our friend tom

Paula and I have just returned from visiting Tom Li, who has been out of Hong Kong for many months, so we’re completely cream-crackered. Tom has a store in the remote New Territories village of Sham Chung, and every Saturday when he’s in town we cycle down from the north, a round trip of 45 miles, to eat his incomparable pan-fried noodles.

The cycling is an adventure in itself, keeping entirely to country paths, back roads and dedicated cycle tracks, but that’s a subject for another day. Tom grew up in Sham Chung, which has no road access and is now almost completely abandoned, but he left to work in Chinese restaurants in the UK while still in his teens, more than forty years ago. He has a very low opinion of Chinese food in Britain, a judgement that I share, but he eventually moved to the States, where he opened his own restaurant. Nowadays, he comes back to Hong Kong regularly because he enjoys cooking for people who appreciate his food, and he has a lot of ‘fans’. His regular menu is basic country store fare, but in no other store will you find food this good. And if you phone him well in advance he’ll make anything you want.

We arrive in mid-morning, so there are no other diners, and we have time, over a bottle of ice-cold Tsingtao (a Chinese beer), to catch up on what we’ve been doing since we last met. Then it’s time for Tom to disappear into the kitchen. The first two pictures show Tom frying the noodles, and the third shows the end-product: Tom always complains that we polish off the plate in less time than it takes him to prepare it. After a second bottle of Tsingtao, it’s time to take our leave. We need to reach the bridge over the Shing Mun River (the halfway point) before one o’clock to avoid the worst of the crowds on the main cycle track north. A perfect day. We’re already looking forward to next Saturday.

slow food

A few years ago, while I was back in the UK, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen for some time. In the course of the ensuing conversation, he happened to mention that his family had been to New Zealand en masse to attend his sister’s wedding. On the return journey, they had a six-hour stopover in Hong Kong.

“Guess where they ate,” he said.

“No need to guess,” I replied. “They ate at McDonald’s.”

I feel deeply sorry for people who have a chance to eat one meal in Hong Kong and this is what they choose. But I’m not surprised. People like McDonald’s because every item on the menu tastes exactly the same, whether it’s in Beijing or London, Moscow or New York, or in the same restaurant, every time. It’s somehow ‘reliable’. It’s also why I dislike it. Variation is, or should be, part of the attraction of eating the same thing regularly.

Every time my wife and I go for breakfast at our nearby restaurant, a dish we always order is har gow, which are small dumplings consisting of fresh prawns wrapped in rice-flour pastry and steamed. And every time there is something different: the pastry is thicker or more glutinous; or the seasoning varies; and the crunchiness of the prawns depends on precisely how long they’ve been steamed. We eat them slowly and compare notes. We drink tea from very small cups, and we chat about the restaurant’s clientele. Well over a hundred of them at any one time. And at 63, I’m probably below the average age.

Yam char (‘drink tea’) is an important cultural ritual here, and this is the only restaurant in Luen Wo Hui (plenty of eateries, but this is the only restaurant). Everyone shares tables, but it’s still more or less full by 7am. Once we’ve found somewhere to sit, we order the tea (usually sow mei). The waitress brings two pots, one with tea and one with boiling water, and a large empty dish. The water is for us to clean our bowls, spoons, cups and chopsticks, which are on the table beforehand and have in fact already been washed. Anyway, cleaning the utensils is my responsibility, and I have my own method, but the best thing about this process is watching how other people do it. And everyone has their own method, not all of which are good or sensible. Some people even use the tea rather than the water, which I’ve never understood.

In the old days (1990s), women pushed heated trolleys around the restaurant laden with steaming baskets and with signs on the front telling you what was in the baskets (going back to the old, old days (1970s), the trolley pushers used to shout out what they had on board, making a noisy room even noisier). Nowadays, however, we can fill in an order card, and we always order the same three dishes. There is a large open counter in one corner, and while we wait for our three dim sum favourites to arrive (freshly prepared, so it takes about 15 minutes), my wife selects a couple of other dishes to keep us going. Everything is relaxed, despite the loudness of the background chatter. This is slow food, where eating is never done in a hurry, and nobody is hassling you to leave to make way for incoming patrons.

This last point reminds me of an Italian American restaurant my wife and I once visited in the posh district of Kowloon Tong on the recommendation of her then boss. We were aware that it was very popular, so my wife called to reserve a table for seven o’clock. Sorry, you can book for six o’clock or seven thirty, but not seven o’clock. I’ll gloss over the meal itself, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t exciting either. The one incident that has stuck in my memory came at the end. We’d finished eating, and a waiter asked whether we’d like dessert or coffee. No we wouldn’t. Less than a minute later, the same waiter returned.

“Excuse me sir,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve taken the trouble of preparing your bill.”

In other words: “We aren’t going to get any more money out of you, so fuck off!”

This may seem like an extreme interpretation, but it is how I felt at the time. And we would have left within the next five minutes anyway. We’ve never been back.

When I analyse it, this is a restaurant run by accountants, who may know how to maximize income but have no feeling for the adventure of eating. They sell you a homogenized, pre-packaged, standardized, ninety-minute dining experience. It may be more expensive than eating at McDonald’s, you may have your food brought to the table, and you may pay at the end of your meal, but the underlying philosophy is the same.

I’ve no doubt that McDonald’s has a business plan and a mission statement, and that in neither document will you find any reference to what the company really stands for. In fact, like MTV in the music field, McDonald’s is representative of an accelerating trend towards the homogenization of popular culture throughout the world. The company can only expand at the expense of indigenous cultures; for example, it opened hundreds of new outlets in the 1990s in Beijing, and now almost no local under thirty years of age knows, or is interested in learning, how to prepare traditional Pekinese dumplings. Within a generation, no one will remember what they tasted like either, although some ersatz replacement may well be available at the nearest McDonald’s ‘restaurant’, complete with ‘tangy’ sauce, whatever that means.

hong kong country

Given that this blog is called ‘The View from Fanling’, some readers may have wondered who or what this Fanling is. Wonder no more. Fanling is a large town in the northern New Territories, and it’s where I live. It’s not a notably photogenic town, except in the spring, when the trees are flowering, but I took a small liberty with my earlier statement anyway: in fact I live in a small traditional village about a mile east of town, and what follows is a (mis)guided tour of the neighbourhood.

My village is called San Wai, and it’s a walled village. This view is of the west wall, and the gateway you see is the only way in and out. There is a squat defensive tower at each corner with embrasures through which crossbows could have been fired in earlier times. However, I don’t live within the walls. Too claustrophobic. I live in a modern house close to the east wall, built on what was once the village’s paddy fields (no rice has been grown in Hong Kong since about 1975).

If we now turn around and walk about 60 metres from where the previous photo was taken, we come to the River Indus (not the one in Pakistan, obviously, but it is one of the largest rivers in Hong Kong). It was probably given this name by some wag in the British colonial administration in the distant past. It has been canalized, like all the rivers in the area, which suggests that flooding was once a regular occurrence here. Egrets are common, herons are often seen, and if you’re lucky you may catch the turquoise flash of a kingfisher. An evening stroll along the river bank in springtime is a ‘musical’ delight. The air is filled with the cacophonous croaking of thousands of frogs, and if my hypothesis is correct that each species has its own distinctive croak, you will hear at least ten and possibly twelve different species. The most ‘entertaining’ are the frogs that live in the drainage traps. These are concrete shafts about a metre square and four metres deep that are designed to trap debris during heavy rain. The shaft acts as an acoustic resonator (the same effect that you get when you hold a seashell to your ear), and as a result the croak is so loud you might think it was a cow mooing.

Our route now takes us across the footbridge that can be seen in the distance in the previous picture and across what was once the floodplain of the river. Much of this plain has been overtaken by weeds, but given that the soil is extremely fertile, some enterprising locals have taken advantage by growing vegetables here. It is a curious fact that most of the people tending these plots are old ladies, and it is not an exaggeration to say that many of them are in their eighties! The high-rise apartment blocks in the distance mark the eastern edge of Luen Wo Hui, a working-class district of Fanling where I do most of my food shopping and where my wife and I often go for yam char (literally, ‘drink tea’ but in practice ‘breakfast’).

However, before we reach Luen Wo Hui, we pass Koon Garden. The derelict house that can be glimpsed through the gateway bears the date ‘1960’ on its front elevation, which means that in the space of half a century, someone has built a substantial house, lived in it and abandoned it, and a tree has grown to partially block the entrance.

Returning to San Wai by a shorter route, we pass another gateway. This one proudly proclaims that it is the dwelling of Mr Lee Ming Sang, and like Koon Garden the house within is in ruins. Every time I pass it, I’m reminded of Shelley’s poem:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Yes, I am aware that I’m employing a degree of hyperbole here, but no more than might be expected from a former hack journalist. A recently abandoned wood-framed tin shack can be seen on the right of the picture. The last occupant removed all the tin before leaving, presumably to use elsewhere, leaving the frame to the termites, which won’t take long to finish it off.

Further along the path, we come to the ‘sun gate’. This is what I call a ‘story picture’. The story may not be true, but it is certainly plausible: the substantial house behind the gate, well hidden by trees, is owned by a Chinese millionaire, who may well have grown up here. It is not occupied all the time, but it is still in use. This house is about half a kilometre from any road, and the anonymous millionaire uses this address in all correspondence with the tax authorities, which, knowing that all the other houses on this plain are tin shacks, assume that this dwelling too is merely a shack. In this way, the millionaire is able to declare less than his real income without arousing suspicion. However, this very expensive stainless steel gate is the giveaway, betraying an opulence not seen anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

The tin shack in this picture is more typical of the dwellings scattered across the plain. It is taken looking back along the track from a footbridge, from which the next picture is also taken.

This is a tributary of the River Indus, the name of which I’ve not yet been able to discover; the confluence can be seen in the middle distance. Although in winter the river flow is confined to the narrow channel on the right, I’ve seen a three-foot catfish in the channel. Egrets can be seen frequently here, standing motionless along the edge of the channel watching intently for smaller fish. From this point, it is less than 200 metres to where we started, but the skyline in the far distance is our next destination. It circumscribes a narrow side valley now used as a firing range by the People’s Liberation Army but set up originally by the British army.

A narrow concrete military road runs along the ridge line. It too was built by the British and demarcates an exclusion zone along the border with the rest of China that was once a preventive measure against illegal immigrants. It is no longer used by vehicular traffic, except possibly mountain bikes, but the occasional hiker may be encountered. The murkiness of the background is a measure of the pollution level in this area, all of which is a result of the rapid industrialization of southern Guangdong over the past three decades.

Finally, on the descent from the ridge, we pass this grave. Graves like this are scattered all over the hillsides of the New Territories, and the exact location of each will have been determined by the dictates of fung shui. Although it may not be obvious, this is something of a puzzle picture. The white area in the foreground is all that remains of another grave, one that has been almost completely obliterated. Fragments of engraved and polished granite litter the immediate area. My wife and I have discussed this at length: it is clear that the smaller grave must have been desecrated by people associated with the larger grave, but the sequence of events is not obvious. Which grave was established first? If it was the larger, why would anyone make a new grave so close? If it was the smaller, how does one account for the observation that the lichen on the larger grave makes it appear to be older? The solution to this conundrum may not be discoverable: this photograph was taken in the autumn of 2008, shortly after a major hill fire. I have a second photo, taken last year shortly after the autumn grave-sweeping festival of Chung Yeung, and the grave is almost completely engulfed by new vegetation. Had the grave been visited during the festival, that vegetation would have been cleared. So there it remains, neglected and forgotten.

And that concludes a whistle-stop tour of the district. It may not have been a tour de force, but I hope it wasn’t a wild goose chase either.


update: 24/11/2010
A recent visit to Koon Garden revealed some inaccuracies in the interpretation set out above.

update: 01/02/2013
Koon Garden, the house of Lee Ming Sang and the millionaire’s house have been demolished, although the sun gate is still there. I assume that the henchmen of Uncle Four were responsible.

confucius he say...

Very little that happens in Hong Kong makes the news internationally. Stories that do invariably have a sensationalist angle to them, such as the case of the phantom acid thrower, which made the BBC’s World News recently probably because in the latest attack tourists were among the injured. Another example is the sordid wranglings over the will of eccentric billionaire Nina Wang, Asia’s richest woman, some details of which can be found on the BBC News website. ‘Little Sweetie’, as she was affectionately known locally, died in 2007, apparently leaving her entire fortune to a local fung shui ‘master’. Given that in Hong Kong fung shui is principally a vehicle for extorting money, and any self-proclaimed ‘master’ is certainly a charlatan, some degree of skullduggery is likely. It could be years before the case is resolved, but don’t watch this space for updates, because you won’t get any.

Meanwhile, one local story that doesn’t appear to have been picked up by the international news media is the campaign to have the birthday of Confucius declared a public holiday. My first reaction was to applaud: Hong Kong is already well provided with public holidays, but one more wouldn’t hurt. Apparently, it would, however: there is a local ordinance restricting the number of public holidays each year to seventeen, and the quota has already been filled. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Hong Kong is amenable to the idea of scrapping Easter Monday—a hangover from the days of British rule—and replacing it with a holiday on the twenty-seventh day of the eighth lunar month.

So why do I think this would be a bad idea? After all, you might think, not for nothing is Confucius known in China as the ‘Great Sage’. However, a closer examination of Confucian philosophy reveals the damage that this man has inflicted on the country in the past, succinctly summed up in the phrase ‘filial piety’. Without doubt, China was technologically the most advanced civilization in the world 2,000 years ago, at a time when Britons were still painting themselves blue and the Americas were home only to hunter-gatherers and civilizations that never got beyond the Bronze Age or used the wheel, except on children’s toys. A list of Chinese inventions from this period includes the magnetic compass, fore-and-aft sails and the stern-post rudder, which enabled China to develop rapidly as a seafaring nation—Chinese ships sailed as far as India during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). By the time of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907), widely regarded by scholars as the zenith of Chinese civilization, woodblock printing, gunpowder and silk, together with a sophisticated device for detecting and measuring earthquakes, had been added to the list.

So what went wrong? During the early part of the Tang Dynasty, Buddhism had taken hold in China, but Tang officials regarded it as a disruptive influence and contrary to Confucian harmony, so much so that in AD 845 a massive purge was launched, resulting in the destruction of more than 4,000 Buddhist monasteries and 46,000 temples. Confucianism thereby became the dominant ideology in China. However, this so-called Confucian ‘harmony’ was based on a hierarchical system with the emperor at the top and women right at the bottom, with each individual owing allegiance to those higher up the hierarchy. At the top of the pyramid, the emperor's duty was to attract “all under heaven” to be civilized in Confucian harmony. In practice, this system also meant that sons had a responsibility towards their fathers (‘filial piety’) rather than parents to their children. This backward-looking philosophy, combined with the fact that Chinese civilization developed in relative isolation from the rest of the world, bred an insularity and disdain for other cultures that is reflected in the Chinese name for China: ‘Central country’ (right).

Fast-forward to the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and the seven voyages of Admiral Zheng He (1405–33). With a fleet of the largest ships on Earth at that time under his command, Zheng was dispatched with orders to sail to “the countries beyond the horizon, all the way to the end of the Earth.” His mission was to display the might of Chinese power and exact tribute from the “barbarians from beyond the seas.” During these voyages, Zheng sailed as far as Calicut in India, Ormuz in Persia, Jeddah in Arabia and Mogadishu in present-day Somalia. A Chinese map (see below) purportedly dating from this period suggests that Chinese sailors may have ventured even further afield, although the authenticity of this map has been widely questioned.

Following Zheng’s last voyage and his subsequent retirement, the emperor and his court officials, motivated by Confucian ideals, decided that there was nothing more to learn about the world, so both the ships and Zheng’s logs were wantonly destroyed. Within a hundred years, Portuguese sailors were venturing further and further down the west coast of Africa, eventually reaching the Indian Ocean, and Ferdinand Magellan had led an expedition that successfully circumnavigated the world. Consequently, instead of the Chinese discovering Europe, European sailors discovered China.

By the eighteenth century, the big European colonial powers (the French, the Dutch and above all the British) were in the process of grabbing as much of Asia as they could lay their hands on. And although China remained more or less intact, save for the enclaves of Macau and Hong Kong, it endured systematic humiliation throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the eight-nation alliance that finally suppressed the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion in 1901.

It was not until Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that Confucius was finally denounced as a reactionary, but China is now a forward-looking country that is on course to become the hegemonic power of the twenty-first century. However, when the country finally achieves this, the Chinese will discover that, like the British in the nineteenth century and the Americans in the twentieth, everybody hates you when you’re top dog.