Chopsticks Etiquette  

                                          by Bill Yim

Studying how people, both Chinese and non-Chinese, use their chopsticks when eating out in a Chinese restaurant is one of my favourite hobbies. And I'm not exaggerating that most of them do not know their chopsticks etiquette.

I'm not referring to the odd office worker who casually turns his chopsticks into a back-scratcher in the middle of a lunch in Wanchai or the playful kid who tries to create a scene by sticking the utensils into his ears and laughs at a birthday party in a five-star hotel.

I was four years old when I first learned how to use chopsticks. My mother used to strike me across my knuckles with her spoon whenever I used the chopsticks to pick up my food with the back of my hand facing her. What I did is common among most diners and you could be one of them.

"That's bad chopsticks manners," my furious mother would yell at me, warning she would hit me again if I didn't stop doing that.    

"The back of your hand symbolizes your behind," she said, "It's rude to do that when eating with other people." 

She then grabbed my right hand and gave it a little turn to the right so my palm would face up before I reached out for my food with my chopsticks.

"Your palm represents your heart. Good table manner is to show you're not hiding anything there when dining with other people," she explained.

I'm still most grateful to my mother for this unforgettable lecture. I could still be eating out with my backside exposed to fellow diners if not because of the painful experience.

There is no historical record as to who started this old tradition. One story goes that people had always been picking up their food with their hands palm down until an imperial concubine tried to murder an emperor in Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) because of jealousy. She had some kind of poison hidden in her palm and quietly unloaded it in the food while serving the king. Fortunately the king was eating with his own personal silver chopsticks which detected the poison and immediately turned black. The concubine was later beheaded.

Apart from being "obscene" at dinner, there are a few other taboos when using chopsticks. One of them is making noise by beating the empty bowls with the sticks, a game some musicians find it hard to resist at the end of a happy dinner even in the Mandarin Hotel. This behaviour is regarded as uncouth because bowl-beating used to be practiced by beggars in China when they walked from door to door for money.

Another no-no is the planting of chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice. You'd be asked to leave the table if you did that. People do it only at funerals or on the altar of the deceased.

Also bad news is passing your food from your chopsticks to another person's chopsticks. You might think you're just trying to be cute in sharing a piece of pork spare-rib with your loved one but this again is a funeral custom when the  bones of the cremated are passed from one family member to another.

Using your chopsticks to point at the waiter is obviously a rude behaviour but who can blame you when you're not happy with his service.

There are certain superstitions based around the use or misuse of the ancient eating utensils. Though most people are not too serious about them these days, dropping your chopsticks in the middle of a dinner is a sign of bad luck to come.

And if you find an uneven pair of chopsticks at your table seating, it is believed that you will miss the next train, boat or plane you're trying to catch.

You're most welcome to lick your fingers after eating at KFC but don't you suck your chopsticks after swallowing a piece of sweet and sour pork. Not only it's unsightly, you can get hiccups too!

Air Mail Olives & A Basket Of Toilet Paper

By Bill Yim

Hong Kong is  probably the only place in the world where you can find vendors who play music in the street and send  olives flying "like an aeroplane" to their customers standing on the balconies of the old colonial buildings.

They are affectionately known “Fei Gei Larm” vendors or “Aeroplane Olive Men”.

Though there are only a few of them left, these popular vendors were seen in almost every residential district in the lean days of 1950's Hong Kong, when most of the old four-story tenement buildings had balconies on each floor, and  streets were never too busy as trams and rickshaws were the major means of transport. 

Wearing a straw hat and carrying a tin box shaped like a three-foot long olive around his waist, these colourful vendors stopped in the middle of a street. Playing a catchy Cantonese tune with a Chinese trumpet known as the "dee-da", they drew the attention of people in the neighborhood. "Me! The Aeroplane Olive Man is here!" was the message.

People, mostly house-wives, children and even their cats would excitedly rush out to their balconies for the man's happy music, tossing five-cent or ten-cent (Hong Kong) coins down to the musician as a token of appreciation.

In return, the dee-da player would open the lid of his tin box, fish out several small packets of olives and, one by one, pitch them high, sending them "flying like an aeroplane" to his customers on the second, third and fourth floors. He seldom missed a target.

I was living in one of those four-story buildings on Johnston Road in Wanchai when I was a child. Standing on the balcony, listening to his music and watching the olive man's amazing throwing skill was the highlight of my day.

At a time when television was totally unknown to most people in Hong Kong, I, like most children, was easy to please.

Jobs were hard to find in those days. Many people, especially those who fled to Hong Kong as refugees after the Communists' takeover of Mainland China in 1949, had to live in make-shift wooden huts on the hill-sides.

To make a living, many turned themselves into street vendors or hawkers like the olive man. Carrying a bamboo pole on their shoulders with two basket loads of goods on each end, they walked the streets and lanes selling soy sauce, peanut oil, salt, sugar, pickled vegetables, rice, bananas and even toilet papers.

There were also junk collectors buying old newspapers, broken pots, cracked kettles, useless lamps, rusty can openers, handle-less hammers - anything metal from residents at low prices. They then sold them to recycling factories for a small profit.

As none of those old buildings were equipped with elevators, almost every family had a basket with a long rope tied to the handle. To buy a bunch of bananas for instance, the house-wife would walk to the balcony and bargain with the vendor on the street from upstairs.

On making a deal, the house-wife would place the money in the basket and swing it down to the vendor. The banana woman (men wouldn't sell bananas in those days) would pick up the money and place the fruit on the basket so the house-wife could pull the rope and bring the "shopping" home. 

It was a big production to buy a bunch of bananas in those days, but at least the poor house-wife didn't have to walk downstairs from her fourth floor apartment and climb all the way back up again.

Was it Confucius who said: "Food is indispensable and so is toilet paper"? These two items might not go side-by-side on a house-wife's daily "shopping list", but the toilet paper hawker was somehow more prominent than other vendors when he vocally plugged his goods. He made sure he was loud and clear when he repeatedly yelled; "Toilet paper! Cheap high quality toilet paper!" as he walked up and down the street with everyone staring at him. This was one obvious reason why women would rather stick to selling bananas. 

By the way, toilet paper didn't come in rolls like what we get in supermarkets these days. They were large sheets of light brown paper measuring 3 sq. ft each. People didn't buy them by the sheets. The vendor, who always carried a Chinese weight scale, sold them by the catty, a Chinese weight slightly heavier than a pound.

Though some people used the whole large sheet in the toilet for their own strange reasons, most users had them cut into small squares measuring about 3X3 or 4X4 inches, depending on the individual's physical preference.

Only wealthy families could afford the more expensive high quality sheets which, let's face it, were quite tender and absorbent; definitely good enough for their children to practice Chinese calligraphy on.

My mother used to pay for the cheaper ones. They were as rough as sandpaper and tough as cardboard, with the occasional woody pieces the size of a toothpick on the surface. This cheap quality paper was obviously not suitable for babies - though I had been wounded a few times myself.

When I told an old friend about this painful experience recently, he said:

"Bill, you should count yourself lucky when I tell you what we had to use to solve this sticky problem in the old days in China."

He said it was in the 1940's when he and his parents were living in a farm in Dongguan (Guangdong Province) and the toilet was an outhouse about 15 minutes walk from their farm house.

"As we were too poor to buy toilet paper, we had to use fallen leaves to do the job. We only used leaves the size of the palm and there were heaps and heaps of them on the narrow lane leading to the outhouse," he recalled.

“Leaves, as you know, are neither soft nor absorbent, but we had no other choice. Going to the toilet in those days was a real pain in the butt!”

Perhaps that was Nature's original solution to man's natural problem back in the days of Adam and Eve. But to tell you the truth, I would bring my cat with me and use its tail to do the job if I had to walk so far to an outhouse to answer the call of nature.

Now, let's change the subject and go back to hawking.

What about people who didn't have the capital to deal in trading to make a living like the olive man, the banana woman or the toilet paper hawker? Well, they'd just have to sell whatever skills they had.

There were travelling barbers walking around with a pair of scissors and a comb, kitchen knife sharpeners with portable sharpening tools, plumbers with spanners and screw-drivers, fortune tellers with books of Yin and Yang…and lots of others.

They walked up and down the street announcing their trades and, at the same time, smiling at potential customers looking at them from the balconies. 

On agreeing to the prices offered by the customers who had called for their services, they would happily climb up to the apartments, do their jobs there and earn their dollar or two for the day.

Come of think of it, with all these lovely people doing all the walking for you, who needs the Yellow Pages!?

                                         Legend of the Lovers' Rock

                                                    by Bill Yim

   Has the popular and ubiquitous computer dating replaced the charm of the old Lovers' Rock?

   No, at least not in Hong Kong.

   It's five o'clock in the morning and the sun is about to rise.  While most people are still fast asleep, a group of old ladies have already climbed half way up a hill, and are busy negotiating with a prominent phallic-looking stone located there.

   The women are Taoist pilgrims, and the stone they are talking to, fondly termed the Lovers' Rock, is a legendary open-air temple rising 30 feet into the sky on the scenic hillside of Bowen Road in the Mid-Levels of Hong Kong Island.

   Most of the worshippers in the group are women in their 50's and 60's, although young girls sometimes lurk among them.  They burn joss sticks and candles.  They make offerings of roast chicken, suckling pig and oranges to the rock as they kneel and pray for a better life and marriages for their children.

   The worship ritual happens three times a month.  It takes place regularly on the sixth, 16th and 26th days of each moon in the lunar calendar. Six is an auspicious number to Taoists. It stands for eternity.

   Long before computer dating was invented, the Chinese had begun to use unconventional means of searching for their perfect mate. Consulting "the rock" is one of the methods that have withstood the test of time and maidenly patience.  To pilgrim believers, it is a magical stone that answers their prayers -- sometimes.

   The day I visited the rock recently, I overheard one old lady asking if her 40 year-old son, a truck driver, should marry a 28-year-old woman, a school teacher in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.

   It transpired that the driver had been dating her for almost a year on his trips to China. He was desperate for a wife and the girl was apparently keen on the idea of living in Hong Kong.

   To find out whether her son should marry the school teacher, the mother made abundant offerings of joss sticks, candles and spiritual money before the rock. She then picked up a box of numbered sticks, knelt and shook the box until one of the sticks dropped out.  The stick was believed to have been "picked" by the Rock God.  For an interpretation of the meaning of the number on the selected stick, the woman approached a professional soothsayer "on location" at the rock site, and paid HK$20 for the answer which came from the well-worn depths of an old Book of Fortune.

The answer was : "Go ahead!"

   How did the legend of Lovers' Rock originate?  Some people say the stone was first worshipped as a phallic symbol.  Others argue that the shape of the rock is totally irrelevant to its power.  It is a miracle rock, they insist, because the God of Love has chosen it as his domain.

   Yet another tale revolves around an English seaman and a Chinese sampan girl who fell in love a long, long time ago. He had come to Hong Kong on a merchant ship, and she earned her living by scraping the sides of the ships.  And so it was that fate made their happiness together an impossible dream.

   For the captain of the ship, on learning of the affair, refused to allow the seaman to leave the vessel in order to remain in Hong Kong.  And the girl's parents detested the idea of their daughter marrying a foreigner.

   As the ship was about to leave for the next port of call, the English seaman, with tears in his eyes, stood on deck gazing at the waterfront.  He could see that his Chinese lover was weeping too.

   Knowing that if he sailed away he might never return, the seaman suddenly jumped overboard, and swam to shore.  Overjoyed and moved by the bravery of her lover's action, the maiden decided to run away with him.

   Together the two fugitives disappeared as rapidly as they could into the hills.

   Meanwhile the captain mounted a hunt for his missing seaman and the girl's parents started searching for their rebellious daughter.

   With their trackers gaining on them the two lovers reached a tower rock.  It was there that they ended their lives together, freeing their souls from a cruel world that forbade their union.

   Some say they jumped to their deaths from Lovers' Rock.  Others believe they hanged themselves on a tree close by.

    Kowloon, on the peninsula opposite Hong Kong island, also has a "Lovers' Rock" of some repute.  Ten feet high and eight feet wide, this miracle rock is perched on a hillside of Chi Wan Shan or the "Hill of Merciful Clouds."  It is part of a nearby temple dedicated to the Goddess of Mercy.

    It was some time ago when I last visited this rock. According to a caretaker of the temple, the popular stone was discovered some 200 years ago during the Ching Dynasty of China when pilgrims went there to pray for assistance from the gods if they ran into earthly misfortune.  It was then known as the Treasure Rock.

   Years later, however, people began to call the stone Lovers' Rock when pilgrims claimed they could see images of their future husbands or wives by "looking into" the rock surface.

   First things first, the caretaker would advise the "enquirer" to visit the temple, make an appropriate offering to the Goddess of Mercy, and pray devoutly before asking the rock to play mirror to the future. The face of the future would take a while to appear on the rock screen, but when it does, said the caretaker, the pilgrim would first see a sort of light emanating from within the rock.  This beam would gradually melt into an image.

   And when you are faced with a face in the rock, what you see is what you are destined to get as your future spouse. Like it or not!

  However, he said, not just anybody could look into the stone and see his or her future love.  "You must believe implicitly or you will not stand a chance," he added.

   I heard about a middle-aged couple who took their two children to visit the temple. The children, one 10 years old and the other nine, said they wanted to find out whom they would marry in the future. "Have a look," said the father, pointing to the rock.  The children ran over to the stone and began to peer closely at its surface.  Something soon happened for the daughter. Crouching close to the stone, she suddenly cried out and sprang away."Mom," she wailed, "all I see is a bunch of ants in the rock!'

  Undeterred by his sister's screaming, the boy carried on looking into the stone patiently for almost 10 minutes, at which point, he turned around to his parents and said: "I think my wife is going to be a rock."

  Funny? Well, not everyone thinks so. As one wit puts it: "Don't laugh at the believers who beat a faithful trail to Bowen Road or Chi Wan Shan. You too might find that talking things over with a magic stone is not such a cold and sobering experience after all."

             The Headless Dancing Beauty

               Southorn Playground 1950

                        By Bill Yim

"Come on in, ladies and gentlemen! Check out the one and only Headless Dancing Beauty!"

A man in a tattered Chinese jacket, his right hand beating a gong from time to time, told a crowd of curious on-lookers with a homemade loudhailer in front of a make-shift magic theater.

The place was Southorn Playground, in Wanchai 1950, when the public square was a primitive sandy sports ground during the day and a popular and exciting night spot for local residents in the evening.

The Headless Dancing Beauty was the main feature of the magic show that week. I was then 14 years old and I was there. The following account was inspired by the brief records in the diary I kept in those days.

Wearing a red Chinese dress she danced on top of a wooden table, swaying to a piece of Hawaiian music from a 78 RPM record played on an old fashioned RCA Victor gramophone next to her.

Nobody seemed to know how she was made to appear headless. But they all got excited and roared in approval as she turned around from time to time, gently wiggling her backside in front of them.

There were approximately 20 spectators, mostly hot blooded young men, watching the show which lasted for about 10 minutes, when we all had to leave to make room for another crowd.

To me, the most entertaining and the funniest part of her act came when she bent forward to give a headless bow at the end of her dance amid a standing ovation from the audience. (There were no chairs.)

She then gingerly jumped off the table and gracefully wiggled her way to the backstage behind a black curtain. Headlessly.

I still have no idea how she managed to hide her head so neatly but, looking back,  her every move was so beautifully enticing it still makes me wonder if the head really mattered at all.

While collecting material for this article the other day, I asked a friend if he would take a sexy headless woman for a wife, one who can't argue or complain.

"Sure," he replied, "only I wouldn't want to be her guide dog every time I take her out."

I must say the 30-cent admission fee to the fantastic, albeit too short, performance was certainly worth it. 

Thirty Hong Kong cents was enough to buy a large bowl of noodles with meat balls in those days, when the average monthly income was way less than HK$100.

Television had never even been heard of by most people in Hong Kong. The only entertainment for people was a visit to the Southorn Playground night market in pyjamas, a popular evening casual wear in those days, if they were sick of playing mah jong or tired of having fights with their in-laws.

Apart from the "magic theater" there were also fortune tellers who would advise whether you should shave off your eyebrows or keep your toe nails growing for better luck.

Professional storytellers were always there entertaining listeners with their fascinating Chinese tales, such as the Naughty Monkey King or the Evil White Snake Woman. 

Of course there were also feng shui experts who could explain why their customers always felt dizzy waking up in the morning - because they had left their slippers on the wrong side of the bed or their toilets were facing the wrong direction.

Cheap cooked food stalls selling delicious clams in black bean sauce and wonton noodle soups were handy for people, especially those who had just been told by a fortune teller nearby: "You'll be hungry in five minutes."

The playground was not as lit up as what it is today. Vendors either had to carry their own oil lamps or pressure lamps for lighting or pay to use one from the rent-a-lamp services there.

Genuine traditional Chinese doctors (as well as genuine quacks) were everywhere. Their usual way to attract a crowd of would-be customers was to put on a powerful and dangerous kung fu demonstration before they started talking about their homemade cure-all ointments and plasters.

One of them was a snake catcher who made and sold wine with snake penises for aphrodisiac.

I don't have a record of his name, but I vividly remember he was always surrounded by on-lookers every night as soon as he arrived at his regular spot under a tree with a bagful of live snakes and a rattan case of his sex wine.

"Brothers and sisters. Friends and neighbors. Me, the King of Snakes is here again tonight," was his usual self-introduction to a crowd of about 30 people, mostly middle-aged men and teenagers.

Eager to find out what the King was going to do with his dangerous serpents, on-lookers would start moving closer to him, so close the King himself began to get a little annoyed because his "stage" was becoming too small for his performance.

"Please move back a little and leave me and my snakes with some space," he would tell the curious crowd as he reached into the bag, fished out a handful of hissing serpents and suddenly, without warning at all, pushed them towards the crowd.

Horrified that they might get bitten, the crowd stepped back immediately, some screaming, others laughing.

"Thank you brothers and sisters. Friends and neighbors," he bowed and thanked the crowd for their cooperation as he swung the three snakes round his neck and started talking about the wonder of his home-made aphrodisiac wine.

Quoting Confucius' famous saying "Seeic sic sing ya" or "Loving food and sex is human nature," he said men must replenish their “strength” if they want to stay as virile as a snake.

"Drinking a small glass of my snake penis wine before going to bed every night," he suggested conspiratorially, "is the answer." 

By now on-lookers, still not having seen anything exciting, were getting a little bored with his sales talk…and the King noticed that too. 

Worried that his would-be customers might walk away from him, he decided to illustrate the power of his product and the meaning of virility in a more dramatic manner.

This was what he did:

With the three snakes still hanging round his neck, he overtly zipped down his trousers and, with a flourish, surprisingly pulled out an angry king cobra hidden in a secret pocket between his legs.          

"Check this out!" he told the crowd as he grabbed the snake by the neck with one hand and ran the other hand down to the very spot where the penis was located. "This is where the energy comes from. This is what I use for making my magic wine and I use hundreds of them," he declared.

The crowd was so flabbergasted they decided to stay on as the man forcefully stuffed the snake back into its miserable secret hide-out between his legs and proudly zipped up his trousers again. 

I feel sorry for the poor king cobra which was exposed to fresh air for no more than five minutes. But the evening ended happily for everyone with the Snake King successfully making quite a few sales of his sex wine to men who agreed with Confucius that "Loving food and sex is human nature."

   ******************************************* 

 Bill Yim, the writer, is also a party caricaturist specialising in entertaining guests at corporate and private functions in Hong Kong and overseas. For a glimpse of his performance, please click on the following link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpBmvuAU37g

or email: bycartoon@yahoo.com.hk

for more information.

Fortune cookies?

What fortune cookies?

By Bill Yim

   Most Chinese who have never eaten in Chinese restaurants in America or Canada have no idea what fortune cookies are.

  Made from flour, sugar, vanilla and oil with a "fortune message" wrapped inside, these popular cookies, an indispensable part of a Chinese meal in North America, have never seriously made it to  Hong Kong restaurants. And there are good reasons for this, involving cultures and humor.

   Messages such as "You will find a new love soon," "Today is your lucky day," and "Don't make your boss angry unless you want to lose your job" are not generally regarded as "fortune" by the average Chinese.

   Lee Chiu Yan, a veteran fortune teller outside the Wong Tai Sin Temple in Kowloon explained: "Fortune and cookies are two totally different things that have nothing to do with each other. When you put them together and call them fortune cookies, the marriage immediately becomes a joke that appeals only to the very young-at-heart and children.

   "The average Chinese is far too serious about the business of fortune telling, unless he or she was born in a foreign country and brought up with a western sense of humor."

   Raymond Chan, a 35-year-old businessman who travels to New York regularly, described these messages as "silly kid stuff."

    "If I wanted to have my fortune told," he explained, "I would go to a fortune teller."

   Mrs. Wong Siu Lin, a 40-year-old nurse, said she ate the cookies but didn't even bother to read the messages when she recently dined in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.

   Asked how she would define the word "fortune", she answered:

    "Fortune is when I crack open a cookie and find a $100 bill or a little diamond ring pops out."

    There is no official record of the cookie's history. According to MonsterFact.com, some say they were invented by a Japanese immigrant named Makato Hagiwara, a gardener who designed the famous Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

   Others insist the idea came from a Chinese immigrant name David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles in 1918.  He created the cookies with an inspirational Bible scripture on it and passed them out to the poor wandering near his shop.

    Whoever later developed the idea into a successful business venture must have been a psychologist who understood the fun-loving mentality of the average American and made good use of it.

   There are hundreds of bakeries in the U.S., Canada and Europe baking millions of such cookies everyday for Chinese restaurants as well as wedding, graduation and business promotional events. There are giant cookies, cookies with custom messages and cookies dipped in chocolate.

    The well-established Garden Bakery in Hong Kong is probably the only company that makes fortune cookies with bilingual messages, English on one side and Chinese on the other. Their clients are mainly  major  hotels where tourists would expect them at the end of a Chinese meal. Chinese students who have been exposed to the culture while studying abroad are also their customers.

   I had my first taste of fortune cookies when I was back-packing in the United States years ago, working in a Chinese restaurant as a waiter and trying to earn some money for my next Greyhound trip to Canada.

   The restaurant was in San Mateo, a city about 25 miles from San Francisco. It was called the Rickshaw Restaurant, a name suitable perhaps only for businesses intended to take people for a ride.

    It catered to a cross-section of Americans ranging from business executives to strip dancers. All regarded the fortune cookies as a highlight of their meal.

The "fortunes" might never be true but they never failed to bring a sunny smile to the recipients, even though the absent-minded chef had forgotten the vital sugar in their sweet and sour pork.

  However these messages can sometimes create embarrassment when they end up in the wrong hands.

  A nine-year-old boy almost burst into tears when he landed one that read: "You will be married in less than a year."

  An elderly woman jumped up from her chair, hugged me and kissed me when she got one that read: "Romance is just around the corner."

   Of all the different cookie messages I had collected for souvenirs during my one month working there, the one that really enlightened me  was: "The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your arm." A bit rude but that was exactly what I was looking for after a hard day's work.

 Fancy a snake dinner ?

for more information.