Wonderful Joy

       We’re in the Wonderful Joy restaurant and everyone is looking at me. 

“What?” I say. 

I’m used to being stared at:  this is Tai Po, after all, and I’m white, bald, and about a head-and-a-half taller than everyone else. 

This time is different, though.  I’m with friends—or at least co-workers—and they’re used to their freak show of a colleague.

“What?” I say again. 

It’s Hui Xuan who speaks.  “We don’t ask these questions here.”

I look at her, then at Nana, who runs our office, then at Dwight.  Dwight is our guest, a scholar on service learning, and the reason we’re all out for dinner—we wanted to show him a good time.  Nice idea. 

I look at Nana again.  “All I did was ask if she was married.”

Hui Xuan nods and blinks slowly, as though to remind herself to be patient.  Hui Xuan is from the mainland, not a native Cantonese speaker, and definitely an old soul.  I sometimes worry that she feels marooned in a field of baboons in our office—she’s the only one who’s studied general education formally, and the only one who seems to take every conversation we have very seriously.

“I know,” she says now.  “But we don’t ask these kinds of questions here.  Not unless you are very old.”

That I am very old—at least compared to Hui Xuan, and Nana, and Iris, the other colleague present—is something I decide not to point out.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Nana. 

She laughs.  “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just—“ and here I look at Dwight, who’s from Boston.  Wisely, he’s examining a fingernail, very careful, as though looking for a secret word or code to make the awkwardness go away.  “It’s just that in the States, it’s strange to work with someone and not know if they’re married or single, or if they have kids or not.”

“But Paul,” Nana says, “I’m only eighteen.”

I stare, then everyone bursts out laughing. 

“And she’s looking for a man who’s twenty,” Iris says, and everyone cracks up again.  The moment is broken, the awkwardness fades, and everyone goes back to normal conversation.

The thing is, though, I don’t actually know how old Nana is.  Or Hui Xuan.  I don’t know if Iris has children, or a boyfriend, or is gay or married or the daughter of the last emperor of the Bigfoot kingdom.  All of this is fair enough, of course:  their private lives are none of my damn business.  But still, all of this feels a little peculiar to a guy who comes from a country where people go on national TV and say things like, “Jerry, I once had sex with a goat, and I’ll have you know, it wasn’t half bad.” 

Now, the four Chinese—we’ve been joined by the director of some program that has a lot of initials and whose purpose is unknown to me—go back to speaking Cantonese, which is a pity, since between us, Dwight and I know exactly two phrases of Cantonese, one of which means, “I’m so sorry, but I believe the state of Massachusetts just elected an idiot,” and other of which involves ensuring your masseuse keeps her clothes on for the duration of your massage. 

Since neither of these seem useful in this particular setting, Dwight and I chitchat across the table, carefully avoiding any questions about each other’s spouses, children, politics, incomes, or religion. 

Fortunately for us, the hot pot arrives soon. 

"But what," you say, "is hot pot?"

Good question.  An even better question, though, is how the heck have the Chinese kept hot pot a secret for so long? 

Because, and I fear exaggerating here but bear with me—because hot pot is the best damn thing ever. 

Ever. 

Seriously. 

Jesus liked hot pot.

So did Ghandi. 

Abe Lincoln?  Hot pot addict.

Joan D’Arc?  Requested it for her last meal. 

Even Michelle Obama, who, frankly, currently surpasses all of these people in my mind, my lady Michelle LOVES hot pot. 

The best way to describe hot pot is to harken back to the late ‘70s and the Fondue craze.  For those of you for whom shag carpet is just a rumor, Fondue consisted of a bunch of people in tacky pants suits boiling a pot of hot oil in the middle of the table and sticking stuff—shrimp, mini-hotdogs, squares of cheese, what’s left of their marijuana joints—in it to cook. 

If this sounds bizarre and even a little dangerous, that’s because it is.  And the cool thing about Chinese hot pot is that it’s even more bizarre and even more dangerous. 

Essentially, hot pot consists of a pot—stick with me here—that you put in the middle of the table and—wait for it—make hot.  The means for achieving the latter are various.  Most restaurants have special tables with a burner laid into the center.  Other places, though, need to improvise:  I was at a fast food place, once, where keeping the hot pot boiling involved lighting a can of sterno, something I’d love to see Ronald McDonald try. 

But what you ask, is in the pot? 

A good, hearty broth.  Exactly what’s in the broth depends upon your tastes.  The first time we had it, our hosts ordered a pot divided in half:  one side had lots of spices to keep the adults happy; the other had a milder broth that wouldn’t offend the children. 

When we have hot pot at Wonderful Joy, Iris and Nana do the ordering.  Iris is a little like Abe Lincoln in that she too wears a tall black hat, once freed a nation from slavery, and is addicted to hot pot.  She’ll deny this if you ask her, but one visit to her Face Book wall and you realize that an intervention is in order: 

10 January. Hot pot!  The fifth time this week!

2 January.  Hot pot tonight.  Friends got mad at me because I wouldn’t share.  Don’t care. 

28 December.  Hot pot again tonight, alone, in a sleazy hotel.  Not very good, but enough to keep me going.

21 December.  Held myself to just one hot pot this week.  Want more, though.  Much much more. 

15 December.  Had to sell mother’s pearls to get hot pot.  Feel bad.  But not too bad.

5 December.  Killed an old lady because she got in the way of my hot pot.  Hope she was homeless, so no one will notice. 

 

Anyhow, Iris and Nana do all the ordering, so when the pot comes, all of us ask what’s in it. 

“Chicken feet,” says Iris. 

Dwight and I stare.   “Really?” I ask. 

Iris picks up her chopsticks, fishes around in the broth for a few seconds, and pulls out a very large, very gnarled chicken foot.

“Oh,” I say.  I try to sound nonplussed, but I’m sure my face is pale. 

“Is it for flavor?” Dwight asks.

Iris shakes her head. 

“Not,” I say, feeling just a little bit white, a little bit western, and, well, sort of a little bit scared to death.  “Not for eating?”

Iris grimaces and shakes her head again. 

“Well then,” I say, “what’s it for?”

Iris considers for a moment, then says, “I don’t know.”  She drops the foot back in the pot, and returns to her conversation with Nana. 

Besides the broth, everyone at the table receives a small bowl with soy sauce in it.  To this you can add a variety of chopped delicacies:  roasted garlic, green onions, peanuts, sliced chilies.  I take most of the chilies and when everyone complains, give them each one peanut. 

Once the stew is at a rolling boil, the waiters and waitresses descend on the table with plate after plate of goodies to be cooked.   The great thing about hot pot is that you can do it with anything.  On this particular night, we can choose from sliced beef, butterflied scallops, prawns still twitching on the plate, three or four kinds of dumplings, a melon-like vegetable that have to be cooked forever before you could eat it, razor-thin slices of eel, and four or five different kinds of fish.

And mushrooms.  The mushrooms are unbelievable:  some of them are just plain old stem and caps like your mother used to put on pizza or your college roommate used to eat before watching reruns of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.  Others, though, are more exotic:  my favorite are the enoki, long, reedy mushrooms joined at the bottom and with caps so narrow that they look like bean sprouts when cooked.

Once the food comes, it takes a while to get things going.  Everyone reaches for stuff and passes plates around the table.  Each person has a small wire basket with a wooden handle.  You put your food in this, then place it in the broth, trying your best to avoid the chicken foot floating near the surface.  Then you wait.  It seems pokey, at first, especially since you’re hungry and you’ve just been informed that all of the things you’d normally talk about over dinner are forbidden.  But eventually you draw your scallops or shrimp dumpling or pork meatball out of the pot and put it in your bowl.   Once it’s cooled a bit, you roll it in the soy-sauce mixture, then pop it in your mouth. 

And then you chew and go, “Oh my god, that tastes good.”   And then, for maybe the fifteenth time that evening, you wonder why the heck the rest of the world doesn’t know about Chinese hot pot.

At one point, I gesture toward my little basket where something pink and limp is waiting to be boiled.  “What’s this?” I say to Iris.

She uses her chopsticks to nudge it.  She looked at Nana, who shrugs.  Then she looks back at me. “I don’t know.”

“But you ordered it,” I say.

Again that shrug. 

“And you’re the hot pot expert,” I say.

Iris makes a small, gleeful smile and throws another prawn in the pot.  She is in her element.  She’s not about to be thrown off by some white guy who’s afraid of eating chicken foot.  “We ordered a lot of things.”

I lower my basket into the pot.  Within seconds, the heat curls the pink thing into a ball, revealing ruffles and ridges resembling an octopus tentacle. 

“Oh!” says Iris, “it’s—“ and then names something in Cantonese. 

I drop it into my soy mix and pop it into my mouth.  It definitely has that rubbery, squiddy texture and that mild, pleasant flavor I’ve come to associate with cephalopods.

“So what is it in English?”

Iris squints, then shakes her head.  “No idea.”

This happens two or three times, enough that Dwight and I start to wonder if we’re not being fed every form of internal organ known to man.  At one point, Dwight points to a plate near me and says, “Can I try some of that?” 

“Sure.”  I hand it to him.  I’ve had four or five of these things, and found them really tasty. 

He takes one in his chopsticks, holds it up to his face and examines it.  “What is it?”

“Jellyfish,” I say, at the exact same moment the man next to me—the director of the initial place—says, “Noodles.”

I stare at him.  “That?”  I point to the small nearly translucent white bundles.  There are probably fifteen of them, each about the size and shape of a small thumb.  Thin strands curve along the back—tentacles, I have no doubt.

The man nods.  “Noodles.”

“That,” I say, “is most certainly jellyfish.”

We eye each other for a moment, then turn to Iris.  She bends over the plate.   When she straightens, she says, “Squid.”

Nana snorts.  “Noodles.”

Iris looks at her.  “Is not.  It’s—“ and then she tosses out another Cantonese term.

“It’s noodles,” Hui Xuan says from the other side of the table. 

But by now Nana is taking another look, holding whatever it is up for closer examination.  “Paul’s right.”  The regret is diamond hard in her voice.  “Jellyfish.”

“Oh please,” Iris says, then bursts into machine-gun Cantonese.  In seconds the table has erupted, everyone throwing words back and forth across the pot.  Even Hui Xuan is animated.

Eventually the waitress comes.  Iris gestures at Nana, using a little basket to fish one of the whatever-it-ises out of the hot pot.  En masse, the four Chinese grill the waitress.  She listens for a minute, hands in her pockets, then throws back a staccato question or two.  Iris responds, and eventually the waitress marches off. 

“What’d she say?” Dwight asks. 

Nana bites her lip.  “She doesn’t know.”

A few minutes later another woman comes to the table, this one in a suit with a white shirt, looking like the hostess maybe, or even the owner.  Again the rapid-fire words and phrases, everyone at the table giving suggestions.  The hostess listens for a while, nodding at each person in turn.  Dwight and I, meanwhile, are working our way through the little white things.  Whatever they are, they taste good.

Eventually the hostess lets loose a stream of words.  Iris responds in kind, then the man next to me tosses out a phrase or two.  The woman ignores him, gesturing toward the back of the restaurant.  And then, in what sounds like mid-sentence, she turns and walks off.

“Where’s she going?” I say.

“To the kitchen.”

“She doesn’t know either?”

Iris shakes her head.  “She’s asking the cook.”

To the best of my knowledge, we never did get the answer.  It didn’t matter:  we ate every one of those little white things, then cleared every other plate on the table, and a few from a table nearby.

It’s hard to say just what makes hot pot so wonderful.  Certainly, the broth helps (god bless them chicken feet) and the ground spices in soy sauce don’t suck either.  And there’s a lot to be said for food that’s so freshly-cooked you actually scald your lips eating it.   There’s no oil that I can tell, and no grease, so everything you put in your mouth you really taste.  I like shrimp under any circumstances, but coming out of a hot pot, you get the sense that you’re experiencing shrimp in its purest form. 

It’s also possible that part of the joy of hot pot comes with having to wait.  That sounds very Victorian, I know, and rather ironic coming from a guy my “friend” Gordon once referred to as “the king of instant gratification.”   But there you have it.  As we hover over the steaming pot, eyes on our spoons, we start to talk about the impending birth of Hui Xuan’s first child .  She tells us the story of a friend who got pregnant and posted 24 names on a website, asking acquaintances to vote. 

“Did she go with the winning name?” Dwight asks. 

Hui Xuan shakes her head.  “No.  Right before the baby came, she thought of another one.  That’s what they chose.”

Someone asks if Hui Xuan and her husband have picked a name for their baby.  Hui Xuan shakes her head.  Apparently there’s a tradition in her husband’s family where everyone has the same character as their second name. 

“You mean the same middle name?”

No Hui Xuan says, and then explains that Chinese names aren’t really names, at all, but combinations of words.  In English, of course, most names are meaningless sounds separate from everyday speech—Paul, Ellen, Dolores.  There are some exceptions, of course:  Will, Heather, Angus. 

In China, though, names are made up of one, two, or three actual words that express the parents’ hopes for the personality and fortunes of the child:  Hui, for instance, means “intelligent” and “Xuan” means gem.  My colleague William is named Wai Lam, which means “Strong Forest.” 

“So what’s the name your husband’s family uses?” one of the other women asks. 

Hui Xuan responds in Mandarin.  The other Chinese look confused.  Hui Xuan thinks for a moment, then shakes her head.  She can’t remember the Cantonese word. 

“What’s the character?” Iris asks.  Mandarin and Cantonese use the same characters, just pronounce them differently. 

Hui Xuan looks around, trying to see if there’s a piece of paper handy.   There isn’t.  Finally, she holds up her hand, flat, so we can see.  With her index finger, she makes a slash across the palm, then a dot.  She hesitates, then, using her nail, makes a pair of squiggles just below the line.

I’ve known Hui Xuan for five months now, seen her on an almost daily basis.  I respect her about as much as any scholar I’ve ever worked with.  In that time, we’ve talked about assessment, about curricular development, about service-learning and cognition and writing and course assessment.  We’ve discussed coming from the north and living in the south and being far away from our families.  I’ve met her husband and seen her present at a conference and talked with her afterwards about how she thought she did.  When she confessed her pregnancy to me, long after I’d figured it out for myself, she neither blushed nor looked away. 

This, though—this flight of the finger over the curve of the thumb—this is the most intimate thing I’ve ever seen her do.  This is evident to everyone at the table, maybe everyone in the restaurant.  As she gestures, it’s like the whole room falls silent:  there’s just her one hand, palm to us, finger dancing over the skin, her eyes on us, each of us, as she writes, trying to see, trying to know, hoping we understand. 

 

An ode (sort of) to the everlasting appeal (kind of) of the boa

It’s Friday morning and I’ve just seen Will and Lucy onto their shuttle bus.  I consider just crossing the street and taking the 26 back to school, but it’s sunny and warm and it’s been a few days since I’ve had anytime to wander around, so I stroll up Kwong Fuk Road, glancing in shop windows and just generally enjoying not being in an office designing powerpoint slides for a workshop I have to run next week. 

I’m vaguely hungry, and tempted to go into one of the bakeries you find every 20 feet or so in Hong Kong, but since moving here 4 months ago, I’ve gained 300 pounds, so even just looking at a custard cup makes my good old Midwestern guilt meter kick in. 

And then I see the steamed buns. 

Now, I should tell you that the first time I had boa dim, I was disgusted:  steamed bread?  Wet buns?  (Quit snickering!)  No flakey crust baked to a crispy golden brown?  None of those little hollow spots, so perfect for storing butter?

And I would eat this why?

The first taste basically lived up to my expectations:  boring.  Bland.  Chewey in a snap-back-in-your-face kind of way. 

And no butter.  Let’s just build the little bun-sized coffins right now, and get it over with. 

Then a few weeks ago I was faced with one of those Chinese breakfasts that consists of greasy noodles cooked with garlic and sinewy ham and—what do you know?—suddenly boiled bread didn’t look half bad.

And frankly, upon this second tasting, I actually found myself sort of satisfied:  sure, it was kind of chewy; sure, the texture was neither as crispy on the outside nor as fluffy on the inside as I would have liked; sure, the waitress looked at me like I had just ordered flambéed baby when I asked if there was any butter in the house—but aside from that, it tasted kind of good, like bread dough tastes just after you’ve added just enough flour to make it stretchy and just before you put it the oven.  Not bad at all, really.

 

And now, on this particular Friday, I’m standing in old Tai Po outside a boa dim shop.  There’s a line of people gathered around a large, white, industrial case with glass doors that slide open when you tug on the thick aluminum handles.  Inside, there are three or four metal shelves, on top of which sit a selection of buns:  some white, some pale green, some round and smooth, some twisted and grooved with a gathered crest at the top, some with meat sticking out of their sides.

As I watch, two women serve a line of customers:  one takes their coins and tosses them into a cardboard box on top of the boa box.  The other takes the order, reaches into the case to retrieve the bun, and slides it into a plastic bag, which she then hands the customer.  Every time she opens the door, a blanket of steam rises into the cold morning air.  In the half-minute or so I watch, ten or eleven customers shuffle their way through the line and leave happy, bun in hand.  Clearly this is the place to be. 

When the line thins, I step forward and lean in for a closer look.  I know this will hurt my macho quotient, but frankly, I’m intimidated by the buns.  There are just so many of them.  What if I get the wrong kind?  What if, in ordering, I commit some egregious cultural error—ordering the Buddhist bun, or the I hate Americans Bun—that brands me forever as a social reprobate?  What, in short, if everyone laughs at me? 

Then I see that across the top of the case stretches a double row of small red stickers, each listing the name of a bun and its cost.  And they’re in English:  Lotus Paste, Sesame Paste, Red Bean, Mushrom, Green Tea, Chicken, Pork and Leek, and many, many more.

I examine my options, not sure where to begin.  Beef curry?  Sausage? 

And then I realize:  I am looking at my destiny.

It’s true.  My entire career as a writer, I have searched for something that is truly mine.  John Updike wrote about suburban angst;  Tim O’Brien’s got that Vietnam War thing; one guy I know blogs just about street food—presently he’s working his way from Beijing to Singapore eating nothing that isn’t sold on a sidewalk.  Another blogger (see the link, above) write about being the only woman in a family of five.  Bill Bryson writes about, well, everything—and seems to get away with it, the bastard. 

But me?  I’ve got nothing.  I’m just a bald white guy from a nation of bald white guys, with no particular distinguishing characteristics—or material. 

Until now. 

Now, standing amid the noise and clutter of a Friday morning in Tai Po, steam rising from the chest/cabinet bun thingy in front of me, I know who I am.  And why the good Lord put me on this earth.

Boa Dim.

I will write about boa dim as no man has written about boa dim before.  I will dwelve into its innermost secrets, savor its most bizarre variations, travel to the remotest corners of the New Territories in search of its most fascinating and often only rumored varieties.

I will become one with the boa. 

And, clearly, I will write lots of dramatic one-sentence paragraphs about it. 

I glance up.  The woman who takes the money is looking at me, face placid.  I straighten, hand her my HK$3.5.  Then I turn to the woman who hands out the buns.  She, too, is looking at me, her face that determined mask of neutrality that the Hongkongers do so well when faced with one as bald and pasty as myself.

“Yes?” she says.

And then, in the confident, resonant voice that can only come from a man who knows his place in the universe, I open my lips and speak the two words that will shape my destiny:

“Sweet potato.”

 

It’s purple.  I forgot about that, that they have purple sweet potatoes in China.  Even so, I bite into it.  Soft.  Slightly moist.  Very chewy.  But tasty.  It has that dusky, mildly earthy taste that makes sweet potatoes so delicious.  Strolling toward the stop for the 26, I chew slowly, happily.  Once I swallow, I bite further into the bun, searching for the flesh of the potato I know will be in the center.  When I find it, it’s hot and soft, like a purple mashed potato. 

Waiting for the minibus, I work my way through the boa, suddenly happy about the day, about work, about my life.  No longer will I have to labor in obscurity, an unknown blogger in a universe of bloggers. I have found my muse.  I’ll milk—you heard me:  milk the boa for all it’s worth.  I’ll write about the boa and write about the boa and spread the gospel of the boa until the farthest corners of the universe echo in praise of steamed bread.  I’ll get to meet Oprah.

 

Only, I won’t.  Because by the time the 26 finally comes and I’ve pretty much finished my sweet potato boa, I’m sick of the damn thing.  Or more to the point:  sickened by the damn thing.  Because man, those things are sweet.  Whoever though of putting yams in a boa must have been married to a dentist, because that’s like adding brown sugar to a jar of honey. 

And man, those things are big!  Or not big really, but filling.  Or dense.  Or whatever it is that makes you feel like you’re going to hurl after eating just one of them.  The whole ride home on the 26, I keep one hand on the grip in front of me, trying to keep my churning stomach from churning even more as we skid around corners and roar past taxis.  The other hand I keep over my mouth, just in case my first hand doesn’t do the trick.

When we arrive back on campus, I’m as purple my boa and swearing to high heaven that never again—NEVER!—will I eat another &*%# boa, sweet potato or otherwise.  I mean, seriously, they could put Gillian Anderson in a bikini with 30 million dollars and a Pulitzer Prize for literature in the middle of a boa, and I wouldn’t take a bite.

 

Except maybe I would.  Because now, two days later, as I write this, I find myself thinking back to that steaming white case/trunk boa thingy, that busy street corner with those eager crowds, that semi-surly woman taking my money and the other, equally, semi-surly woman reaching in through the steam and pulling out a big white lump of wet dough.  And I find myself thinking:

Mmmm . . . sesame paste . . .

 

Vittles II: A play in five parts, starring Bruce Willis as a resilient yet sensitive squid

     Around the corner from the Tai Po market, right next to the shop where we buy almonds and dried papaya, stands a non-descript, almost dingy bakery.  Most of their offerings are on the bread line, flavorless and bland.  If you duck down, though, and look close on the bottom shelf of the glass case beneath the cash register, you’ll see something that can make you very happy. 

Mango Pancakes aren’t pancakes in the American sense of the word, but more a cross of crepes and a breakfast burrito.  The “cake” referred to is a thin layer of golden sponge, maybe twice the size of a pancake but not nearly as thick as something you’d layer and frost.  Around it are stewed slices of mango, maybe from a can, but frankly it doesn’t matter:  they’re sweet and a little green in that way that mangos have.  And around that is fluffy white whipped cream of the cheap, canned variety, the stuff you know you should hate, but don’t, especially when it comes with mangos.  And wrapping it all up is a large, slightly-eggy crepe, folded in a square like the dinner crepes you have in France when you’re in the country and they’re not catering to tourists. 

Just to recap, in case I lost you at “golden sponge”:  crepes, yellow cake, mangos, and whipped cream, all wrapped up in a tidy little package you can gobble as you stroll down the street. 

 

The night of the fireworks celebrating the PRC’s 60^th anniversary, we stumbled out the MTR station and halted just on the brink of our usual path of backstreet Kowloon. 

“Spring Deer?” I said to Ellen.  One of our favorites, famous throughout HK for its Peking Duck.

She gave a little shrug, then a grimace.  Relief flooded me.  So it was okay.  For a week now I’d been walking around feeling guilty, too embarrassed to confess the truth:  I was sick of Chinese food.  And, it appeared, so was Ellen.  Thank God. 

We turned around and walked into the first western restaurant we could find.  Tapas.  Excellent.  We ordered two baskets of fried chicken and French fries to keep the kids happy, then a pair of Hoegardens to keep us happy as we perused the menu.  It was all good in the end, but the two highlights of the evening were the chorizo with figs and the sautéed squid with olives.

I’m beginning to like this hot and sweet thing (boy, there’s a sentence not to be taken out of context):  the chorizo was sliced into half-inch rounds and fried in its own juices (grease, really, but juices sounds better).  Fresh sliced figs were added at the last minute and cooked until they were barely soft.  The combination was unreal:  burning the top and back of your mouth at the same time it lit up the front of your tongue with sweetness.  Unbelievable.

The squid was cooked in just a little bit of olive oil with Mediterranean herbs.  The olives were green, so here again you had contrast, this time between the mild, almost milky taste of the squid and the sharp, edgy taste of the olive.

 

The evening of Mid-Autumn festival, we went out to dinner with our friends Anita and Collin.  The dinner was good, except for the sea cucumber that I ordered (Am I the only person in the universe who didn’t know this isn’t actually a vegetable?).  But the best thing, seriously?  A tiny dish served as a pre-appetizer full of mildly vinegared cucumbers (real ones, grown in the dirt not birthed by sea demon spawn) and pork floss.  You heard me:  pork floss.  Dried pork that’s pulled apart and spun so that it’s fuzzy and chewy.  A little sweet, a little spicy, a little salty. And delicious.

 

Strolling across the walkway between old Tai Po and the new city, I hear the dink dink dink of metal on metal, like someone’s playing a triangle and getting it all wrong.  Sitting on one side of the covered bridge is an old man dressed entirely in white—white sneakers, white pants, a graying-white shirt with an open collar.  Even his baseball cap is white.

Between his legs, resting on a small stand, is a large metal pan, about nine inches deep and thirty inches across.  Wrinkled foil covers the side nearest me, but in the open space of the rest I see uneven, off-white chunks of something coated in something white and powdery.

That’s a terrible description I know, but at this point I have no idea what’s going on.  The old man is sitting on a stool beside this pan, leaning over it with a small chisel in one hand.  In his other he holds a metal instrument I’ve never seen before, about the shape and size of the hand-held scrapers you use to remove ice from your windshield.  The only difference is that the end of his instrument is scooped and the man keeps using it to gather up the vanilla colored chunks of—whatever it is (crystallized human flesh?), tossing them in the white powdery stuff, whatever it is (dandruff?).  Then he gathers and tosses again, and then again, then taps the tip of the chisel on the back of the scoop dink dink dink and a pudgy mom with a little boy in glasses comes over.  She says something in Cantonese, and the man mumbles back.  He pulls out a small plastic bag the size of a handkerchief, scoops the candy in the sugar (I’m making assumptions here, I know,  but the boy hardly looks cannibalistic) and slides it edgewise into the bag.  The woman hands him a five-dollar coin and the old man goes back to scooping and tapping, scooping and tapping. 

The great thing about this candy is not how chewy it is—think stale saltwater taffy—or how sweet it is—(it’s not just sugar, but confectioners sugar) or the way it’s gingery at first and peanut-buttery later on, when the outside has softened and your dental work is starting to shake loose. 

No, the great thing about this candy is the way it burns:  somewhere, deep beneath the sugar and the nougat and the butter, somewhere beneath the nuts and ginger and glucose, somewhere beneath all of that—is cayenne.  You feel it first thing when it hits your mouth, and after you chew for a while (and chew . . . and chew), you feel it at the back of your throat.  And the whole time your lips are still powdered with sugar and your jaw is working and your mouth is salivating over that nutty, earthy flavor, your mouth continues to burn like you just swallowed sweet, candy-covered nettles.

 

This one sounds gross.  It looks gross.  It feels gross.  Hell, it smells gross. 

But here goes:  we’re sitting down by the harbor, stuffing stale peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our mouths so that we can catch the 12:00 cruise on a real junk.  Lucy hates PBJ.  She reminds us of this every 7 seconds, taking bites that would leave a mouse famished.  It’s 11:51, though, and we still have to find the right dock and we need her to shut up and eat so we can get on this big old boat and I can promptly regurgitate my sandwich into the harbor. 

“Lucy,” I tell her.  “If you eat that sandwich now—right now—then after the cruise we can go get some dumplings on the island.”

Lucy loves dumplings.  She can eat a dozen at a go and not break a sweat.  But even so, I can see her eyeing me carefully.

Finally she says, “And if I don’t eat my sandwich right now?”

“We’ll sell you to that man in the Tai Po market, the guy with one eye.”

“The pig gut man?”

“That’s right,” I say.   “The pig gut man.”

Even so, she takes a moment to consider the options.  Finally, though, the sandwich goes in her mouth, we sprint for the docks, we make our cruise, and we have a grand time.

Once we make it to Hong Kong Island, we go in search of a dim sum restaurant.  And of course we can’t find any.  6,000 restaurants on that island, the main island of Hong Kong, the most famous place in the world for dim sum, and we can’t find a single friggin’ dim sum restaurant to save our lives.  Finally, we circle back to where we started, coming up a narrow, rising street.  And there, 14 feet from where our quest began, is a restaurant called, I kid you not, “The Dumpling House.”

I turn and look at Ellen.   Her face is glistening with sweat, her skin pale.  We’ve just walked 1,489 miles on an island roughly 31 square miles in size.  Had we simply turned in the other direction when we started, we would have eaten three days ago.

We go in.  It’s a pit:  part waffle house, part Flannery O’Connor stage play.  But they have dumplings.  Only one kind, of course, but Lucy doesn’t care:  as long as they have dough wrapped around something dead and ground up, she’s happy.

I don’t quite know how we got the soup.  God knows, if I’m awake, sober, and not suffering brain trauma and I see a soup called “Seaweed and Egg” on the menu, I’m not ordering it.  Ever.  Jennifer Anniston, naked, with “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” written across her chest in orange marmalade could be serving it, and I still wouldn’t order it.  I mean, are you kidding me? 

And this is a soup that does itself no favors.  When it arrives, it’s just as advertised:  more or less scrambled egg, served in a steaming bowl of seaweed and what looks like dishwater.  And we’re not talking that sanitized, formerly dried, neat and tidy seaweed you get in an American sushi restaurant.  Oh now, when this seaweed comes, it’s got attitude.  It’s seaweed that says, “So, you hate seaweed, do ya’?  Well seaweed this, pal.”  And then it grabs its privates and flicks you a rude gesture that only makes sense in Italy. 

I mean, this stuff is fuzzy.  It looks like seaweed, like the crap you avoid stepping in when you’re having a nice time at the beach.  Only here, it’s in a bowl, with a strange boiled version of the scrambled egg.  And a spoon.  Because you’re supposed to eat it.

The next question, of course, is why I put it in my mouth.  I don’t know, to be honest.  But I did.  And boy was I glad. 

You know how coffee smells good, but doesn’t taste nearly as good as it smells?  Or how pipe smoke really makes you feel warm and nostalgic when you catch it drifting on an autumn breeze, but when you put that pipe to your mouth and inhale you feel like someone dragged a rake across your tonsils? 

Well this stuff, this soup, it tastes like coffee smells.  Not like coffee tastes, mind you, but like it smells:  it’s dark, and textured, tickling the back of your throat before going down warm and rich and—and just fulfilling.  It’s satisfying, like taking a bite of warm bread soaked in butter.  How it work, is beyond me, combining two things that generally disgust on their own—dead water plant, and soggy egg—into something that’s salty and hearty and really really tasty.  But it does.  And that’s a good thing.  

Vittles

If you walk into a grocery store in Hong Kong, chances are you’ll think to yourself, “Man, they need to throw out their kiwi.  It stinks.”  And then you’ll pass through the produce section and into the bread aisle and forget all about it.

Until the next time you go to a grocery store.  Or until the next time you walk past a grocery store with an open front.  Or until the next time you’re in a mall that has a grocery store at one end, and you’re at the other end, in a perfume store, with a scarf wrapped around your nose.  And then you’ll smell that rotten stinky fruit/kiwi smell again, and go, “God Almighty, what is it with these people and their rotten fruit?”

Of course I’d heard about durian (rhymes with urine, with good reason) before I came here, the spiky fruit with the soft innards that smells so bad there are signs on trains in Singapore forbidding its presence.  What I’d heard, though, was that despite it’s nasty smell, it tasted like something God had made with his (or her, or its) own hands.  And of course, as a semi-epicurean (meaning, I have more cook books than I actually use) when I heard about this I thought, “Cool!  I want to try that!”  Thinking, of course, that, sort of like Jagermeister, having the guts and stomach to try durian, and even like it (because, you know, us cultured types like peculiar things that the MacDonald’s crowd is too uncivilized to appreciate) made you a manly man in a chardonnay swilling kind of a way. 

No, actually.  Durian just tastes as foul as it smells, and it smells plenty foul. 

I know this because last night after we went out to dinner with one of my colleagues, they took us across the street to a dessert place.  While the kids were ordering all sorts of fruit and frozen tofu concoctions, I pointed to a poster on the wall of a sticky pastry surrounding a fruity center. 

“What’s that?” I asked.

Colin, my Singaporean neighbor, just grinned. 

To begin with, it was the only dessert I saw last night that came to the table tightly sealed in plastic wrap.  Second, while it didn’t have an overwhelming smell when I took it out, it certainly did remind me of something leafy and wet that had been left outside in the heat.  And third, the first bite was nasty, yes, but not that bad.  Oh no, not that bad indeed, not compared to the second bite, which was like eating a grape that had been soaked in putrid flesh.  And the second bite made the third bite seem like pure heaven. 

Colin swears that there are those who eat durian for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I’m guessing these people are single.  Even 14 hours after having it, I can still taste its rancid unholiness at the back of my throat, and smell it somewhere in the upper regions of my nostrils. 

 

That aside, here are a few of the culinary delights you should know about, that we’ve encountered thus far:

Our first time to Kowloon, Lucy and Will and Jamie and I emerged from a small park shaded by tall trees onto a busy Nathan road, with its 1920s Main street architecture, honking horns, crowded sidewalks, and a blinding sun that brought the sweat to our foreheads instantly.  Squinting, the kids ducked under a brick overhang and waited for me to get my bearings.  Next thing I knew, a woman with a bright red head scarf swooped in over them and was offering them a bottle of water.  I scurried over, ever the watchful parent—and, admittedly, a little thirsty myself.  Bright red head scarves, you see, especially ones with matching skirts and sequins, aren’t really Hong Kong couture, but more the sign of a Jonestown survivor still trying to work out her anger issues.  When I got to the kids, this woman was bent over them, thrusting the water at them and chattering away.  She turned, looked at me, and handed me a square package of crackers. 

“These are for you,” she said, then started babbling something in English about some school, with ballerinas and kumquats and brown rubber duckies that knew how to squeal.   And then she straightened, and walked away. 

I stared after her.  Then I looked at the kids.  They were sweating profusely, and the bottle was clearly cold, slick with condensation.  I reached for the water, checked the cap to make sure it was sealed.  Then I broke the seal and took a sip.  Nothing burned down my throat, my stomach didn’t dissolve in a rush of acid, no imperceptible shards of glass cut my tongue.  I handed it to the kids. 

Then, as we wove along the sidewalks toward our MTR station, I split the foil wrapper of the crackers with my thumbnail.  They looked like saltines, only slightly longer, with a seam in the middle and a 3-2-3 pattern of tiny holes in each square.  I bit into one. 

Butter.  Salt.  And something slightly sharp and green.  I looked at the label:  Four Seas, Green Spring Onion.  I took another bite.  Flakey and golden.  You could almost taste the chicken stock they’d used to make them.

 

Okay, so you were probably expecting something more highbrow.  Well here’s one:  we were worried my boss and neighbor Anita wasn’t seeing nearly enough of me, so last night we insisted on taking her and her family out to dinner to repay them for all the help they’d given us in settling in (Hey, with friends like us . . . ). 

Ellen wanted to know more about Cantonese food, so Anita and her husband drove us to a nice restaurant in the middle of Tai Po and ordered a set menu with a half-dozen items, including Ostrich (man, was the head on that sucker big!  Just kidding,), braised tofu, barbequed pork (Will’s favorite), and fried squid with a nice, hot, yellow mustard.  My favorite though, was the pepper beef.  It was sliced thin, and cooked hot so that the meat curled and was crispy on the outside but still pink in the middle.  Surrounding it were little pearl onions, green peppers, and thick triangular cuts of red onion. 

“Damn,” I said at one point, because I always find that swearing in an expensive restaurant and with people I barely know is a great way to impress them.  “I love these little round onions.”

Ellen and Anita laughed.  I raised my eyebrows.  Then Ellen pointed with her chopsticks.  “They’re not onions,” she said.  “See?  They’re lychees.”

Sometimes you eat a meal and you know the cook is clever—the guy who puts raisins in your curry, say, or the woman who decided that cinnamon rolls with frosting were a good idea. 

And then sometimes you eat a meal—say one where sweet crispy lychees are sautéed with crunchy peppered beef—and you know the cook is a genius. 

 

The other night Ellen made pork chops, frying them up with a little garlic.  She’d bought some long thin eggplants, what most American cookbooks call Japanese eggplant, but apparently you can buy them from Chinese people too.  Neither of us had any clever ideas about what to do with them, so she just sliced them up and tossed them in the wok with a little olive oil.  The key, I think, was that she didn’t overcook them, just allowed them to soak up a little oil and heat up.  So when they came out and were on the plate, they were still crisp.  There was nothing green about the taste, nothing bitter or sharp.  Instead, they hit every taste bud in your mouth, filling it with a warm, lush, summery sensation, like when you eat good, warm bread, or dig into tomatoes straight off the vine.

 

The first 29 times we walked down the main street of old Tai Po, we didn’t notice it.  But then I read this great article in the South China Morning Post about how 7-Eleven was trying to edge out local fish ball venders, and two days later we walk past the same narrow shop we’d seen every day since the kids started school, and realized that those little white things floating in the vat of curry must be fish balls. 

“Hey—“I said, pointing, and Ellen, who is generally more articulate, nodded.  “Fish balls.”

So of course we had to buy some.  Granted, it was only 9 in the morning, but the paper said that the common working man of Hong Kong had these things anytime of day, along with milk tea, so why shouldn’t we?

They were fishier than we expected.  Not overwhelming, been sitting on the ice in Kroger for three days too long kind of fishy, but fishy none the less.  But the curry had a nice kick, spiking the back of your throat as it went down.  And that milk rice stuff?  Imagine cold tea with lots of cream and lots and lots of sugar, sliding down your throat right after a good dose of spicy curry.  Not bad. 

 

Wednesday I had to go down to central for a briefing at the US Consulate—something about how it’s illegal to touch womens’ hair on the MTR and murmur, “So pretty.  Like a sleeping kitten,” but I have to admit I didn’t listen very carefully.  Afterwards a few of us went to a restaurant on Wellington that one of the staff at the office recommended.  On a dare, one of ordered the marinated jellyfish.  Someone else—me, probably—ordered the barbequed pork ribs. 

Chances are you’ve had the jellyfish before and not known it.  It looks and feels like slightly underdone rice noodles.  It tastes like a sweet sort of pickle, with just a little spicy pepper thrown in.

The ribs were delicious too.  Which isn’t surprising, because they came to the table under a two inch layer of gelatinous fat.  This is no exaggeration:  imagine a small block of ribs, meat falling off the bone, just what you’d expect—under a two-inch, thick yellow layer of gelatinous fat.  I’ll say it again:  the fat was two inches thick.  And gelatinous.  Headley, our resident nutritionist, just laughed when the waiter laid the plate down. 

Funny thing, though.  When you took your chopsticks and slid them crossways under the yellowed of goo, the fat just dropped right off.  And what was left behind was moist and rich with flavor. 

Which isn’t surprising, since it’d been cooked beneath—say it with me, brother—a two-inch layer of gelatinous fat.

 

If you go to the Wellcome grocery store—yes, that’s how it’s spelled—just up the hill from where we leave, they carry a brand of sour lime gummy worms.  Each one is about six inches long and skinny as a real night crawler.  Eating them requires winding them onto your tongue—otherwise they’re so big they fall out of your mouth.  And they’re sweet, until you swallow, when the back of your mouth is lit up with a salty sourness.

 

Last weekend we went in to Kowloon to see the laser show that happens over the bay every night at eight o’clock.  Wandering down a small side street, we stopped at a rack of postcards.  While the kids were choosing, I glanced into the shop and realized it was actually a little alley leading into the middle of the building.  Not to far in, I saw an Indian restaurant, and pointed it out to Ellen.  “I wonder if it’s any good,” I said.

The man selling the cards shrugged.  “Go upstairs instead,” he said.  “Always full.”

We looked at him.  “Really?”

He nodded.  “Always full.”

So we did.  The inside was long and narrow, with windows along one side and white table clothes, and sage looking waiters who hovered between your table and the next working hard to look unobtrusive, and succeeding.  We ordered pretty much at random, only making sure to get something for Will that had chicken and didn’t bleed profusely.

The first dish was shrimp in tomato sauce with crispy rice.  The shrimp and sauce were just dandy, fine even.  But that crispy rice.  Man.  It looks like Weatabix, rectangular and thin and textured.  The taste is hard to describe, but is closest, as Lucy pointed out, to buttered popcorn.  So, to summarize:  fresh shrimp, a creamy tomato sauce, and popcorn. 

What’s not to like?

It got even better with our last dish:  Dried Pickled Cabbage with Mushrooms and Bamboo Shoots.  Yeah, I’m not sure what we were thinking either.  When I pointed to it on the menu, the waiter looked up at the maitre d’ and said something in rapid Cantonese—which is an exercise in redundancy, since there is no such thing as slow Cantonese.  The maitre d’, who looks like no one so much as a Chinese Riccardo Montebaun, came up and leaned over my shoulder.  “Is dry,” he said, pointing at the dish on the menu and looking a little angry.

“It’s okay,” I said, even though I had no idea what he meant.  Did he mean “dry” like dry cereal?  Were we going to eat astronaut food?  Would it be served with Tang?  Maybe, instead of being presented with a serving plate, we’d simply be handed little plastic Craisin-sized baggies of mushrooms and bamboo.  Or maybe they’d add water to the dish once it arrived?  Surely they didn’t expect us to hydrate our own vittles? 

What finally arrived was a big dish of what looked like dried green leaves, almost ash-like in their lightness and texture.  Scattered throughout, themselves so light that they could float on this mass of dried—um—stuff, were clam-sized gray things. 

Huh. I thought.

“Huh,” said Ellen.

“What’s that?” said Lucy, so loudly that a couple at the other end of the restaurant looked up. 

I grinned sheepishly at our waiter, who was suddenly looking slightly less unobtrusive and slightly more, well—obtrusive.  Then I glanced at the maitre d’, who was looking over some menus, but whom, I suspected, was watching us out of the corner of one eye.

It’s amazing, when you think about it, how many things I’ve done in my life to keep waiters and waitresses happy.  I’ve drunk flat sodas.  I’ve sipped vinegary wine.  I’ve ignored flakes of bread beside the salt shaker.  I’ve apologized profusely for returning food that tasted like rancid cow dung.  All to satisfy someone who I’d probably never see again, and who often didn’t bother to turn from the table before rolling her eyes at my questions about food that cost more than a small farm where I could grow it myself. 

“Well,” I said, and reached across the table with my chopsticks.   The food rustled—rustled—as I put it on my plate.  I stuck my nose over it and took a whiff.  A slightly smoky order, slightly charred, but not bad.  Kind of like the burnt part of a roasted marshmallow—though, of course, the burnt part of a roasted marshmallow is generally redeemed by the fact that it surrounds a roasted marshmallow. 

“Well,” I said again.  And then I stuck it in my mouth.

I’m not going to say much about the dried, pickled cabbage.  It had some flavor, yes:  slightly dusty, slightly ashy, slightly green.  Nice, but not overwhelming.  But man, those dried mushrooms.  Wow.  It was like mushroom, but not really.  More like mushroom pate.  But not really that, either.  It was definitely mushroomy, but sort of mushroom light.  Like, I don’t know, mushroom squared, then divided by two, so that the sum was the same as what you’d started with, but the effect as a whole was different. 

Okay, I admit it:  not only do I not know crap about math, but the taste of those mushrooms completely eludes description.  To quote Salinger, God, I wish you could’ve been there.   If you want to try it yourself, come to Hong Kong and go to Spring Deer on Mody Road.  You’ll have no trouble finding it, just ask anyone.  They’ll be able to tell you.  Because, as it turns out, this little restaurant that we just stumbled upon?  It’s one of the most famous in Hong Kong. 

Damn.  We are so lucky.