After the Awa Odori festival in Tokushima and the great Japan trip last August, I needed to run a few errands for a few hours in Hong Kong. Time was tight, but I stopped by Tak Kee in Kennedy Town for some satisfying Chiu Chow along my route. Tak Kee was a very casual Chiu Chow joint, where many working class folks satisfied their Chiu Chow cravings at a reasonable price. During lunch, swear words casually fly from various tables.
Grabbed the classic Chiu Chow marinated goose rice ($?), the very peppery pork stomach soup $88 and a cold drink. Nothing fancy, but scratched my Chiu Chow itch. The restaurant wasn’t very full.
I think the total added up to around $150. Which made me feel like a high roller because the economy, along with wages in Hong Kong, was stagnating. Many working class folks were struggling, as evidenced by the surging popularity of to-go “This This Rice” places where dozens of dishes were offered and people picked two or three items by pointing (hence, this, this) along with rice as their lunch/ dinner, all for a very economical price of under $40, or about $6 USD. Folks turned to such eateries and forego dining out in order to make the very tight budget.
On the way to Tak Kee, I even passed by such a place that offered “This This Rice” for $28. I didn’t have time to snap the photo but I felt sad when I saw it, because I hadn’t seen lunch box this cheap for 20-25 years. Even Cafe de Coral, an ubiquitous fast food Chinese place, charged more these days.
For some Cantonese people, swear words are just weaved naturally into daily conversations. They don’t need any particular reasons to swear. In fact, when they don’t swear, we’d wonder if something’s wrong.
Poke your head into the kitchen of some Cantonese joint, they probably are swearing like drunken sailors.
Of course, in the event they are upset, they swear too, with a little more passion. Like one time I was eating at a Cantonese restaurant, and the owner of the restaurant was swearing on the phone at the supplier for sending him low quality produce.
My wife once told me that a long time ago when she was at Cal, she was in some big class in an auditorium. In the back sat a couple of students from Hong Kong. My wife, who didn’t speak Cantonese, overheard those two swearing non-stop. They were commenting about all these other students in the room, probably thinking nobody else understood them, or maybe like many Cantonese, didn’t really care if any one heard.
I still remember the heady days of Hong Kong in the 70, 80s till the 90s - they were still the trendsetters in the Asia-Pacific region. My heart seemed to beat faster whenever I stepped off the plane in HK as, compared to staid, boring Singapore, HK was inestimably more exciting. It was a food mecca for gastronomes around the region.
Nowadays, HKers themselves go to Shenzhen to eat for better value.
I miss those Kai Tak years! Back in 1993 when I was a Singapore Airlines auditor, I was sent to review the operations at Kai Tak airport. Spent quite a bit of time there. The Hung Hom neighborhood next to the airport was very, very atmospheric - good to visit, but I won’t want to live there then!! Nowadays, everything’s been gentrified.
Very colourful - dense, tightly-packed tenements of various functions: residential, industrial and commercial, all existing cheek-by-jowl next to each other. Nothing like that in sterile, antiseptic Singapore. Life seemed immeasurably more spontaneous and more “human” in HK, and also more “Chinese”! I know it’s a weird thing to say when one is coming from Singapore, but to us, Hongkongers seemed so much more “Chinese” (similar to their Mainland China counterparts in appearance and behavior) than we were.
I think you meant the Kowloon walled city. Hung Hom was further south. Home to the Polytechnic University, the Cross Harbor tunnel entrance, funeral service companies, the terminus of the train to China and residential neighborhoods. It’s not very different now.
I was at Kowloon’s Walled City, too - brought here by my SIA HK colleagues for a lark. That place was a real eye-opener! Hung Hom was “normal” compared to the Walled City. Believe me - to Singaporeans, even Tsimshatsui was a shock to our senses!!
SIA’s cabin crew stayed at Kowloon Hotel then, and so did we from the HQ finance department. The technical crew (pilots, etc.) stayed at the Excelsior in Causeway Bay. But everywhere we go then, we were overwhelmed by the sheer humanity. We were told that Mongkok was the densest-populated district on Earth at the time.
is it the high prices?
In fact, when they don’t swear, we’d wonder if something’s wrong.
