I’ve never been a kung fu movie kind of person, but I found myself watching Ip Man 2 one afternoon on TV. It’s set in the early days of British Hong Kong [1].
The film reminded me that the Brits had brought their values and practices, good and bad, as colonisers do, and we still live amongst them today. Things like common law, due process, grass-less parks, and a policy that sneakily chips away at street food culture. But perhaps the most intimate of these remnants is how our own Chinese names have been romanised. Our current system, “Government Romanisation”, has its roots in early missionary dictionaries, and is an inconsistent jumble of transliterations that somehow Hongkongers have been able to learn by heart. This paper [PDF] by Kataoka and Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong delightfully calls it “A System Without a System”. In Government Romanisation, my surname is written as “Leung”, but in other, arguably more consistent Cantonese systems, such as Jyutping (developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong) it would be “Loeng”, and under the Yale (University) system (developed by Yale professors Gerard P. Kok and Parker Po-fei Huang), it’s “Lèuhng”.
This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t know what to do when I’m writing in English about things with Chinese names. Once, I was writing about the food of Guangdong Province, specifically the district of Shunde, and I wrote it as “Shun Tak”, which is the more or less accepted form (stemming from Government Romanisation) in Hong Kong. Something in the publisher’s system picked it up as Shun Tak Holdings, the company listed on the HK Stock Exchange, and linked my copy to the stock ticker. That was a long time ago, and if I were rewriting it today, I would probably use “Shunde” instead, because that’s the way it’s written in Standard (Mandarin) Pinyin, the official Mainland Chinese romanisation method. But every time I do that, I can’t help but think that I’m helping the erasure of the Cantonese language (and it is a language, not a dialect, fight me anytime), especially because Shunde is part of Guangdong, where Cantonese originated. If you really think about it, even this sentence – “Shunde” and “Guangdong” (Standard Mandarin pinyin) vs. “Cantonese” (derived from the word “Canton”, the old Postal Romanisation for Guangzhou) is a nightmare for a culturally/linguistically-aware (and perhaps pedantic) writer like me, who is an actual Cantonese-speaking person that a woke non-Chinese-speaking editor might actually consult. How can I expect someone who doesn’t have cultural or linguistic connections to Chinese/Cantonese to know what to do?
I raise this because I used to be (okay fine, I still am) annoyed every time I read “Szechuan” or “Szechwan” (variations of the Postal Romanisation system), which is mostly in US publications. Maybe I shouldn’t be, because, as explained above, Chinese romanisation is so damn confusing. A few years ago, Clarissa Wei wrote about this for Vice, and despite the technical inaccuracies (Postal Romanisation is confused for Wade-Giles), I understand the sentiment – that these romanisation methods were created by oppressors along with their values and judgement about China, the Chinese and their culture (that lead to war, colonisation and all that), so without changing the words, can we change the values that are intrinsically attached to them? Would we advance cultural understanding if we changed Peking duck to Beijing kaoya? But then would (Hongkongese) egg tarts be dan tat (Government-ish), daan taat (Jyutping), daahn tāat (Yale), or dan ta (Mandarin pinyin)?
Clearly, I don’t have the answers, but whoever does, or rather, whoever will purport to, will end up writing this new style guide to cross-cultural English writing, and we (the cross-cultural English writing community) have to make sure we don’t f*ck it up.
What I’m reading/saw on the interwebs
In the same cultural-linguistic nebula of thought as my ramblings above is When It Comes to a Recipe, What’s in a Name?, published in Vice, in which writer Bettina Makalintal ponders what we lose when we flatten nouns like bibimbap into “Korean rice bowl”, or parathas into “flaky bread”.
Tara O’Brady’s article, The Color of My Skin Is Sometimes Confused With the Scope of My Talent, serves as an explicatory companion to her dosa recipe published in Epicurious resonated with me deeply. Non-White writers in the English writing world are often expected to be “experts” in “their” culture, and to write exclusively on the topic. It’s an implicit bias that White editors have, and I’ve rarely seen it written about so succinctly. I will add though, that as someone a bit whitewashed myself, I have made learning and writing about the food of “my” culture somewhat a priority in career. Amid a desire to connect with my roots are also other motivations – a desire to change the English-language discourse about Chinese food because it had, until recently, mostly been written by people with no stake in the culture, as well as the relative ease of getting work (almost zero publications outside of Asia wants an article from me, a “Chinese” person, about sourdough, but if it was about steamed bao, I’d have a better chance) #realtalk.
Yvonne C Lam offers a window into restaurant closures in Sydney amid the pandemic, through the lens of Chinatown in The future of Sydney's Chinatown hangs in the balance, in Gourmet Traveller. Rarely do I read the words “filial piety” in food media, and yet it really does explain a lot about Chinese family businesses in immigrant countries.
What I watched/listened to
Uncle Roger DISGUSTED by this Egg Fried Rice Video (BBC Food), in which comedian Nigel Ng, as his alter-ego Uncle Roger, reacts to a BBC Food egg fried rice cooking video as taught by Hersha Patel. As the title suggests, Uncle Roger is very unhappy about the way Patel makes fried rice, and most of the Chinese population would probably agree. The video went viral (as of today it has over 3.5 million views) and it looks like Patel and Ng will actually be doing a collab soon. [2]
I don’t take much notice of the book publishing world in general, so it’s my first time tuning into Salt + Spine, a cookbook podcast. This episode, Building a more equitable cookbook industry won't be easy, but change is overdue, provides some interesting insight into why there are so many damn “celebrity” cookbooks, and suggests that, moving forward, past data probably shouldn’t be the only determinant in signing on new authors.
Good Follow
Food Forward India, the organisation founded by chef Garima Arora to “map, explore, extend the understanding of tribal/rural/urban layers of Indian food”. Their Instagram is full of engaging and highly digestible mini-content series about the foodways of the Indian states for people who wouldn’t know Goa from Gujarat.
What I ate
Not much, to be honest. It’s been a few days since the end of my mandatory quarantine, but with virus cases on the rise, I haven’t gone out to eat. I made some giant vats of curry and bolognese that I’m still working through (great freezer food, by the way). A good friend gave my mom some sourdough starter and I attempted to bake a loaf but completely failed. I left it in my parent’s freezer, and my mom said it tasted fine once toasted, but I suspect she said it out of a mother’s love rather than her what her usually-astute tastebuds were telling her.
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[1] When race relations were tense. The movie is about how Ip Man, the talented but under-appreciated kung fu master (and later, sifu (master) to Bruce Lee) defies the odds (racism, corruption, having to fight in a Western boxing match without using his legs – run of the mill injustices faced by a classic underdog that you can expect of a film like this) and comes out with his integrity intact.
[2] Side note: as a speaker of Hong Kong Cantonese, I found Ng’s (who is Malaysian) exasperated “haiya”s in the video a little disturbing since “hai” is a Cantonese swear word (we express exasperation as “aiya”, or “heiya”), so a part of me kept thinking he was being much ruder than he needed to be, LOL.
Just a token from a Malaysian ethnic Chinese: Often not we speak the language (Cantonese) by parroting from our elder generations, so along the passing of the dialect we might've parroted it not very accurately from them, hence the addition of (h)aiya is most likely not intended to include any profanities to the context.
We didn't get to learn Cantonese systematically by the books, so I hope that clears your mind a bit! :')