
TAAI KAMSAN LAPSAPYEH SIKFONG
The Cantonese gentlemen of our tale are very far from civilization indeed.
They have a pig (yat jek fei chyu 一隻肥猪).
Plus sugar (tong 糖), salt (yim 鹽), vinegar (tsou 醋), lard (fan yau 葷油), and clothes' starch (fan jeung 粉漿).
[Don't ask why they have clothes' starch - complicated story.]
And there's a huge horde of hungry sweaty white men outside the door!
" 嘩, 外便有好多鬼佬嘅喎! 咁臭啊! "
You can see where this is going, can't you?
Desperation prompts invention.
甜酸肉
TIEM SUEN YIUK
A simple dish, in which meat is made magic by the addition of very common-place ingredients.
Nothing strange or unusual, no risk-taking by the customers required.
Along with a nice hearty plate of chow-mein you've got everything a gold miner freezing his tuchus off would want.
Flavoured and texturized animal protein, plus a savoury fried starchy substance.
The only thing missing is whiskey.
For nearly a century following that simple act of culinary prestidigitation, Chinese-American food advanced by inventing variations on the theme.
Tomato Beef, Lemon Chicken, Orange Peel Duck.
Fried Rice, Chow Mein, Chow Fun.
[Tomato Beef: fan-keh ngau-yiuk (番茄牛肉). Lemon Chicken: ning-mong kai (檸檬雞). Orange Peel Duck: chan-pei ngaap (陳皮鴨).
Fried Rice: chao fan (炒飯). Chow Mein: chao mien (炒麵). Chow Fun: chao f'n (炒粉) .]
The key to all these dishes is that they are essentially white folks food.
Very Anglo, in fact.
Meat sauced slightly sweet and tangy, and greased-up starch.
Plus one or two additions, for garnish and excitement.
The hamburger (漢堡包) that we all love embodies the same concept.
And like the previously mentioned dishes, the only thing missing is whiskey.
[Whiskey: waisikei jau (威士忌酒). One glas of whiskey: yat pui waisikei (一盃威士忌).]
Only Chop Suey (雜碎) is more American.
And it, too, is thoroughly familiar to everyone, including those who avoid strong drink.
MAKING IT, EATING IT
To make sweet and sour pork, simply stirfry sliced pig with chopped bellpepper, onion (洋葱) and celery (芹菜), then sauce it with diluted vinegar and sugar, plus the usual corn starch and water solution.
Red food colouring, ketchup, and pineapple may be added to taste.
Soy sauce is optional and may be omitted - most white folk will drizzle it over their fried rice in any case, so its absence from the entrée will not be noticed.
The meat can be coated first: eggwhite and water whisked together with a pinch of salt, meat therein, rested in the refrigerator for an hour, then dusted with cornflour, and evenly browned. Cook the meat, remove to a plate, then stirfry the vegetables.
Taste the sauce mixture before adding it to the pan - adjust the flavour with either sugar or vinegar. Pour it into the pan with the vegetables, dump in the meat, and heat through.
But to really enjoy this dish in its native environment, head up to Grant Avenue and look for a restaurant with a whole bunch of happy white people inside.
If they look big, pink, and corn-fed, so much the better!
AFTERWORD
Several years ago we were at a Chinese restaurant out in the avenues.
The menu had a six or seven pages of seafood dishes, and there were tanks with live fish and crustaceans along two walls. It was very obvious what they were proud of, and the several tables of happy Chinese American families feasting on poached, braised, fried, or stewed finned food were abundant testimony that such pride was justified.
Three Caucasians came in, sat down, and spent ten minutes poring over the menu.
Then they ordered three servings of sweet and sour pork over rice.
Doesn't that prove how deservedly appreciated this dish is?
Bon appetit!
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
TAI PO MARKET 大埔
In the North East of Hong Kong SAR is an area that used to be among the most rural and isolated of places, despite having been inhabited for longer than much of the former colony: Tai Po District (大埔區).
Tai Po Keui is mountainous, with green slopes decliving down to a sheltered bay where non-Chinese tribal fishermen and pearl-divers once lived in stilt-houses along the shore of Tolo Harbour (吐露港), until gradually supplanted and absorbed by the expansion of the Han Chinese, eventually disappearing entirely by the time of the Sui (Cheui doi 隋代 589 - 618 CE) and Tang (Tong doi 唐代 618 - 917 CE) dynasties.
Except for a period four centuries ago during the early Ching (Manchu Dynasty: Cheng doi 清代 1644 - 1912 CE), when the coast was evacuated by imperial order (known as the 'great clearance'; chin kai ling 遷界令) with the intent to deny aid and succor to the Ming (明) loyalists operating out of Taiwan, the area surrounding Tolo Harbour has been continuously populated - though not necessarily by the same ethnic groups.
Today, the natives comprise the descendants of Tanka (蜑家) boat people, Hoklo (鶴佬) from further up the coast, Yue (粵) from the Cantonese interior, and Hakka (客家) who took advantage of land and settlement permits issued when the evacuation was ended in 1669.
Until comparatively recently, the different groups did not get along with each other. That, and the sparseness of settlement, spurred the building of walled villages (wai 圍) for protection against ethnic war and brigandage.
Several of these walled villages still exist, some barely changed since the late nineteenth century.
THE LUNG YUK TAU TANG CLAN 龍躍頭鄧氏
Nine centuries ago, when the Northern Song (Pak Sung 北宋 960 – 1127 CE) was collapsing under the assault by savages from beyond the frontiers, Tang Lam (鄧林) came to Lung Yuk Tau (龍躍頭 "dragon frolic ridge") from Kat-Soei (吉水 "fortunate waters") in Jiangxi (Kwong-Sai 江西).
Over the next several generations his descendents flourished, becoming one of the most important lineages in the entire Hong Kong area. They are still dominant in the district, and it was under their aegis that the market town Tai Po (大埔 "big market") was established.
A number of walled villages of the Tang clan (Tang Tsi 鄧族) in the New Territories are still occupied, and support a way of life that has nearly disappeared elsewhere. Along with the other walled villages in the territory, the inhabitants speak a version of Cantonese that has a distinct 'rural' flavour to the modern urban ear (known as Wai-tau Wa 圍頭話 'walled village speech').
In some fortified settlements dialects of Hakka can be heard.
Several Hong Kong walled villages are well worth visiting:
Tsang Tai Ok (曾大屋 'the great hall of the Tsang 曾 clan' - Hakka); Seung Soei Wai (上水圍 'On the Waters Fort' - Liu 廖 clan from Fujian); Fanleng Wai (粉嶺圍 'Powder Peak Fort' - 彭氏 Pang clan); Hakka Wai (客家圍); Tai Tau Leng (大頭嶺 'Big Head Peak' - Hakka), and others.
Characteristics of interest are the relatively intact walls, iron main gates, cannon towers, narrow interior lanes, and grand ancestral halls.
One of them still has a moat - Seung Soei Wai (上水圍).
TOLO HARBOUR HIGHWAY 吐露港公路
If you follow the road along the coast around Tai Mo Shan (大帽山) north from Sha Tin (沙田), you'll first go by Wo Che (禾輋), then Fo Tan (火炭), Kau To Shan (九肚山), Ma Liu Shui (馬尿水), Tau Po Kau (大埔滘) and the nature park (白鷺湖互動中心), after which you finally end up in Tai Po.
[大帽山 (taai mo san): big hat mountain. 沙田 (sa-tien): sandy field. 禾輋 (wo che): rice stalk tribalist ("the rice fields of the heathens"); 輋 (Che) is the name of an ethnic group once more prevalent in Kwantung than it is today. 火炭 (fo tan): burn charcoal, charcoal burning place. 九肚山 (kau tou san): nine stomach mountain. 馬尿水 (ma niu soei): horse pissing water. 大埔滘 (taai po gaau): great market creek. 白鷺湖互動中心 (paklo-wu wudong chongsam): white egret lake reciprocal-moving (interactive) central-heart (centre); Kerry Lake Egret Nature Park. 大埔 (taai po): great market; po (埔) means the central district of a market town.]
Or you could simply take the MTR and get off at Tai Po Market Station (大埔墟).
[大埔墟 (Taai Po Heui): great market hillside, or great market moor. 墟 also means a wasteland, and can describe a blasted heath..]
Tai Po Market is only one station removed from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (香港中文大學) MTR station (大學) at Horse Pissing Water. Like many of the world's newer universities the university was built where land was affordable in its region - by the same process SFSU is out in the foggy hinterlands on the south-west corner of San Francisco, and City College is in a high-crime zone. The 'Heung-Kong Chongman Taai-Hok' is, consequently, a little removed from the centre of the Fragrant Harbour urban conglomerate, in a place with an unusual toponym (long since bowdlerized to 馬料水 "horse feed water").
An area whose most salient feature is equine effluvium - either the significant presence thereof, or its characteristic odour - will be naturally ideal for establishing a campus; heap cheap real estate!
I do wish they had kept the original name. It's so much more evocative and vibrant!
GREAT MARKET 大埔
Tai Po still has a countryside feel, despite the high-rise housing estates for commuters that have sprung up around it. While some parts look extremely modern, the centre of the settlement is older and also more lively. Many of the locals have relatives who emigrated to England and elsewhere in Europe during the sixties and seventies - it is partly because of the funds that they sent back, and partly because of the proximity of both the housing estates and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, that Tai Po is both a vibrant community and a very pleasant place to visit, even if you are only going to eat there. And really, you should eat there; the same cultural diversity that was mentioned earlier (Yuet, Hoklo, Tanka, Hakka) is reflected in the local food, especially in the town centre, where there are a lot of Hakka.
Don't worry! There is no need to learn any new languages to communicate here - everybody speaks Cantonese!
From the Tai Po Market MTR station (35 minutes from Tsimsatsui) you can catch a bus into the centre of town, or you can walk - it's not far, and this is a very pleasant area.
Go west on Tat Wan Road (達運路) to Nan Wan Road (南運路), turn right and follow the curve up into Wan Tau Street (運頭街), past Pui Yin Lane (培賢里).
You can either stay on Wan Tau (on the right), or turn left onto Heung Sze Wui Street(鄉事會街). Either way, you're heading into a very busy area with a lot of small shops and eateries.
If you keep on Wan Tau, turn left on Tai Ming Lane (大明里) and head towards the square.
If you took Heung Sze Wui, turn right on Tai Kwong Lane (大光里).
There are far too many restaurants and eateries here to list all of them, and you can stroll from one place to another having little bits to nosh on at whichever place looks good.
A FEW LOCAL RESTAURANTS
亞婆豆腐花
Shop 2A, Tai Kwong Lane
大光里 2A
[Right up from the corner of Heung Sze Wui Street (鄉事會街).]
Ah-Po Dau Fu Fa: 'Auntie's Fresh Tofu'
Personally, I'm not really into daufu fa, as a large helping of beancurd gives me cramps - even soft and silky fresh beancurd, which is what this place sells. But I will admit that it is a great and comforting snack, especially with palm sugar syrup and tapioca.
This place may have the best daufu fa in Hong Kong - a great many people think so - but for rather obvious reasons I have NO real basis for comparison.
群記清湯腩
Address: No. 26 Dai Ming Lane
大明里 26號
Tel: 2638 3071
[Between Tai Gwong Lane (大光里) and Kwong Fuk Lane (廣福里).]
Kwan-Kee Tseng-Tong Naam: 'Kwan-Kee Clear Broth Brisket'
An extensive menu, considering that they specialize in one thing, and do it very well. There are several cuts of beef to choose from, but what you come here for is beef brisket noodle soup (清湯腩).
Fresh noodles with meaty chunks (brisket: ngau-naam 牛腩) in a clarified broth. Some people aver that this place is far far better than Kau Kee (九記牛腩 ) on Hong Kong Island, most especially because of their truly superior and richly flavourful broth. That alone makes it worth a visit. They open around late morning, and keep serving till they're out of food.
If you delay till evening they might have already closed when you get here.
Really, I have NO idea why brisket-noodle soup should not be the best way to start the day.
東記上海麵
CSF27, 2/F, Tai Po Market Complex, Heung Sze Wui Street.
鄉事會街 8號, 大埔墟街市及熟食中心, 2樓 CSF27舖.
Tung-Kee Seunghoi Mien: 'Tung-Kee Shanghai Noodle'
豬扒粗麵 Thick wheat-flour noodles with vegetable (choi sum) in broth, accompanying a juicy breaded pork cutlet with a superior golden crust, cut into thick segments. Highly recommended. Why a breaded pork cutlet with soup noodles is Shanghainese I do not know. It's a Hong Kong mystery.
雪菜肉絲 Suut-choi yiuk-see - pork shreds and pickled red-in-snow. A classic taste.
上海雲吞 Seunghoi wan tan - also recommended.
新明發食家
7 Kwong Fuk Lane.
廣福里 7號.
San Ming-Fat Sik-Gaa: 'The New Brightness Diner'
Homey restaurant, comfortable, rather old style.
Right on the park, west side. They've got ice cream, family style dishes, and dimsum.
排骨蒸飯 spare ribs steamed rice - recommended.
水餃 soei gau (biggish shrimp wonton) - recommended.
雞飯 (chicken rice) is good, so is 鳳爪排骨飯 (spare ribs and chicken claws over rice) and 雞扎 (fried tofu skin roll stuffed with chicken).
一樂燒臘飯店
Block A, Po Wah Building, 5 Tai Ming Lane.
大明里 5號, 寶華樓 A座
Yat-Lok Siu-Laap Fan-Diem: 'Supreme Joy Barbecue Restaurant'
Anthony Bourdain likes it. And that IS a recommendation, as quite often his opinion is based not on any pretentiousness, but whether he actually enjoyed the food.
Their charsiu (叉燒) is noted, so is the roast goose (燒鵝) and the roast duck(燒鴨). The roast pork (燒肉) has a scrumptious crusty skin. Along with their other offerings, these basic products are used in a number of composed dishes typical for this kind of place.
What is highly unusual, however, are the dishes that include clams (蛤).
成仔記麵食
Shop 20, Jade Plaza Shopping Centre.
安慈路3號, 翠屏花園商場, 地下20號
Seng-Chai-Kee Mien-Sik: 'Kid Seng's Noodle Eats'
Good wonton. That's about it.
潮州冷小炒
No. A2, Mei Sun Building, 4-20 Kau Hui Chik Street.
舊墟直街4-20號, 美新大厦, A2地舖
[About seven or eight blocks north-north east, on the other side of the main drag.]
Chiu-chau Laang Siu Chaau: 'Chao-Zhou Cold Plates & Small Stir-fry'
Recommended: 花生炆豬手 (fa sang man chu sou) stewed trotter with peanuts. This is something most people might associate with Hakka cooking, as they are known for their keen approach to trotters. But as previously noted, this area of the New Territories has been home to disparate groups with different traditions, and there has been considerable sharing of ideas in Hong Kong, especially about food.
In the offal category, there are two specialties which you must try: 糯米釀大腸 (lo mai yeung tai cheung) fried big intestine stuffed with glutinous rice and porkfat, and 豬潤浸皇帝菜 (chyu yun zam wongdai choi) pig liver with 'imperial' vegetables - it is especially good.
Chiu Chou goose is also wonderful: 鵝三寶 (ngo saam po) goose three treasures (liver, dark meat, and breast). 滷水鵝片 (low soei ngo pien) marinated goose slices.
And of course, you need something from the sea: 烏頭魚 (wu tou yu) steamed fish with fresh blanched small vegetables on top. 蔥花炸蠔爽 (tsong fa ja ho song) finely sliver-cut scallion (蔥花 tsong fa) generously accompanying deep-fried oysters. 煎蠔仔餅 (chien ho chai beng) pan-fried baby oyster omelet.
酥炸蟹棗 (so ja hai jow) fried crispy-flaky crab "dates". 酥炸蝦棗 (so ja haa jow) fried crispy-flaky shrimp "dates".
Plus vegetables: 咸菜炆豬肉 (ham choi man chyu yiuk) salt veggie stewed pork (well, the emphasis is really on the pork....).
油炆荀 (yau man seun) oil-seethed bamboo shoot with a little chili.
--- --- ---
The attentive reader will notice that I do not mention any Hakka-style restaurants at all in Tai Po.
There is a good reason for that: I do not wish to fight with over a quarter of a million Hakka who live in the area - Hakka tend to be quite as stubborn and opinionated as the Dutch (though altogether more loveable), and each and every one of them know their own food.
You should have no trouble getting recommendations for Hakka-cuisine (客家菜) from the locals.
Bon gusto, y'all.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Tai Po Keui is mountainous, with green slopes decliving down to a sheltered bay where non-Chinese tribal fishermen and pearl-divers once lived in stilt-houses along the shore of Tolo Harbour (吐露港), until gradually supplanted and absorbed by the expansion of the Han Chinese, eventually disappearing entirely by the time of the Sui (Cheui doi 隋代 589 - 618 CE) and Tang (Tong doi 唐代 618 - 917 CE) dynasties.
Except for a period four centuries ago during the early Ching (Manchu Dynasty: Cheng doi 清代 1644 - 1912 CE), when the coast was evacuated by imperial order (known as the 'great clearance'; chin kai ling 遷界令) with the intent to deny aid and succor to the Ming (明) loyalists operating out of Taiwan, the area surrounding Tolo Harbour has been continuously populated - though not necessarily by the same ethnic groups.
Today, the natives comprise the descendants of Tanka (蜑家) boat people, Hoklo (鶴佬) from further up the coast, Yue (粵) from the Cantonese interior, and Hakka (客家) who took advantage of land and settlement permits issued when the evacuation was ended in 1669.
Until comparatively recently, the different groups did not get along with each other. That, and the sparseness of settlement, spurred the building of walled villages (wai 圍) for protection against ethnic war and brigandage.
Several of these walled villages still exist, some barely changed since the late nineteenth century.
THE LUNG YUK TAU TANG CLAN 龍躍頭鄧氏
Nine centuries ago, when the Northern Song (Pak Sung 北宋 960 – 1127 CE) was collapsing under the assault by savages from beyond the frontiers, Tang Lam (鄧林) came to Lung Yuk Tau (龍躍頭 "dragon frolic ridge") from Kat-Soei (吉水 "fortunate waters") in Jiangxi (Kwong-Sai 江西).
Over the next several generations his descendents flourished, becoming one of the most important lineages in the entire Hong Kong area. They are still dominant in the district, and it was under their aegis that the market town Tai Po (大埔 "big market") was established.
A number of walled villages of the Tang clan (Tang Tsi 鄧族) in the New Territories are still occupied, and support a way of life that has nearly disappeared elsewhere. Along with the other walled villages in the territory, the inhabitants speak a version of Cantonese that has a distinct 'rural' flavour to the modern urban ear (known as Wai-tau Wa 圍頭話 'walled village speech').
In some fortified settlements dialects of Hakka can be heard.
Several Hong Kong walled villages are well worth visiting:
Tsang Tai Ok (曾大屋 'the great hall of the Tsang 曾 clan' - Hakka); Seung Soei Wai (上水圍 'On the Waters Fort' - Liu 廖 clan from Fujian); Fanleng Wai (粉嶺圍 'Powder Peak Fort' - 彭氏 Pang clan); Hakka Wai (客家圍); Tai Tau Leng (大頭嶺 'Big Head Peak' - Hakka), and others.
Characteristics of interest are the relatively intact walls, iron main gates, cannon towers, narrow interior lanes, and grand ancestral halls.
One of them still has a moat - Seung Soei Wai (上水圍).
TOLO HARBOUR HIGHWAY 吐露港公路
If you follow the road along the coast around Tai Mo Shan (大帽山) north from Sha Tin (沙田), you'll first go by Wo Che (禾輋), then Fo Tan (火炭), Kau To Shan (九肚山), Ma Liu Shui (馬尿水), Tau Po Kau (大埔滘) and the nature park (白鷺湖互動中心), after which you finally end up in Tai Po.
[大帽山 (taai mo san): big hat mountain. 沙田 (sa-tien): sandy field. 禾輋 (wo che): rice stalk tribalist ("the rice fields of the heathens"); 輋 (Che) is the name of an ethnic group once more prevalent in Kwantung than it is today. 火炭 (fo tan): burn charcoal, charcoal burning place. 九肚山 (kau tou san): nine stomach mountain. 馬尿水 (ma niu soei): horse pissing water. 大埔滘 (taai po gaau): great market creek. 白鷺湖互動中心 (paklo-wu wudong chongsam): white egret lake reciprocal-moving (interactive) central-heart (centre); Kerry Lake Egret Nature Park. 大埔 (taai po): great market; po (埔) means the central district of a market town.]
Or you could simply take the MTR and get off at Tai Po Market Station (大埔墟).
[大埔墟 (Taai Po Heui): great market hillside, or great market moor. 墟 also means a wasteland, and can describe a blasted heath..]
Tai Po Market is only one station removed from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (香港中文大學) MTR station (大學) at Horse Pissing Water. Like many of the world's newer universities the university was built where land was affordable in its region - by the same process SFSU is out in the foggy hinterlands on the south-west corner of San Francisco, and City College is in a high-crime zone. The 'Heung-Kong Chongman Taai-Hok' is, consequently, a little removed from the centre of the Fragrant Harbour urban conglomerate, in a place with an unusual toponym (long since bowdlerized to 馬料水 "horse feed water").
An area whose most salient feature is equine effluvium - either the significant presence thereof, or its characteristic odour - will be naturally ideal for establishing a campus; heap cheap real estate!
I do wish they had kept the original name. It's so much more evocative and vibrant!
GREAT MARKET 大埔
Tai Po still has a countryside feel, despite the high-rise housing estates for commuters that have sprung up around it. While some parts look extremely modern, the centre of the settlement is older and also more lively. Many of the locals have relatives who emigrated to England and elsewhere in Europe during the sixties and seventies - it is partly because of the funds that they sent back, and partly because of the proximity of both the housing estates and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, that Tai Po is both a vibrant community and a very pleasant place to visit, even if you are only going to eat there. And really, you should eat there; the same cultural diversity that was mentioned earlier (Yuet, Hoklo, Tanka, Hakka) is reflected in the local food, especially in the town centre, where there are a lot of Hakka.
Don't worry! There is no need to learn any new languages to communicate here - everybody speaks Cantonese!
From the Tai Po Market MTR station (35 minutes from Tsimsatsui) you can catch a bus into the centre of town, or you can walk - it's not far, and this is a very pleasant area.
Go west on Tat Wan Road (達運路) to Nan Wan Road (南運路), turn right and follow the curve up into Wan Tau Street (運頭街), past Pui Yin Lane (培賢里).
You can either stay on Wan Tau (on the right), or turn left onto Heung Sze Wui Street(鄉事會街). Either way, you're heading into a very busy area with a lot of small shops and eateries.
If you keep on Wan Tau, turn left on Tai Ming Lane (大明里) and head towards the square.
If you took Heung Sze Wui, turn right on Tai Kwong Lane (大光里).
There are far too many restaurants and eateries here to list all of them, and you can stroll from one place to another having little bits to nosh on at whichever place looks good.
A FEW LOCAL RESTAURANTS
亞婆豆腐花
Shop 2A, Tai Kwong Lane
大光里 2A
[Right up from the corner of Heung Sze Wui Street (鄉事會街).]
Ah-Po Dau Fu Fa: 'Auntie's Fresh Tofu'
Personally, I'm not really into daufu fa, as a large helping of beancurd gives me cramps - even soft and silky fresh beancurd, which is what this place sells. But I will admit that it is a great and comforting snack, especially with palm sugar syrup and tapioca.
This place may have the best daufu fa in Hong Kong - a great many people think so - but for rather obvious reasons I have NO real basis for comparison.
群記清湯腩
Address: No. 26 Dai Ming Lane
大明里 26號
Tel: 2638 3071
[Between Tai Gwong Lane (大光里) and Kwong Fuk Lane (廣福里).]
Kwan-Kee Tseng-Tong Naam: 'Kwan-Kee Clear Broth Brisket'
An extensive menu, considering that they specialize in one thing, and do it very well. There are several cuts of beef to choose from, but what you come here for is beef brisket noodle soup (清湯腩).
Fresh noodles with meaty chunks (brisket: ngau-naam 牛腩) in a clarified broth. Some people aver that this place is far far better than Kau Kee (九記牛腩 ) on Hong Kong Island, most especially because of their truly superior and richly flavourful broth. That alone makes it worth a visit. They open around late morning, and keep serving till they're out of food.
If you delay till evening they might have already closed when you get here.
Really, I have NO idea why brisket-noodle soup should not be the best way to start the day.
東記上海麵
CSF27, 2/F, Tai Po Market Complex, Heung Sze Wui Street.
鄉事會街 8號, 大埔墟街市及熟食中心, 2樓 CSF27舖.
Tung-Kee Seunghoi Mien: 'Tung-Kee Shanghai Noodle'
豬扒粗麵 Thick wheat-flour noodles with vegetable (choi sum) in broth, accompanying a juicy breaded pork cutlet with a superior golden crust, cut into thick segments. Highly recommended. Why a breaded pork cutlet with soup noodles is Shanghainese I do not know. It's a Hong Kong mystery.
雪菜肉絲 Suut-choi yiuk-see - pork shreds and pickled red-in-snow. A classic taste.
上海雲吞 Seunghoi wan tan - also recommended.
新明發食家
7 Kwong Fuk Lane.
廣福里 7號.
San Ming-Fat Sik-Gaa: 'The New Brightness Diner'
Homey restaurant, comfortable, rather old style.
Right on the park, west side. They've got ice cream, family style dishes, and dimsum.
排骨蒸飯 spare ribs steamed rice - recommended.
水餃 soei gau (biggish shrimp wonton) - recommended.
雞飯 (chicken rice) is good, so is 鳳爪排骨飯 (spare ribs and chicken claws over rice) and 雞扎 (fried tofu skin roll stuffed with chicken).
一樂燒臘飯店
Block A, Po Wah Building, 5 Tai Ming Lane.
大明里 5號, 寶華樓 A座
Yat-Lok Siu-Laap Fan-Diem: 'Supreme Joy Barbecue Restaurant'
Anthony Bourdain likes it. And that IS a recommendation, as quite often his opinion is based not on any pretentiousness, but whether he actually enjoyed the food.
Their charsiu (叉燒) is noted, so is the roast goose (燒鵝) and the roast duck(燒鴨). The roast pork (燒肉) has a scrumptious crusty skin. Along with their other offerings, these basic products are used in a number of composed dishes typical for this kind of place.
What is highly unusual, however, are the dishes that include clams (蛤).
成仔記麵食
Shop 20, Jade Plaza Shopping Centre.
安慈路3號, 翠屏花園商場, 地下20號
Seng-Chai-Kee Mien-Sik: 'Kid Seng's Noodle Eats'
Good wonton. That's about it.
潮州冷小炒
No. A2, Mei Sun Building, 4-20 Kau Hui Chik Street.
舊墟直街4-20號, 美新大厦, A2地舖
[About seven or eight blocks north-north east, on the other side of the main drag.]
Chiu-chau Laang Siu Chaau: 'Chao-Zhou Cold Plates & Small Stir-fry'
Recommended: 花生炆豬手 (fa sang man chu sou) stewed trotter with peanuts. This is something most people might associate with Hakka cooking, as they are known for their keen approach to trotters. But as previously noted, this area of the New Territories has been home to disparate groups with different traditions, and there has been considerable sharing of ideas in Hong Kong, especially about food.
In the offal category, there are two specialties which you must try: 糯米釀大腸 (lo mai yeung tai cheung) fried big intestine stuffed with glutinous rice and porkfat, and 豬潤浸皇帝菜 (chyu yun zam wongdai choi) pig liver with 'imperial' vegetables - it is especially good.
Chiu Chou goose is also wonderful: 鵝三寶 (ngo saam po) goose three treasures (liver, dark meat, and breast). 滷水鵝片 (low soei ngo pien) marinated goose slices.
And of course, you need something from the sea: 烏頭魚 (wu tou yu) steamed fish with fresh blanched small vegetables on top. 蔥花炸蠔爽 (tsong fa ja ho song) finely sliver-cut scallion (蔥花 tsong fa) generously accompanying deep-fried oysters. 煎蠔仔餅 (chien ho chai beng) pan-fried baby oyster omelet.
酥炸蟹棗 (so ja hai jow) fried crispy-flaky crab "dates". 酥炸蝦棗 (so ja haa jow) fried crispy-flaky shrimp "dates".
Plus vegetables: 咸菜炆豬肉 (ham choi man chyu yiuk) salt veggie stewed pork (well, the emphasis is really on the pork....).
油炆荀 (yau man seun) oil-seethed bamboo shoot with a little chili.
--- --- ---
The attentive reader will notice that I do not mention any Hakka-style restaurants at all in Tai Po.
There is a good reason for that: I do not wish to fight with over a quarter of a million Hakka who live in the area - Hakka tend to be quite as stubborn and opinionated as the Dutch (though altogether more loveable), and each and every one of them know their own food.
You should have no trouble getting recommendations for Hakka-cuisine (客家菜) from the locals.
Bon gusto, y'all.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Sunday, January 09, 2011
PRISON ON FIRE SONG
The movie 'Prison on Fire' with Chow Yun-fat isn't the greatest movie in the world. But it's a pretty darn good movie, and as excellent a representative of mr. Chow's oeuvre as any.
That alone should make it worth borrowing from the local library.
[Prison on Fire: (gaam yuk fung wan 監獄風雲) made in 1987, directed by Ringo Lam. The movie features three stellar performances: Chou Yun-fat as Ching, the inmate of rather common antecedents, who befriends Yiu, played by Tony Leung Ka-fai, both of them versus Roy Cheung as the sadistic prison guard. It's a buddy flick, but one that speaks to the Cantonese welt-anshauung, and especially the sense of loyalty to ones friends in the hardest of times. In one sense, it's about chivalry - being gallant and righteous from the very fabric of one's character. In quite another sense, it's also about biting the ear off of a sadistic prison guard.
So there's something satisfying there for everyone.
Ringo Lam: 林嶺東 born 1955, director of many exciting action movies, many of which have an undercurrent of elements familiar to any aficionado of Cantonese operas and Gong-wu (江湖) novels. Chow Yun-fat: 周潤發 born 1955, Hong Kong actor of Hakka origin. If you haven't heard of him, you may have been living in a cave for the past twenty years. Tony Leung Ka-fei: 梁家輝 also known as 'big Tony', to distinguish him from someone else. Very good in roles that require a polished or scholarly image. Voted 'man you would really like to see in a tuxedo' by this blog. Roy Cheung: 張耀揚 often cast as a villain or sadist, partly due to his psychotic performance in Prison of Fire. Can be described as intense, even obsessed, in many of his roles.]
FRIENDSHIP'S GLOW
But what really anchors the movie in the viewers mind is the song 'yau-yi ji gwong' (友誼之光).
In this link, scenes from the movie are the background to the recording.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmcXSrgIkFw
The brassy female whose voice starts singing the song as counter point at the fifty second mark is Maria Cordero - also known as 'Fat Momma Maria' (肥媽瑪俐亞) - the Macanese songwriter and singer who wrote the lyrics.
Sut yau man lei san, gak-jo leung tei yiew;
Pat seui kien-min, sam-tsong ya chi-hiew;
Yau-yi goi pat liew!
For a cool video with the lyrics superimposed, so that you can sing along, see this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpM21PR5Jfc&feature=related
No, I don't know why this video shows famous European sights (including Keukenhof and the Arc de Triomf). The visuals are entirely baffling, and decontextual. That's common with karaoke numbers, but more often than not they'll feature some almond-eyed cutie-pie ambling along a tropical beach, with birds, water, palm trees, and icecream shakes.
Or something equally inane and stirring.
人生於世上有幾个知己
Yan-sang yu sai seung, yau gei ko chi kei ?
多少友誼能長存
To-sieu yau-yi nang cheung-chyun?
今日别離共你雙雙两握手
Kam-yat bit-lei gung ney seung-seung leung ak sau,
友誼常在你我心里
Yau-yi seung tsoi ney ngoh sam leui!
In the span of a life how much mutual recognition? How many friendships will long survive? Part today warmly shaking hands, With friendship that remains strong within both of us.
今天且要暫别
Kam-tien che yiu jaam-biet,
他朝也定能聚首
Ta-chiew ya deng nang jeui-sau;
縱使不能會面
Jung-si pat nang woei-min,
始終也是朋友
Chi-chung ya si pang-yau.
Today we mark this moment, Another time we shall meet once more; If we're never again face-to-face, From beginning to end we'll stay friends.
說有萬里山 隔阻兩地遙
Sut yau man lei san, gak-jo leung tei yiew;
不需見面 心中也知曉
Pat seui kien-min, sam-tsong ya chi-hiew;
友誼改不了
Yau-yi goi pat liew.
Myriad mountains, and obstacles beyond measure; No need to actually meet, the heart still deeply knows; this a bond which shall indeed not change.
Like all song lyrics, the cohesion it has in its own language is lost in translation. Forgive me for not being adequate to the task, I cannot do it justice.
Go ahead and watch the movie. Let yourself sink into a Cantonese-hued world for a while, in which universal values will resonate in slightly less familiar ways than you know.
Friendships made in adverse times are annealed by hardship, made stronger by the flames.
NOTE: Previously I have mentioned this song in relation to some other matters - that post provides more framework in which to comprehend it.
This post:http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2010/05/kiss-me-you-rebel.html
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
That alone should make it worth borrowing from the local library.
[Prison on Fire: (gaam yuk fung wan 監獄風雲) made in 1987, directed by Ringo Lam. The movie features three stellar performances: Chou Yun-fat as Ching, the inmate of rather common antecedents, who befriends Yiu, played by Tony Leung Ka-fai, both of them versus Roy Cheung as the sadistic prison guard. It's a buddy flick, but one that speaks to the Cantonese welt-anshauung, and especially the sense of loyalty to ones friends in the hardest of times. In one sense, it's about chivalry - being gallant and righteous from the very fabric of one's character. In quite another sense, it's also about biting the ear off of a sadistic prison guard.
So there's something satisfying there for everyone.
Ringo Lam: 林嶺東 born 1955, director of many exciting action movies, many of which have an undercurrent of elements familiar to any aficionado of Cantonese operas and Gong-wu (江湖) novels. Chow Yun-fat: 周潤發 born 1955, Hong Kong actor of Hakka origin. If you haven't heard of him, you may have been living in a cave for the past twenty years. Tony Leung Ka-fei: 梁家輝 also known as 'big Tony', to distinguish him from someone else. Very good in roles that require a polished or scholarly image. Voted 'man you would really like to see in a tuxedo' by this blog. Roy Cheung: 張耀揚 often cast as a villain or sadist, partly due to his psychotic performance in Prison of Fire. Can be described as intense, even obsessed, in many of his roles.]
FRIENDSHIP'S GLOW
But what really anchors the movie in the viewers mind is the song 'yau-yi ji gwong' (友誼之光).
In this link, scenes from the movie are the background to the recording.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmcXSrgIkFw
The brassy female whose voice starts singing the song as counter point at the fifty second mark is Maria Cordero - also known as 'Fat Momma Maria' (肥媽瑪俐亞) - the Macanese songwriter and singer who wrote the lyrics.
Sut yau man lei san, gak-jo leung tei yiew;
Pat seui kien-min, sam-tsong ya chi-hiew;
Yau-yi goi pat liew!
For a cool video with the lyrics superimposed, so that you can sing along, see this;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpM21PR5Jfc&feature=related
No, I don't know why this video shows famous European sights (including Keukenhof and the Arc de Triomf). The visuals are entirely baffling, and decontextual. That's common with karaoke numbers, but more often than not they'll feature some almond-eyed cutie-pie ambling along a tropical beach, with birds, water, palm trees, and icecream shakes.
Or something equally inane and stirring.
人生於世上有幾个知己
Yan-sang yu sai seung, yau gei ko chi kei ?
多少友誼能長存
To-sieu yau-yi nang cheung-chyun?
今日别離共你雙雙两握手
Kam-yat bit-lei gung ney seung-seung leung ak sau,
友誼常在你我心里
Yau-yi seung tsoi ney ngoh sam leui!
In the span of a life how much mutual recognition? How many friendships will long survive? Part today warmly shaking hands, With friendship that remains strong within both of us.
今天且要暫别
Kam-tien che yiu jaam-biet,
他朝也定能聚首
Ta-chiew ya deng nang jeui-sau;
縱使不能會面
Jung-si pat nang woei-min,
始終也是朋友
Chi-chung ya si pang-yau.
Today we mark this moment, Another time we shall meet once more; If we're never again face-to-face, From beginning to end we'll stay friends.
說有萬里山 隔阻兩地遙
Sut yau man lei san, gak-jo leung tei yiew;
不需見面 心中也知曉
Pat seui kien-min, sam-tsong ya chi-hiew;
友誼改不了
Yau-yi goi pat liew.
Myriad mountains, and obstacles beyond measure; No need to actually meet, the heart still deeply knows; this a bond which shall indeed not change.
Like all song lyrics, the cohesion it has in its own language is lost in translation. Forgive me for not being adequate to the task, I cannot do it justice.
Go ahead and watch the movie. Let yourself sink into a Cantonese-hued world for a while, in which universal values will resonate in slightly less familiar ways than you know.
Friendships made in adverse times are annealed by hardship, made stronger by the flames.
NOTE: Previously I have mentioned this song in relation to some other matters - that post provides more framework in which to comprehend it.
This post:http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2010/05/kiss-me-you-rebel.html
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
DEATH ON MA WEI SLOPE
The astute reader will have noticed the clickable label 唐人街 under several posts discussing Chinatown on this blog.
The words 唐人街 ('Tong-Yan Kai') literally mean Tang Person Street - that being the name for the Chinese district in San Francisco, as well as most Chinatowns elsewhere. It is strictly a Cantonese term; the Cantonese refer to themselves as men of Tang, after China's arguably most splendid era.
In the Western World, the Tang dynasty is known mainly for San-Tsai pottery and horse paintings, whereas to the Chinese that period is famous primarily for poetry, fat beauties, and Turks.
The Cantonese, like all Chinese, take great pride in the poetry.
Not so much the fat beauties or the Turks.
Here in San Francisco we have Chinese people, and also enough plump hell-cats to make an emperor drool. Quite likely we have Turks as well.
[Honestly, what is it with modern San Francisco girls? Why do so many of them pack more poundage than I do? Why is there such a surfeit of young ladies here, so much younger than yours truly yet so much heavier? I'm a mature man, Fercrapsakes!
I'm not supposed to look trimmer and spryer than you lot! Really!]
No other Chinese describe themselves as Tang, only the Cantonese. It is deliciously odd.
INCESTUOUS THREATS
The Tang Dynasty (Tong Chiew: 唐朝 - anno 618 CE to 907 CE) was one of the high-water marks of Chinese civilization, during which the empire reached its furthest expanse. Great advances in the arts and sciences were made, and due to the many splendid achievements, especially in literature, the Tang Dynasty truly counts as one of the golden ages of human history.
Yet there was always a haunting sense of fragility.
Several societies have traditionally been endangered by howling savages from the north - Rome had the Germanic tribes, Israel has the Lebanese, and we have the Canadians.
China for centuries has had the Turks.
More than the fashionably fat temptresses beloved by the grandees of the capital, the constant threat of invasion by barbarians from beyond the frontier shaped Tang society. Scholars and officials for generations either were posted north to fend off the fur-clad mob, or fled south to escape their depredations. The sight of men on horseback was a constant in metropoles north of the Yangtze, and returnees told harrowing tales of deprivation and endurance in the waste lands.
Ironically the Tang Dynasty itself was actually part Turkish, albeit long Sinicized and acclimatized. The ruling clan, and of much of the Northern aristocracy, had been on the frontier for generations, and represented a subculture that was more-or-less Chinese politically, but had overmuch in common with the tribes that beset the border.
The ancestors of many such clans had been heathen warlords co-opted by titles and power, and gradually brought into the civilized fold.
They were 'gentled' by their association with Chinese culture, but not entirely converted - during periods of instability, their opportunism and rapacious native tendencies would resurface.
The following poem adds to that irony - it references the killing of the emperor's concubine during a period of crypto-Turkic rebellion and bloodshed.
Now please note: the ruling family of Tang was named Li (Lei: 李), a surname that very often indicates a Barbaric origin (hence so many Turco-Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others of questionable antecedents thus appelled). The lady in this quatrain was surnamed Yang (Yeung: 楊), that being also the name of the crypto-Turkic clan that the Lis of Tang had superceded (and both she herself as well as her lord were in fact related by blood to the previous dynasty), yet Yang is a very Chinese name with absolutely no heathen hue.
Though people with these surnames are USUALLY fully Chinese, these particular Lis and Yangs were MOSTLY of 'foreign' origin.
This poem could NOT be more Chinese - yet the people in it were barely so.
If anything, they were Tang.
馬嵬坡 - MA WEI PO
玄宗回馬楊妃死， 雲雨難忘日月新。
終是聖明天子事， 景陽宮井又何人。
[詩者: 鄭畋]
MA NGAI PO ('Ma Wei Slope')
Yun-Tsong wui ma Yeung-Fei sei,
Wan-yiu naan-mong yat-yuet san;
Jung-si Sing-Ming tien-ji si,
Ging-Yeung Gung jeng yau ho-yan?
[Written by Zheng Tian (Jeng Tin 鄭畋) ]
Translation:
Hsuan-Tsung return horse Yang honoured consort dead,
Cloud-rain difficult forget day month new;
Finality indeed Sheng-Ming son-of-heaven business,
Ching-Yang Palace waterwell once-more who?
Paraphrasis:
When Hsuan-Tsung came back from his ride Lady Yang was already dead,
His love for her will be remembered for all eternity;
‘Recollect the affair of the Sing-Ming emperor............
And who (also) ended up in the well at the Ging-Yeung Palace?’
In short, while the emperor was off riding, his soldiers killed his concubine, whose family they hated.
CLARIFICATORY BACKGROUND
In the year 712 CE Li Longji (Lei LungKei: 李隆基 born 685 CE, died 762 CE) became the seventh emperor of the Tang Dynasty (styled Tang Hsuan-Tsung / Tong Yun-Tsong: 唐玄宗), reigning till 756 CE. After several years of quite able rule, he grew lax and careless, eventually bringing the empire to the edge of ruin. The name most associated with this latter period is Yang Kweifei - the imperial consort Yang.
Yang Yu-Hwan (Yeung Yiuk-Waan: 楊玉環 - born 719 CE, died 756 CE), the daughter of Yang Hsuan-Yan (Yeung Yun-Yim: 楊玄琰), was the wife of Hsuan-Tsung's son the Prince of Shou. After emperor Hsuan-Tsung noticed her, she divorced her husband, became a Buddhist nun for while to ensure plausible deniability, then rejoined the world (circa 737 or 738 CE) and became the emperor's concubine, receiving the title kweifei (gwaifei: 貴妃 honoured consort).
[The Prince of Shou (Sau Wong: 壽王): Li Mao (Lei Mo: 李瑁) born 715 CE died 775 CE. The eighteenth son of the emperor, whose mother was Consort Wu (Wu Wuifei / Mou Waifei 武惠妃), daughter of a clan that had nearly usurped the throne in a previous generation. Consort Wu never became empress due to the extreme wariness of court officials, who remembered what had happened. She never the less had great status and influence in the palace, and was deferred to as the highest lady in the land. She died in 737 CE.
Like many other power-circles within the imperial court, the Wus were border aristocracy and related by blood to the imperial family. The surname Wu (Mou: 武) means martial, military, warlike - characteristically a surname chosen by Sinified barbarians in the North. ]
As the emperor became ever more besotted by his lady, he acceded to her requests to bestow favours upon her relatives, making her cousin Yang Kuo-Chong (Yeung Kok-Chung: 楊國忠) prime minister, and several of her other kinsmen high officials. Over the years while the power of the Yang family grew affairs of state were neglected and the treasury despoiled, leading to rebellion in the provinces.
In 755 CE, An LuShan (On LokSan: 安禄山), a feudal lord of mixed Sogdian and Central-Asian Turkish ancestry from the North-Eastern border of the empire, raised the standard of revolt and marched on the capitol Chang-An (Cheung-On: 長安 - modern day Hsi-An/Sei-On: 西安).
The imperial court fled south towards Shu (Suk: 蜀 - modern day Szechuan), and at Ma Wei Station (Ma-NGai Yik: 馬嵬驛) in Shaansi (Simsai: 陝西) the military escort decided to exact revenge for the destruction that the emperor's concubine and her rapacious relatives had wrought.
The emperor's tearful objections were stilled when he was reminded that ONE death might not be enough - killing ineffective rulers also had historic precedents.
SO FAR, SO GOOD .......
After slaughtering several court officials and members of the Yang family, troops and officers remonstrated with the emperor.
Thereupon Yang Kweifei was taken to a nearby Buddhist temple and strangled, following which she was unceremoniously buried at Ma Wei slope (馬嵬坡).
In 757 CE, when the now retired emperor Hsuan-Tsung returned to Chang-An, he wished to retrieve her body for a proper entombment, but was dissuaded by his officials, who feared tumult if the military should hear of it.
Historians are of two minds about the reputation of Lady Yang – was she the root of trouble, or merely a symptom? And who deserves more blame – the emperor for his weakness, Lady Yang for her manipulation on behalf of her kinsmen, or her relatives for being so unworthy of benefice?
Was she a vixen, or merely a victim of her time and place?
[I need not even mention that she was also rumoured to have had an affair with An Lu-Shan. Who was, notabene, an honorary 'adopted' son of the emperor!]
Whatever her true role in the convoluted court politics of Tang may have been, Yang Kweifei is mainly remembered as one of the greatest temptresses of all time, charming enough to alter the course of history - pleasingly plump and full figured, pale, with a lively and intelligent face.
A classic Chinese beauty. And thus a dangerous woman.
TONG YAN KAI
To the Cantonese, the distant Northern Border might as well be on the far side of the moon. Nothing in their environment prepares them for the extreme cold, the dryness, the aridity. The idea of being sent to man an outpost in the sands of Turkestan is enough to make them blanch.
Yes, the Cantonese are proud of China's achievements, and of the extension of empire along the Silk-Road - but everything North of the great river is a foreign world, and arguably not even Chinese. Certainly not proper Chinese.
They talk funny, eat weird crap, and smell funky, up there in the North.
Why, they're probably even half Turks!
NOTE: The two types of pronunciation given for Chinese characters above reflect Mandarin, which is the official language, and Cantonese, which is spoken here in San Francisco. In addition to being the Chinese language with which I am most familiar, Cantonese is also much more appropriate in the context of this post: It is the Chinese language whose pronunciation is closest to the koine of the Tang period.
As many Cantonese proudly assert, and educated Northerners grudgingly acknowledge.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
The words 唐人街 ('Tong-Yan Kai') literally mean Tang Person Street - that being the name for the Chinese district in San Francisco, as well as most Chinatowns elsewhere. It is strictly a Cantonese term; the Cantonese refer to themselves as men of Tang, after China's arguably most splendid era.
In the Western World, the Tang dynasty is known mainly for San-Tsai pottery and horse paintings, whereas to the Chinese that period is famous primarily for poetry, fat beauties, and Turks.
The Cantonese, like all Chinese, take great pride in the poetry.
Not so much the fat beauties or the Turks.
Here in San Francisco we have Chinese people, and also enough plump hell-cats to make an emperor drool. Quite likely we have Turks as well.
[Honestly, what is it with modern San Francisco girls? Why do so many of them pack more poundage than I do? Why is there such a surfeit of young ladies here, so much younger than yours truly yet so much heavier? I'm a mature man, Fercrapsakes!
I'm not supposed to look trimmer and spryer than you lot! Really!]
No other Chinese describe themselves as Tang, only the Cantonese. It is deliciously odd.
INCESTUOUS THREATS
The Tang Dynasty (Tong Chiew: 唐朝 - anno 618 CE to 907 CE) was one of the high-water marks of Chinese civilization, during which the empire reached its furthest expanse. Great advances in the arts and sciences were made, and due to the many splendid achievements, especially in literature, the Tang Dynasty truly counts as one of the golden ages of human history.
Yet there was always a haunting sense of fragility.
Several societies have traditionally been endangered by howling savages from the north - Rome had the Germanic tribes, Israel has the Lebanese, and we have the Canadians.
China for centuries has had the Turks.
More than the fashionably fat temptresses beloved by the grandees of the capital, the constant threat of invasion by barbarians from beyond the frontier shaped Tang society. Scholars and officials for generations either were posted north to fend off the fur-clad mob, or fled south to escape their depredations. The sight of men on horseback was a constant in metropoles north of the Yangtze, and returnees told harrowing tales of deprivation and endurance in the waste lands.
Ironically the Tang Dynasty itself was actually part Turkish, albeit long Sinicized and acclimatized. The ruling clan, and of much of the Northern aristocracy, had been on the frontier for generations, and represented a subculture that was more-or-less Chinese politically, but had overmuch in common with the tribes that beset the border.
The ancestors of many such clans had been heathen warlords co-opted by titles and power, and gradually brought into the civilized fold.
They were 'gentled' by their association with Chinese culture, but not entirely converted - during periods of instability, their opportunism and rapacious native tendencies would resurface.
The following poem adds to that irony - it references the killing of the emperor's concubine during a period of crypto-Turkic rebellion and bloodshed.
Now please note: the ruling family of Tang was named Li (Lei: 李), a surname that very often indicates a Barbaric origin (hence so many Turco-Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others of questionable antecedents thus appelled). The lady in this quatrain was surnamed Yang (Yeung: 楊), that being also the name of the crypto-Turkic clan that the Lis of Tang had superceded (and both she herself as well as her lord were in fact related by blood to the previous dynasty), yet Yang is a very Chinese name with absolutely no heathen hue.
Though people with these surnames are USUALLY fully Chinese, these particular Lis and Yangs were MOSTLY of 'foreign' origin.
This poem could NOT be more Chinese - yet the people in it were barely so.
If anything, they were Tang.
馬嵬坡 - MA WEI PO
玄宗回馬楊妃死， 雲雨難忘日月新。
終是聖明天子事， 景陽宮井又何人。
[詩者: 鄭畋]
MA NGAI PO ('Ma Wei Slope')
Yun-Tsong wui ma Yeung-Fei sei,
Wan-yiu naan-mong yat-yuet san;
Jung-si Sing-Ming tien-ji si,
Ging-Yeung Gung jeng yau ho-yan?
[Written by Zheng Tian (Jeng Tin 鄭畋) ]
Translation:
Hsuan-Tsung return horse Yang honoured consort dead,
Cloud-rain difficult forget day month new;
Finality indeed Sheng-Ming son-of-heaven business,
Ching-Yang Palace waterwell once-more who?
Paraphrasis:
When Hsuan-Tsung came back from his ride Lady Yang was already dead,
His love for her will be remembered for all eternity;
‘Recollect the affair of the Sing-Ming emperor............
And who (also) ended up in the well at the Ging-Yeung Palace?’
In short, while the emperor was off riding, his soldiers killed his concubine, whose family they hated.
CLARIFICATORY BACKGROUND
In the year 712 CE Li Longji (Lei LungKei: 李隆基 born 685 CE, died 762 CE) became the seventh emperor of the Tang Dynasty (styled Tang Hsuan-Tsung / Tong Yun-Tsong: 唐玄宗), reigning till 756 CE. After several years of quite able rule, he grew lax and careless, eventually bringing the empire to the edge of ruin. The name most associated with this latter period is Yang Kweifei - the imperial consort Yang.
Yang Yu-Hwan (Yeung Yiuk-Waan: 楊玉環 - born 719 CE, died 756 CE), the daughter of Yang Hsuan-Yan (Yeung Yun-Yim: 楊玄琰), was the wife of Hsuan-Tsung's son the Prince of Shou. After emperor Hsuan-Tsung noticed her, she divorced her husband, became a Buddhist nun for while to ensure plausible deniability, then rejoined the world (circa 737 or 738 CE) and became the emperor's concubine, receiving the title kweifei (gwaifei: 貴妃 honoured consort).
[The Prince of Shou (Sau Wong: 壽王): Li Mao (Lei Mo: 李瑁) born 715 CE died 775 CE. The eighteenth son of the emperor, whose mother was Consort Wu (Wu Wuifei / Mou Waifei 武惠妃), daughter of a clan that had nearly usurped the throne in a previous generation. Consort Wu never became empress due to the extreme wariness of court officials, who remembered what had happened. She never the less had great status and influence in the palace, and was deferred to as the highest lady in the land. She died in 737 CE.
Like many other power-circles within the imperial court, the Wus were border aristocracy and related by blood to the imperial family. The surname Wu (Mou: 武) means martial, military, warlike - characteristically a surname chosen by Sinified barbarians in the North. ]
As the emperor became ever more besotted by his lady, he acceded to her requests to bestow favours upon her relatives, making her cousin Yang Kuo-Chong (Yeung Kok-Chung: 楊國忠) prime minister, and several of her other kinsmen high officials. Over the years while the power of the Yang family grew affairs of state were neglected and the treasury despoiled, leading to rebellion in the provinces.
In 755 CE, An LuShan (On LokSan: 安禄山), a feudal lord of mixed Sogdian and Central-Asian Turkish ancestry from the North-Eastern border of the empire, raised the standard of revolt and marched on the capitol Chang-An (Cheung-On: 長安 - modern day Hsi-An/Sei-On: 西安).
The imperial court fled south towards Shu (Suk: 蜀 - modern day Szechuan), and at Ma Wei Station (Ma-NGai Yik: 馬嵬驛) in Shaansi (Simsai: 陝西) the military escort decided to exact revenge for the destruction that the emperor's concubine and her rapacious relatives had wrought.
The emperor's tearful objections were stilled when he was reminded that ONE death might not be enough - killing ineffective rulers also had historic precedents.
SO FAR, SO GOOD .......
After slaughtering several court officials and members of the Yang family, troops and officers remonstrated with the emperor.
Thereupon Yang Kweifei was taken to a nearby Buddhist temple and strangled, following which she was unceremoniously buried at Ma Wei slope (馬嵬坡).
In 757 CE, when the now retired emperor Hsuan-Tsung returned to Chang-An, he wished to retrieve her body for a proper entombment, but was dissuaded by his officials, who feared tumult if the military should hear of it.
Historians are of two minds about the reputation of Lady Yang – was she the root of trouble, or merely a symptom? And who deserves more blame – the emperor for his weakness, Lady Yang for her manipulation on behalf of her kinsmen, or her relatives for being so unworthy of benefice?
Was she a vixen, or merely a victim of her time and place?
[I need not even mention that she was also rumoured to have had an affair with An Lu-Shan. Who was, notabene, an honorary 'adopted' son of the emperor!]
Whatever her true role in the convoluted court politics of Tang may have been, Yang Kweifei is mainly remembered as one of the greatest temptresses of all time, charming enough to alter the course of history - pleasingly plump and full figured, pale, with a lively and intelligent face.
A classic Chinese beauty. And thus a dangerous woman.
TONG YAN KAI
To the Cantonese, the distant Northern Border might as well be on the far side of the moon. Nothing in their environment prepares them for the extreme cold, the dryness, the aridity. The idea of being sent to man an outpost in the sands of Turkestan is enough to make them blanch.
Yes, the Cantonese are proud of China's achievements, and of the extension of empire along the Silk-Road - but everything North of the great river is a foreign world, and arguably not even Chinese. Certainly not proper Chinese.
They talk funny, eat weird crap, and smell funky, up there in the North.
Why, they're probably even half Turks!
NOTE: The two types of pronunciation given for Chinese characters above reflect Mandarin, which is the official language, and Cantonese, which is spoken here in San Francisco. In addition to being the Chinese language with which I am most familiar, Cantonese is also much more appropriate in the context of this post: It is the Chinese language whose pronunciation is closest to the koine of the Tang period.
As many Cantonese proudly assert, and educated Northerners grudgingly acknowledge.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
DRIED SHRIMP, CHINESE COOKING, FAT, GIRLS, AND RICE
While I was in South-East Asia I stayed for a while with a Chinese family.
The father had been educated in America, and consequently spoke English with far greater eloquence than I could muster in the local language. He was a very interesting person, combining Ivy-league literacy with the stern heterodox Confucianism once common among Chinese born and raised outside China - old style cultural knowledge, but no strict adherence to any quaint literalities which were in conflict with common sense and pragmatism.
All in all a very flexible man.
His sons and other male relatives were involved in the family business, as were some of the senior women. The only time his daughters showed up at the company warehouse was when they needed to requisition material from the stores. At other times, unmarried females were strictly forbidden from being anywhere near the working men. Too distracting, and quite unseemly.
Whenever I was in that part of the country I would stay over for a while. Not necessarily because of him, however, but because of his youngest daughter. Yes, she was even more fascinating than him - she knew how to cook.
I found her utterly charming.
After eating fruitbat, rancid dried fish, and other oddments, food homecooked by a vivacious young miss is VERY appealing.
Whether it was her food or her vivacity that attracted me I do not know.
JUICY SALTY THINGS 鹹濕物
[Yeah, I know - not quite a fitting choice of words. It's a private joke.]
She once told me that the main problem with Shakespeare was that he never wrote about cooking. So boring, lah!
Well....., one doesn't really expect a mature appreciation of The Bard from a pretty teenager.
Even if she can quote MacBeth with relish.
Neither does one expect Act IV, Scene 1 when observing the young lady in the kitchen. Very disconcerting to have heard about poisoned entrails, toad, sweltered venom, fenny snake, eye of newt, and toe of frog, when you knew that the result would soon be on the dinner table.
The disarming girlish giggle that followed, alas, did not disarm.
"So what the heck am I eating here?!?"
I need not have worried. Her cooking was creative, but not THAT creative. She merely used typical South-East Asian Chinese patent approaches to adding flavour.
Dried shrimp and black mushrooms, gonpui, salt vegetables, dried lilies, chinkang ham, lapcheung, soysauce cured porkbelly, lard, chicken fat, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, rice wine.
Unlike several other Chinese comestibles of the dry or odd variety, the substances above are used in small quantities to make a dish more interesting, rather than as main ingredients.
They round out flavours, and many of them contain glutamic acids, and so function in some ways like monosodium glutamate. Their contribution is savoury rather than salty.
These are the equivalents of the salt pork, smoked fish, and dried apples in mediaeval European cooking, essential only because their absence dulls the finished dish.
Dried shrimp: 蝦米 haa mai - these add flavour, and increase the savouriness of the resultant dish.
Black mushrooms: 香菇 heung gu, or 冬菇 dong gu - shiitake mushrooms, used for taste and a textural element.
For vegetable dishes which are simply cooked, one uses about a tablespoon or two of dried shrimp and an equivalent amount of dried black mushroom. Soak them about an hour or so before use. You can add the soaking water to the cooking pot. Black mushrooms can be left whole after trimming off the hard stem, or sliced; dried shrimp are either left whole or mashed up.
Rehydrated dried shrimp can also be stir-fried with garlic, ginger, scallions, soy sauce, sugar, and chili-paste to make a zesty side dish. If oily, add a squeeze of lime.
Gonpui (conpoy): 乾貝 dried scallop, also called 乾瑤柱 (gon yiu chyu - Dried Jade Supports) and 江瑤柱 (gong yiu chyu - River Jade supports). The name 'gonpui' is more common in the Cantonese-speaking areas - it means dried seashell, dried currency. Dried scallop is added to stewed dishes and soups for flavour and nutrition.
Gonpui needs to be soaked for three or four hours at least, after which it is usually pulled apart.
[瑤 Yiu: 1. Surname Yiu (Yao). 2. Tribe situated along the China-Burma and China-Siam frontiers. 3. Mother of pearl, nacre, jade. Precious. 柱 Chyu: Pillar, supporting post or beam. Support. To lean on.]
Salt vegetables: 鹹菜 haam tsoi. Preserved vegetables, such as 梅菜 mui tsoi - Red-in-Snow cabbage preserved with salt; 天津冬菜 Tien-Jun dong tsoi - Tientsin style finely chopped cabbages with salt and garlic; 榨菜 ja tsoi - Szechuanese mustard stems preserved by semi-drying, salting, pressing (榨) and fermenting.
[Tsoi (菜): as you can guess, this means vegetable. But also, by extension, any cooked dish, or even an entire cuisine. Watch out for restaurants which in their Chinese name have 鬼佬菜 or 西方菜 (kwailo tsoi, seyfong tsoi, respectively). What they serve is NOT Chinese cuisine, it's yours.]
Dried lilies: 金針 kam dzam - Golden Needles; a dried hemerocallidaceous flower which is tonifying, often used in vegetarian dishes and soups.
Chinkang ham: trade name for 金華火腿 (Kam-Hwa foh-doei); cured ham from Chinhua in Chekiang province that rather resembles some Spanish hams.
Lapcheung: 臘腸 Chinese dried pork sausage.
Soysauce cured porkbelly: 臘肉 lap yiuk - thick strips of layered lard and lean pork cured with sugar, soy sauce, nitrates, and dehydration.
Ham, if used, is slivered or chopped - it's presence will be an accent. Same goes for soysauce cured pork belly and lap cheung.
Ginger: 薑 or 姜 keung - fresh ginger is smashed and added to the hot wok before anything else, which will aromatize the oil. Ginger juice may be added to any meats or fish beforehand to denature a strong smell.
[The first character by its phonetic element indicates that ginger originally was not a Chinese product but came from beyond the frontiers. The second character is also the surname Jiang, originally referring to a clan whose women had married into the imperial family during the Shang period. It shows a woman raising aloft a sheep.]
Garlic: 蒜 syun - used in lesser quantity than ginger.
If there is only a minor amount of soaking liquid from dried ingredients, the vegetables can be sizzled with rice wine (酒 jau, or 米酒 mai jau) after gilding in the hot oil. The addition of moisture to the pan releases a burst of steam which further cooks the vegetables.
Both lard and chicken fat are favoured cooking greases - they add flavour and lend a glossy appearance to the dish.
In many cases a little cornstarch water is also added near the end of cooking to make the food look velvety and extend the gravy.
For meat dishes, especially those using pork belly (五花 腩 ng-fa naam: five flower fatty abdomen, also called 五花肉 ng-faa yiuk), which is the favoured cut for most Chinese, the salt vegetables will often come into play. The meat is gilded in the pan, or briefly deep-fried, or even blanched for five minutes in boiling water ere use - this both cleans it and reduces the fat content slightly. Most often it will then be slow-cooked or steamed with a little soy sauce and rice wine, with scallions, ginger, and salt vegetables. Whether or not it is whole while cooking and cut after, or already chunked or sliced before being cooked, is up to you and your recipe. Salt vegetables are rinsed to remove the excess salt and added towards the end, to function as a foil for the rich fatty meat.
Beancurd (豆腐 taufu), beancurd skin (豆皮 taupei - must be soaked before use), or black mushrooms can be added for a most delicious effect, too.
Salt vegetables can also be used in small quantity to add flavour to other dishes. They are very versatile. Even so, whenever I use them I often end up throwing out most of the container, because I don't use them often enough. Ja tsoi, however, keeps nearly forever.
Shrimp paste: 鹹蝦醬 haahm haa jeung - a moist odoriferous goo sold in jars. Many White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have an antipathy towards this, I do not know why. You may substitute anchovy paste if you are delicate.
For a more robust flavour, use shrimp-paste instead of both the salt vegetables and the dried ingredients. Fatty pork steamed with shrimp-paste and ginger is utterly delicious, fresh vegetables sautéed with shrimp-paste and chilies are divine.
Your house-mates may disagree. They're probably a bunch of prods.
THE WELL-STOCKED LARDER
I realize that not everyone can have a vivacious Chinese miss in the house, which is a great pity - they add so very much to the quality of life - but most of the other things I have mentioned are easily available, and, like the teenager, it takes a while before they go bad.
So if you do not cook as often as you would like, you should consider acquiring them.
If you ever intend to have a lively young thing in your life, it is probably also a good idea to learn how to cook a more varied selection of dishes than typical bachelor chow. Trust me, grilled cheese sandwiches made with processed yellow slices and pop-tarts may be perfect late at night.... but they are hardly candlelight supper quality.
Even with Branston Pickle and hot sauce.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN ASPERGERLY 'A-RETENTIVE' AFTERWORD
The characters for dried shrimp (蝦米 haa mai) literally read 'shrimp rice'. But that needs a little elucidation. Rice, you see, is not always rice.
In China and South-East Asia, people make distinctions which are not well-expressed in English.
Rice starts of as 'dou' (稻), which is rice in the field - padi ('paddy') in Malay ('palay' in Tagalog) means both the growing rice and where it is grown, which is a 稻田 (dou tien: rice field) or 水田 (sui tien: water field) to the Chinese.
Once harvested and processed, it is 米 (mai: raw rice), called 'beras' in Malay and 'bigas' in Tamarao and most Philippino languages (Jalan Beras Basa in Singapore is 'wet rice road').
After cooking, it is 飯 (fan: cooked rice), which is the basis of almost all Southern Chinese and South-East Asian meals. Without cooked rice you are eating a mere snack. That's what that foot long hoagie with meats and cheeses really is, just a snack. Your mother may never have believed you when you said that, but over a billion Asians know that you were right. Same goes for the extra large pizza. Snack.
There are two other useful terms which you should also learn: 糯米 (lo mai) glutinous rice, used in a number of wrapped steamed dishes, and 飯桶 (fan tong), meaning a rice bucket - but charmingly also a wastrel, dummy, or dimwit.
NOTE: The rice that Chinese and many others prefer is 籼稻 (sin dou: long grain non-glutinous rice).
Sin ( 籼) is a homophone for sin (秈): common rice, non-glutinous rice.
Long grain rice is also called 籼米 (sin mai).
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
The father had been educated in America, and consequently spoke English with far greater eloquence than I could muster in the local language. He was a very interesting person, combining Ivy-league literacy with the stern heterodox Confucianism once common among Chinese born and raised outside China - old style cultural knowledge, but no strict adherence to any quaint literalities which were in conflict with common sense and pragmatism.
All in all a very flexible man.
His sons and other male relatives were involved in the family business, as were some of the senior women. The only time his daughters showed up at the company warehouse was when they needed to requisition material from the stores. At other times, unmarried females were strictly forbidden from being anywhere near the working men. Too distracting, and quite unseemly.
Whenever I was in that part of the country I would stay over for a while. Not necessarily because of him, however, but because of his youngest daughter. Yes, she was even more fascinating than him - she knew how to cook.
I found her utterly charming.
After eating fruitbat, rancid dried fish, and other oddments, food homecooked by a vivacious young miss is VERY appealing.
Whether it was her food or her vivacity that attracted me I do not know.
JUICY SALTY THINGS 鹹濕物
[Yeah, I know - not quite a fitting choice of words. It's a private joke.]
She once told me that the main problem with Shakespeare was that he never wrote about cooking. So boring, lah!
Well....., one doesn't really expect a mature appreciation of The Bard from a pretty teenager.
Even if she can quote MacBeth with relish.
Neither does one expect Act IV, Scene 1 when observing the young lady in the kitchen. Very disconcerting to have heard about poisoned entrails, toad, sweltered venom, fenny snake, eye of newt, and toe of frog, when you knew that the result would soon be on the dinner table.
The disarming girlish giggle that followed, alas, did not disarm.
"So what the heck am I eating here?!?"
I need not have worried. Her cooking was creative, but not THAT creative. She merely used typical South-East Asian Chinese patent approaches to adding flavour.
Dried shrimp and black mushrooms, gonpui, salt vegetables, dried lilies, chinkang ham, lapcheung, soysauce cured porkbelly, lard, chicken fat, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, rice wine.
Unlike several other Chinese comestibles of the dry or odd variety, the substances above are used in small quantities to make a dish more interesting, rather than as main ingredients.
They round out flavours, and many of them contain glutamic acids, and so function in some ways like monosodium glutamate. Their contribution is savoury rather than salty.
These are the equivalents of the salt pork, smoked fish, and dried apples in mediaeval European cooking, essential only because their absence dulls the finished dish.
Dried shrimp: 蝦米 haa mai - these add flavour, and increase the savouriness of the resultant dish.
Black mushrooms: 香菇 heung gu, or 冬菇 dong gu - shiitake mushrooms, used for taste and a textural element.
For vegetable dishes which are simply cooked, one uses about a tablespoon or two of dried shrimp and an equivalent amount of dried black mushroom. Soak them about an hour or so before use. You can add the soaking water to the cooking pot. Black mushrooms can be left whole after trimming off the hard stem, or sliced; dried shrimp are either left whole or mashed up.
Rehydrated dried shrimp can also be stir-fried with garlic, ginger, scallions, soy sauce, sugar, and chili-paste to make a zesty side dish. If oily, add a squeeze of lime.
Gonpui (conpoy): 乾貝 dried scallop, also called 乾瑤柱 (gon yiu chyu - Dried Jade Supports) and 江瑤柱 (gong yiu chyu - River Jade supports). The name 'gonpui' is more common in the Cantonese-speaking areas - it means dried seashell, dried currency. Dried scallop is added to stewed dishes and soups for flavour and nutrition.
Gonpui needs to be soaked for three or four hours at least, after which it is usually pulled apart.
[瑤 Yiu: 1. Surname Yiu (Yao). 2. Tribe situated along the China-Burma and China-Siam frontiers. 3. Mother of pearl, nacre, jade. Precious. 柱 Chyu: Pillar, supporting post or beam. Support. To lean on.]
Salt vegetables: 鹹菜 haam tsoi. Preserved vegetables, such as 梅菜 mui tsoi - Red-in-Snow cabbage preserved with salt; 天津冬菜 Tien-Jun dong tsoi - Tientsin style finely chopped cabbages with salt and garlic; 榨菜 ja tsoi - Szechuanese mustard stems preserved by semi-drying, salting, pressing (榨) and fermenting.
[Tsoi (菜): as you can guess, this means vegetable. But also, by extension, any cooked dish, or even an entire cuisine. Watch out for restaurants which in their Chinese name have 鬼佬菜 or 西方菜 (kwailo tsoi, seyfong tsoi, respectively). What they serve is NOT Chinese cuisine, it's yours.]
Dried lilies: 金針 kam dzam - Golden Needles; a dried hemerocallidaceous flower which is tonifying, often used in vegetarian dishes and soups.
Chinkang ham: trade name for 金華火腿 (Kam-Hwa foh-doei); cured ham from Chinhua in Chekiang province that rather resembles some Spanish hams.
Lapcheung: 臘腸 Chinese dried pork sausage.
Soysauce cured porkbelly: 臘肉 lap yiuk - thick strips of layered lard and lean pork cured with sugar, soy sauce, nitrates, and dehydration.
Ham, if used, is slivered or chopped - it's presence will be an accent. Same goes for soysauce cured pork belly and lap cheung.
Ginger: 薑 or 姜 keung - fresh ginger is smashed and added to the hot wok before anything else, which will aromatize the oil. Ginger juice may be added to any meats or fish beforehand to denature a strong smell.
[The first character by its phonetic element indicates that ginger originally was not a Chinese product but came from beyond the frontiers. The second character is also the surname Jiang, originally referring to a clan whose women had married into the imperial family during the Shang period. It shows a woman raising aloft a sheep.]
Garlic: 蒜 syun - used in lesser quantity than ginger.
If there is only a minor amount of soaking liquid from dried ingredients, the vegetables can be sizzled with rice wine (酒 jau, or 米酒 mai jau) after gilding in the hot oil. The addition of moisture to the pan releases a burst of steam which further cooks the vegetables.
Both lard and chicken fat are favoured cooking greases - they add flavour and lend a glossy appearance to the dish.
In many cases a little cornstarch water is also added near the end of cooking to make the food look velvety and extend the gravy.
For meat dishes, especially those using pork belly (五花 腩 ng-fa naam: five flower fatty abdomen, also called 五花肉 ng-faa yiuk), which is the favoured cut for most Chinese, the salt vegetables will often come into play. The meat is gilded in the pan, or briefly deep-fried, or even blanched for five minutes in boiling water ere use - this both cleans it and reduces the fat content slightly. Most often it will then be slow-cooked or steamed with a little soy sauce and rice wine, with scallions, ginger, and salt vegetables. Whether or not it is whole while cooking and cut after, or already chunked or sliced before being cooked, is up to you and your recipe. Salt vegetables are rinsed to remove the excess salt and added towards the end, to function as a foil for the rich fatty meat.
Beancurd (豆腐 taufu), beancurd skin (豆皮 taupei - must be soaked before use), or black mushrooms can be added for a most delicious effect, too.
Salt vegetables can also be used in small quantity to add flavour to other dishes. They are very versatile. Even so, whenever I use them I often end up throwing out most of the container, because I don't use them often enough. Ja tsoi, however, keeps nearly forever.
Shrimp paste: 鹹蝦醬 haahm haa jeung - a moist odoriferous goo sold in jars. Many White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have an antipathy towards this, I do not know why. You may substitute anchovy paste if you are delicate.
For a more robust flavour, use shrimp-paste instead of both the salt vegetables and the dried ingredients. Fatty pork steamed with shrimp-paste and ginger is utterly delicious, fresh vegetables sautéed with shrimp-paste and chilies are divine.
Your house-mates may disagree. They're probably a bunch of prods.
THE WELL-STOCKED LARDER
I realize that not everyone can have a vivacious Chinese miss in the house, which is a great pity - they add so very much to the quality of life - but most of the other things I have mentioned are easily available, and, like the teenager, it takes a while before they go bad.
So if you do not cook as often as you would like, you should consider acquiring them.
If you ever intend to have a lively young thing in your life, it is probably also a good idea to learn how to cook a more varied selection of dishes than typical bachelor chow. Trust me, grilled cheese sandwiches made with processed yellow slices and pop-tarts may be perfect late at night.... but they are hardly candlelight supper quality.
Even with Branston Pickle and hot sauce.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN ASPERGERLY 'A-RETENTIVE' AFTERWORD
The characters for dried shrimp (蝦米 haa mai) literally read 'shrimp rice'. But that needs a little elucidation. Rice, you see, is not always rice.
In China and South-East Asia, people make distinctions which are not well-expressed in English.
Rice starts of as 'dou' (稻), which is rice in the field - padi ('paddy') in Malay ('palay' in Tagalog) means both the growing rice and where it is grown, which is a 稻田 (dou tien: rice field) or 水田 (sui tien: water field) to the Chinese.
Once harvested and processed, it is 米 (mai: raw rice), called 'beras' in Malay and 'bigas' in Tamarao and most Philippino languages (Jalan Beras Basa in Singapore is 'wet rice road').
After cooking, it is 飯 (fan: cooked rice), which is the basis of almost all Southern Chinese and South-East Asian meals. Without cooked rice you are eating a mere snack. That's what that foot long hoagie with meats and cheeses really is, just a snack. Your mother may never have believed you when you said that, but over a billion Asians know that you were right. Same goes for the extra large pizza. Snack.
There are two other useful terms which you should also learn: 糯米 (lo mai) glutinous rice, used in a number of wrapped steamed dishes, and 飯桶 (fan tong), meaning a rice bucket - but charmingly also a wastrel, dummy, or dimwit.
NOTE: The rice that Chinese and many others prefer is 籼稻 (sin dou: long grain non-glutinous rice).
Sin ( 籼) is a homophone for sin (秈): common rice, non-glutinous rice.
Long grain rice is also called 籼米 (sin mai).
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Sunday, October 24, 2010
LEARNING CANTONESE THE LAZY WAY
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.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
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.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Thursday, October 14, 2010
SMART MONKEY!
One of the things old-time San Franciscans have always suspected is that people who aren't speaking English are talking about us behind our back.
Usually, this paranoia is directed at the Chinese.
This idea puts the white person at the centre of the universe. Consequently even when confronted with the facts, most people will refuse to adjust their thinking - "whaddya mean they aren't talking about us?!? Of course they're talking about us! We're IMPORTANT, dammit!!"
Sorry, no. You aren't.
Unless you intend to buy something.
I can say this because I speak Cantonese, and in consequence get to listen in.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Being able to speak Cantonese is not an unalloyed blessing. It has positives, but it also has negatives.
Very often I will be in a store that I have never patronized before. There will be an old lady sitting by the cash-register, and a few teenage grandchildren restocking the shelves or dealing with customers. I find what I need to buy, and go up to pay.
A few sentences after I have first spoken in Cantonese, the old lady will, with sudden surprise, realize that we're NOT speaking English - we haven't been talking in English at all!
She is very pleased at this point.
And she yells across the crowded store at her grandchildren:
Wa, ni-go kwailo ho lek-ge, sik Tong-wa!
嘩, 呢個鬼佬好叻嘅, 識唐話!
["Oy, this kwailo very smart, speaks Cantonese!"]
Because, after all, her grandkids should feel thoroughly ashamed that some stinky ghost-devil is making them look stupid - they only want to speak English to her! Bad grandkids, so worthless! Nice kwailo, so civilized!
Then she'll turn to me, and in a friendly tone affirm:
Ney kam tsong-ming ah!
你咁聰明呀!
["You so smart!"]
White people speaking Cantonese, no matter how badly, deserve praise. Especially if her stupid grandkids are watching and listening.
They should learn from this, and talk to their grandmother more often in a civilized language. Why aren't they embarrassed? Where are their manners?!?
I know where mine are. Being younger than the old lady, I will modestly discount my own abilities, appropriately using somewhat formal phrasing:
Tsan mm-hai ge, ngoh mm gam tong.
真唔係嘅, 我不敢當.
["Truly not thus, I dare not presume!"]
It's always sad when this happens. I would really like to keep patronizing a store where I can find everything I need. But those grandkids are going to remember me and recognize my face the next time.
A pity, because that girl over near the bottled condiments was very sweet. But no. Better find a store without a grandma.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
Usually, this paranoia is directed at the Chinese.
This idea puts the white person at the centre of the universe. Consequently even when confronted with the facts, most people will refuse to adjust their thinking - "whaddya mean they aren't talking about us?!? Of course they're talking about us! We're IMPORTANT, dammit!!"
Sorry, no. You aren't.
Unless you intend to buy something.
I can say this because I speak Cantonese, and in consequence get to listen in.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Being able to speak Cantonese is not an unalloyed blessing. It has positives, but it also has negatives.
Very often I will be in a store that I have never patronized before. There will be an old lady sitting by the cash-register, and a few teenage grandchildren restocking the shelves or dealing with customers. I find what I need to buy, and go up to pay.
A few sentences after I have first spoken in Cantonese, the old lady will, with sudden surprise, realize that we're NOT speaking English - we haven't been talking in English at all!
She is very pleased at this point.
And she yells across the crowded store at her grandchildren:
Wa, ni-go kwailo ho lek-ge, sik Tong-wa!
嘩, 呢個鬼佬好叻嘅, 識唐話!
["Oy, this kwailo very smart, speaks Cantonese!"]
Because, after all, her grandkids should feel thoroughly ashamed that some stinky ghost-devil is making them look stupid - they only want to speak English to her! Bad grandkids, so worthless! Nice kwailo, so civilized!
Then she'll turn to me, and in a friendly tone affirm:
Ney kam tsong-ming ah!
你咁聰明呀!
["You so smart!"]
White people speaking Cantonese, no matter how badly, deserve praise. Especially if her stupid grandkids are watching and listening.
They should learn from this, and talk to their grandmother more often in a civilized language. Why aren't they embarrassed? Where are their manners?!?
I know where mine are. Being younger than the old lady, I will modestly discount my own abilities, appropriately using somewhat formal phrasing:
Tsan mm-hai ge, ngoh mm gam tong.
真唔係嘅, 我不敢當.
["Truly not thus, I dare not presume!"]
It's always sad when this happens. I would really like to keep patronizing a store where I can find everything I need. But those grandkids are going to remember me and recognize my face the next time.
A pity, because that girl over near the bottled condiments was very sweet. But no. Better find a store without a grandma.
==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================
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GRITS AND TOFU
Like most Americans, I have a list of people who should be peacefully retired from public service and thereafter kept away from their desks,...
