Islands and Continents: Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan

Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart

91 Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart 1. Ah Lee stumbled into my bar just as it was getting dark, carrying a bag of some fruit or other, something he’d picked up down the road in Peel Street Market. I hadn’t seen him for an age. He sat down at the counter and started crunching up the long narrow brown fruit. He offered me a bite. He kept on saying how long it had been since the bunch of us last got together. Perhaps we could meet up some time soon and have a bit of fun, perhaps on my birthday, which was coming up. I tried the fruit and thought it had an interesting taste, a bit like a dried longan. It had a biggish stone, and a crumbly skin — just like a longan, in fact. But curved like a bean pod. You could almost imagine it to be a cross between a bean and a longan. Some sort of love child. All these years, I’ve never been in the habit of celebrating my birthday. Probably because my parents sneaked into Hong Kong illegally in the first place, so I was born at home and never even had a proper birth certificate. When I grew up and went to get my ID card, I couldn’t understand English and ended up putting down whatever date it happened to be that day in the P ostcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart Translated by Chan Wing Sze and John Minford 92 Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan place where it said ‘date of birth’. I’ve got a family birthday, worked out by the old lunar calendar; I’ve got the made-up one on my ID card, which I use for official purposes; and then, later on, my aunt calculated the solar calendar equivalent for my lunar birthday, using the tables in the perpetual calendar. (I’ve never checked her calculations. That one’s only there just in case.) So altogether I’ve got three birthdays, for use on different occasions. I’ve always been pretty casual about the whole thing, as you’d expect from someone of my undisciplined and capricious nature. Last year, not long after my bar opened, we’d all gathered there one night and were drinking and chatting, when somehow, somebody mentioned that Lao Ho, our lecturer friend, had the same birthday as mine (or perhaps I should say the same as one of my three birthdays). Anyway, when the day in question came round, we all ended up having a party in my bar. Everybody brought something different to eat: hummus, tapas, pasta, Portuguese duck rice, some sushi. Marianne brought a French dessert — and dragged along one or two French friends she’d met while travelling in Spain, who provided some great rap music. Lao Ho brought his American university colleague, Roger. (He’d separated from his wife, who had gone to live abroad somewhere.) And I had invited Lao Sit, the famous veteran food critic. Technically, the bar, which functioned as a hair salon during the day, was not licensed for food, but under Lao Sit’s expert direction, we chopped up some spicy ox innards and cooked them. We then got a bit carried away and wok-fried some genuine pig’s intestine stuffed with glutinous rice, cut into slices. (That’s the dish known as Beauty’s Face in the Mirror.) We improvised as we went along, using the shampooing basins to wash the vegetables, and the hairdryers to air-bake some cured fish. It was just before the Hand-over, and our totally over-the-top menu chimed in perfectly with the general hysteria sweeping through Hong Kong. On the one hand, we had these nightly TV shows inflicted on us, featuring patriotic songs, public displays of nationalistic pride and fervour; on the other hand, foreigners were holding raves down the cobbled alleys of Lan Kwai Fong, celebrating their fin de siècle. It was either tomorrow and nothing else, or no tomorrow at all. Whichever way 93 Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart you looked at it, tomorrow somehow seemed to have become a huge redletter day in the calendar, the anniversary of either the birth or the death of something or somebody great. To me, all of this was simply a form of ‘date’ worship. Big dates mean nothing to...