The Minister, the Goddess, and the Tea Table

Food for me has long been an obstacle to get through, one of the few vestigial needs of the human body that has not been tech-ified out of our lives. At best, eating at restaurants is a fun social occasion. It is a passive activity for talking to someone with, and comes with a built-in timer for when I can leave. Someone should do a linear regression of the food-quantity to time-left-at-restaurant relationship. 

In my opinion, other mediums for conversation are far more enjoyable than the sluggish stuffiness of eating — like an adventurous walk. If I had my way, or had a time machine, all my long conversations would be had via a walk in the woods with a parasol in hand. Elizabeth Bennet would be proud. I always found it funny how privileged English people walked through the woods in their wool suits or fluffy dresses, and found it relaxing. The feeling of being toasted inside one’s wool suit aside, walking through weedy fields or past sharp thistles would definitely cause some damage to those nice clothes. If you were in a dress, holding up a dress the whole time and trying not to crunch too many twigs along the way doesn’t seem like the stuff of a very therapeutic walk. Maybe there’s a reason that part of Western culture got phased out. 

So I guess I’ve come to terms with the fact that society has imposed food on me as the medium for long conversations. Well, I think I’m getting more used to it. Perhaps it might be the more time I’ve spent eating in HK, or the no-longer-in-college-lifestyle-diet I have. Whatever the origins of my improved relationship with food (and the way it holds conversations captive), I’ve gotten to know the foods and drinks here better. Tea-ing and dining has been a frequent part of my social calendar here, as colleagues and friends-of-friends in HK will often treat me out to one of the many unique elements of the cuisine here: yum cha (afternoon tea), claypot rice, or steam buns. Each food-related custom comes laden with its own history, whether it be political or social. Here are some of the biographies of these food-related customs.

I’ll start with table etiquette. Tapping two (or sometimes three) fingers on a table is a way to show gratitude for the person pouring your tea. The first time I saw a HK native tap two fingers on the table after being served tea, I was deadly curious and asked what it meant. Her eyes brightened, and she regaled me with a beautiful story. I heard the story a few more times afterward. People who knew I was an outsider seemed eager to tell the story. I don’t blame them. It’s a beautiful one, and one that I wouldn’t tire of hearing. Here I am about to re-tell myself! How meta. When an emperor visited the city disguised as a normal citizen, his servants (who were similarly disguised) would tap two fingers on a table rather than kowtowing to him to show gratitude when he served tea. The two finger tap prevented the emperor’s cover from being blown. Fast forward a few centuries, and normal people today also tap two fingers to express gratitude for whoever serves them tea. 

On to mooncakes. Why do mooncakes exist? What do they signify? Why are they eaten during the mid-autumn festival? When I was young, I heard the mooncake origin stories in snippets. The snippets were always vague and hazy (even when I first heard them), and the stories themselves even more so. The snippets were only ever choice scenes that I never took the mental initiative to stitch together. Consequently, the image I have of them more so compose a kaleidoscope of scenes making up a fever dream rather than a concrete unit of knowledge. Well, having celebrated the mid-autumn festival in all its bright fanfare in Hong Kong, I can say that I still hadn’t achieved comprehension for why people eat mooncakes. I did some research on my own and patched up the holes of my childhood knowledge. There are two interpretations of the mooncake story. Both are legends, but one leans closer to myth while the other one at least tries to stay grounded in history. You can probably guess which one has my personal favor. The first one is as follows: a local hero used mooncakes to honor his wife, who was the goddess of the moon, by offering mooncakes and fruits during the time of the year when the moon was at its fullest. The story is far more colorful and includes a scene with ten suns, but I’d rather not compete in telling a story that has been told in better renditions in more legitimate areas of the internet. The second version goes like this: when China was ruled by a minority Mongol government, the ethnic Han majority used mooncakes to coordinate when they would revolt against the government. The mooncakes had different types of messages in different variants of the story. 

The next story is one that I also heard often when growing up. And when I did hear it, I often smirked at the ridiculousness of it. The story is the origin tale of why we eat 粽子 (glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves) during the dragon boat festival, and it goes like this: an exiled minister drowned himself in a river after hearing that the kingdom he formerly served was conquered. The minister used to be one of the kingdom’s few principled and valuable officials, but was pushed out because of court intrigue. Mind you, the minister’s wistful death was not what I smirked at — even child-me, impoverished of most senses, had some sense to know the tragedy and honor of his ordeal. What I did smirk at was the rescue operation conceived by the neighboring villagers. When the villagers found out the minister had drowned himself, they rowed boats into the river and pelted 粽子 into the water so that the fish would eat the rice rather than the minister’s body. 

These stories are well-known across Hong Kong and, as a small aside, the culture of the Chinese diaspora I have experienced in the U.S. The stories are taught by teachers, recounted by relatives, and reinforced by the city’s sights and eats. These stories float through and make up a solid block of collective consciousness for the people here. It’s like a game of telephone except no-one gets its wrong, or distorts what is said. 

I’ve long thought about these stories’ validity in relation to their ubiquity. The popularity and regard that these stories have seem impregnable to the many plot holes I often think of. So… we are eating mooncakes because a moon goddess had to down an elixir of immortality and then became separated from her significant other? When I’m with more familiar company, verbal utterance is oftentimes necessary to liberate that feeling of disbelief. The natives around me might smile, and then continue eating their mooncakes. 

Well, perhaps the two-finger tap signal wasn’t so effective, and restaurant owners could detect from the dynamics of the room that their plainclothes guest was actually the emperor. Perhaps the restaurant owners knew the whole time, and kept up the act to give their leader an authentic experience — or out of fear of angering him. What if all these things were true? Tapping two fingers on a table is still courteous, elegant, and shows someone the esteem one might show an emperor. 

Were mooncakes really the best way to pay tribute to a star-crossed lover? Or that the national insurrection against a military occupation might have required more coordination than messages in mooncakes? It is a time when family members return home to gather over a meal together, and after the meal, to split mooncakes together. The moon is high up in the air during a time when the autumn harvest is about to end. Mooncakes are charming, and bring families together.

Why do people throw glutinous rice into the sea to rescue someone who drowned? Will throwing really help the fish not eat the scholar? Wouldn’t throwing all that food just attract more fish? What if all this incredible logic really isn’t credible? The story itself — not its logic, but its heart — married food with helping others.

In my initial encounter with these stories, I was thinking the wrong question. It is not about validity. (After all, the truth-popularity R^2 value has never been a strong one.) But even though I was looking in the wrong place, an answer did find its way to me. These stories emphasize values rather than validity. At least, that’s the feeling I get when I eat, hear, and see the legacies of these stories in person. 

Yīng mán

The contents of this post are neither new nor insightful. They are the observations of a dilettante in a field he has no business treading into. These observations, though profound to myself, are undoubtedly well-worn to more weathered eyes. But they are interesting to me, which is what matters most in determining how the valuable column inches of my blog are apportioned. 

English is the lingua franca of the world! That grand declaration is often repeated. When I was in the eleventh grade, I once listened to a guest speaker, an international businessman, tell other students and me that we need not worry much about language problems abroad. It was at a day-long conference, and the speaker was giving a talk about international careers to a room of about 30 of us high school students. A student expressed her concern that her intermediate-level German would not be good enough for international work with Germany. I forget what exactly her question was, and am fearful of recounting it wrong. But I remember distinctly the speaker’s answer. English is more than enough! He told us. Most countries understand English, will use English to communicate, and if not, you’ll have translators. The guest speaker, addressing all of us, said that putting our time to other skills might be a better use of our time. I don’t know if he was going for the shock factor or for helpful advice, but he continued on and told us not to let our American self guilt force us to spend so much time learning languages when it is not that necessary. 

During my time here, I often thought about this businessman. In my first few weeks here, I knew that English was the language of law, business, and academia. Nevertheless, I continue to be surprised at seeing, in person, how deeply the English language has planted its many flags on HK society. I always knew that it did, and I always knew how it did. Colonial legacies and globalization are waves that do not break softly. Still, I’m always surprised.

My students (in nearly all fields except Chinese language) tell me that their professors teach classes in English, and assign papers in English. And yet, my students tell me that they rarely use English outside the classroom. Among friends, family, and in almost every quarter of their lives, Cantonese or Mandarin is used. During office hours, I sometimes asked my students when they last read a book cover to cover in English. They often said secondary six (twelfth grade in the US). I often pressed to the next question: so what do you read in English? Many said only in academic articles in their field, or assignment handouts. We always laughed after this remark. So few of the words spoken here are in English, yet so much of the words written here are. 

In many of the bilingual online contracts I have signed, there is a caveat at the bottom that says something along the lines of: in the event of a dispute between the two languages, the English version prevails. I wish I screenshotted some of these contracts, but will do so the next time I come across these caveats. Anyways, such is the legal capital of the English language. Even though English is rarely used by my students in most contexts, it is used in the most important ones. 

Yesterday I saw a mother walking along with her child on the grounds outside our campus. Her child was toddling along the pavement. “Be careful!” she said sweetly to her son. And then they resumed their mother-son talk in Cantonese. The son seemed to be around four to five years old. This is a minute sample out of many, but I was struck by the fluid and natural way that English was peppered into her Cantonese. Why not “siu sam” or “xiao xin”? I’m sure all these languages might be used interchangeably if I were to follow the mother and her son around for a whole day, but the fluidity with the way she interspersed the rhythm and content of her Cantonese with English stuck with me. 

Of course, other elements of Hong Kong life are held firmly within the territory of Cantonese and Mandarin. The most up to date or well-contributed to online forums, group messages, are mostly in Cantonese. English swear words do not hold a candle to Cantonese swear words. The baddest English swear words can’t compare to the meanings of some of these knock-em dead Cantonese swear words. Restaurant menus in areas without Westerners, like Tai Po Market, will not pack their menus with English. Names are interesting. Some students are called by their friends in their English names, some in their Chinese names. My thoughts haven’t matured on this part of life.  

It seems obvious to say this, but multilingual societies are not composed of an even split between its languages. Multilingualism in a society is not unique, but the values a society attaches to each of its multiple languages, I believe, are unique. I think of the French, Russian, and English that were tossed around fluidly in one conversation within nineteenth century St. Petersburg society (at least, in a Tolstoy novel). I then think of, closer to Hong Kong, the multilingual societies influenced by the Chinese diaspora in the nanyang (of which Hong Kong is a part): from the Philippines, across Indonesia, and to Malaysia. 

Rather than being on equal footing with each other, languages seem to stand on separate planes in a multilingual society. The languages here in Hong Kong serve different roles — and are attached with different values. All I know is that one needs to be armed with a multilingual society’s multiple languages to penetrate its cultural fog.

Dragons Have Long Backs

Last Sunday, a few of us hiked a trail called Dragon’s Back. Along the way, a giant spider hung over a part of the trail. The trail was only wide enough for one person, so to cross, we had to duck under the spider one at a time.

When we first came up to the spider, we gawked at it for a bit. Well, first, someone pointed out its existence, then we gawked at it for a bit. “Spider!” “Where? Where?” “There!” “Oh.”

The spider was gigantic — if this were a conversation I’d use my hands to show you how big. But it was far too big for anyone to pass under it without mustering up emergency reserves of bravery. It was mostly black — I don’t know if it was a black widow though. I should have paid more attention to the pictures in those Doring Kindersley books. And finally, the spider was in the center of its web, which had such neat angles and evenly drawn open spaces between each line of...silk? The spider dangled over the trail like a gatekeeper, no doubt vetting us for whether we were worthy of entry into this part of the mountain.

I wish I took a photo of it, as I have been taking a lot of photos recently. But I made a quick calculation in my head — there’s not much point in documenting anything if I die. Well, now I’m alive to tell the story, and the proof is missing. I can imagine how time travelers must feel when they can’t take any evidence with them to their own time, and no one believes them. I guess you’ll have to rely on this approximation of reality for reference.

The large spider kind of felt like those spiders that dangled over you in a side-scrolling adventure game, where you had to duck under them. I googled “side-scrolling adventure games”, and in a rare stroke of luck found this great image from a game called Ardentryst. This was exactly what I was looking for from Google images with my very vague search input! How often does that happen. Anyways, the spider didn’t shoot fire at us (or maybe that’s the character shooting fire back), and there was only one rather than three, but otherwise this picture is a pretty accurate depiction of what happened. Image source from “Duskfire’s Blog”: https://duskfire.wordpress.com/page/14/.

Anyways, I’m making quite a big deal about this part of my weekend, dramatizing an ordinary event into a larger than life story about life, death, and barriers to entry. The real spider, rather than the one in my imagination or in a game, really was calm and restful. It may or may not have been lethal, but it was peaceful. All of it was — the spider, its web, the trees. Walking through the trail was peaceful.

Some photos from the rest of the hike:

Climbing up the foot of the dragon. I’m in the blue shirt. Photo credits to Emma Pred-Sosa; this is just one of her scene-stealing shots

Us at top of the hike, ready to plant our imaginary flag. One long hike for man, no progress for mankind.

The four elements on full display: earth, water, air, concrete.

These are maps of the trail from a blogger who looked at the trail through Google maps (left) and Google Earth (right): https://trailhiker.wordpress.com/2018/11/11/hong-kong-trail-section-8-including-dragons-back/.

Source: Apple Maps on my iPhone. Hong Kong’s country parks never stood out to me until after the trail. Whenever I looked at a map of Hong Kong, my eyes always glazed past those big green patches that cushioned the roads. I was aware of and saw those green patches, but I never really noticed them. There were no roads there, so it always seemed empty. If I was wearing a beret and holding a paint brush, I might be dropping the term “negative space.” I’m kicking myself for realizing just how not-negative at all that space is, how those parts are just as full of life as Central. When I opened my GPS this week, it was impossible not to notice all the reserves and country parks each time. I feel a little bit shameful at how, in spite of the fact that I literally live next to mountains and have been reading up on Hong Kong, I still looked at maps of HK with terrible filters for so long.

Breakfast Redeemed

I usually skipped actual breakfasts in college. It always felt like an unnecessary speed bump to the momentum I needed for the day. Ironic, I know. If I ate an omelette, or anything really that comes on a plate and can’t be held in one hand without falling apart, I would have a moderate to severe food coma while working. If I lived my own best life, I wouldn’t eat breakfast at all. Without breakfast, I felt lean and agile. But all the college nutrition presentations and shaming from adults guilted me into eating at least something. I didn’t know if intermittent fasting could be trusted, so I bent to the wisdom of a good phrase: it’s the most important meal of the day! And it’s grrrreat if you have the right cereal. So every time I ate nothing for breakfast, I felt that I was foolishly trading nutrition for a temporary feeling of agility.

In college, I usually had an apple if my refrigerator was stocked, or a toasted bagel if I got out of bed at the time I set on my alarm clock. Breakfast was an obligation, a tax I paid to feel like a non-slacker citizen. In Hong Kong, however, breakfast options are my favorite things to eat. Most of my favorite foods are all concentrated in the breakfast options. Glutinous rice wrapped with tea leaves (粽子). Shumai (燒賣) and cheung fen (腸粉) for breakfast, yes please. Even the lowbrow insult-to-steam-buns steam buns at a 7-Eleven make my mornings. The pot pies are stuffed with cha siu pork, the kind of pork found in cha siu baos. The quiche at the Western coffee shop somehow tastes softer. And the bread! Sliced bread is not humanity’s best innovation to bread. The buttery, puffy bread here is. Sometimes I break off bits to dip in the congee. Hong Kong residents know how to breakfast.

This is the menu at one of the food carts on our campus. My goal is to be able to read all the items on this menu and order in Cantonese by the end of the semester. In the meantime, I’ve been learning to use google translate really well..

My morning routine changed to make room for this newfound necessity of my day. Toeing the boundary of food coma is also made easier because the entrees are small, and I can order or combine orders in just the right quantity. That said, I don’t know if my love for breakfast food here might also be the product of my new love for breakfast time. I have more time to pace my mornings, and to take normal-sized bites rather than always biting off more of that bagel than I could chew while walking. All I know is, I plan on making the most of all the HK breakfasts I have left while I can. Legend has it everyone here gets up so early because the scent of breakfast jolts them out of bed with excitement. I just made that up, but it’d be a good legend to tell. 

Health and Beauty

I rarely try to vividly describe nature or wildlife, because I’ve found that I don’t have much of a vocabulary when it comes to writing about non-human things. I’d probably inflict injustices upon nature if I tried, and call a coniferous tree a deciduous one.  

At Tai Po, however, I feel like I have a moral obligation to write about the environment. I’m surrounded by a beauty that demands to be talked about. If I can’t identify the wildlife around me concretely, at least I can describe them abstractly. Pictures help too. 

The photo above was taken on one side of the campus looking toward the other. Our academic buildings are embraced on all sides by mountains. Standing here, I feel shielded by the broad arms of mountain ranges hugging our school. If I looked further outward, I could see small trails of houses snaking across the hills of some mountains. The houses weren’t perched on or dug into the mountains, but seemed to blend into them, like they were made for each other. 

Yes that was a humble brag about how early I woke up for a run, rest assured it didn’t happen again the next day.

This is a photo of the sunrise I took while on a run on Thursday morning. It took some discipline to run straight while the sunrise was fighting for my attention. I compromised and struck a middle ground between my health and the sun’s beauty by stopping to take some photos. The sun rising over the mountains reminded me of the old dust jacket of The Hobbit.

Newbies

I’ve been in Hong Kong for five days now. I’ve spent most of my time getting my bearings at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). I don’t know how to tie all the disparate parts of my week so far into a cohesive narrative, so I’m going to cheat and present snippets. (This paragraph was my best attempt at putting a fig leaf over the ensuing naked information dump.) 

***

August 9 was the day that I arrived to the Hong Kong airport and met up with Lauren, my ETA partner at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). EdUHK is the university we’ll be teaching at for the year. More information on the university is in the “About” page. 

Below is a photo of the taxi we took from the airport to EdUHK. Because our suitcases were too large, the trunk was held down over our suitcases by a single cable.

A nightmare scenario of our suitcases falling out and spilling onto the highway while other drivers swerved around our suitcases honking and raising their fists in the air at us new American arrivals played out in my mind a few times during the trip. In the backseat, I kept looking over my shoulder. The driver, smiling at me through the rearview mirror, kept telling me not to worry. 

When we pulled up to EdUHK, we were welcomed warmly. University staff helped carry our luggage up several flights of stairs to our rooms, and gave us a tour of the campus. The campus grounds were beautiful. There was a garden for geology, a rock climbing wall in the gym, and stores selling all the items of twenty-first century sustenance I might need so as to never have to leave campus. The university staff have been nothing but helpful. They clothed us with books, food, and ample support whenever we needed it. On books: asides from all the print/digital resources in the Arthur Samy Language Learning Center (ASLLC), where Lauren and I will be working, I was super excited when I found out we could take any number of books, from a box of books on English, home.

This is the main open central area of the university. Lauren is to the left!

C-Can is the largest dining hall at EdUHK, one of five places to get food on campus. I believe I’ll be spending a large part of my time this year here. There was braised beef, pork, congee, noodles, western choices, and like twenty more choices. Lauren and I were thinking that we might never tire of options to choose from. And the best part is that the options change seasonally.

Students and university staff lining up for lunch!

If I want to splash around in unsustainable luxury, there’s a Chinese restaurant on campus where dim sum is served. The university staff treated us out to dim sum there, and I might end up hassling with my wallet to sneak in a few meals there in the future.

A note about our rooms. There are fourteen floors up to our rooms, navigable only by walking up the stairs. Lauren and I nicknamed this hike “the Mountain”. If the stairs are a mountain, though, our rooms are definitely the summit — and well worth every step.  Our two rooms made up the the tallest floor of the tallest building on campus, overlooking the city of 大埔 (Tai Po) and some of the mountain ranges that run through the New Territories. Our rooms were encased with large windows that obscured none of the mountains. Standing in my room felt like standing inside Tony Stark’s mountainside villa. My room might not have a JARVIS, but it was surrounded by a way more comfortable environment — greener and more full of life. 

After our first day of work (read: receiving an orientation), Lauren and I had this photo taken of us. I think it’s going to be one of those photos I’ll look back on and sigh, oh how young we once were. I love it. 

These teachers are armed and dangerous with their teaching tools

Take two: a normal picture