We’re shaking up our longstanding Pop Cantonese series by inviting author Eva Wong Yi to offer her take on distinctly Cantonese expressions. Wong is known for her Chinese-language short stories, including the collections Ways to Love in a Crowded City (擠迫之城的戀愛方法) and The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (林葉的四季).
A lot of Cantonese nicknames for things are to do with the way things look. Take the hair cut of Dora the Explorer, a classic style that many boys and girls (including me) have had at least once in their lives when their mothers gave them a DIY haircut. In Cantonese, the style is called 冬菇頭 (dung1 gu1 tau4, Chinese mushroom head) because the bob cut resembles a dried Shiitake mushroom commonly used in Cantonese cooking. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you can’t stop calling it that.
Often known in English by its Japanese name, shiitake, the Chinese mushroom’s unique shape lends itself to being metaphors for various things in Cantonese, including the classic cooked food stalls in public housing estates that look like one-storey huts with a pointy roof in a shape that resembles Pizza Hut’s logo. These cooked food stalls are affectionately referred to as 冬菇亭 (dung1 gu1 ting4) or mushroom huts, the imagery of the mushroom lending it both an accurate description of its appearance and a homey, local vibe consistent with the atmosphere of these casual eateries.
There’s also 燉冬菇 (dan6 dung1 gu1, stewed Chinese mushroom). Stewed Chinese mushrooms are of course a real and very delicious dish served in everyday meals and festive banquets alike, but when used as a metaphor, it means something far less celebratory. The phrase originated in British Hong Kong as a reflection of police-civilian relationship. According to the Hong Kong Police Museum, at the early stages of the inception of the police force in Hong Kong, there was a severe shortage of police officers. In addition to European police officers, Britain recruited officers from India from 1861, many of them Sikhs from Punjab. Sikh tradition strictly prohibits haircuts, and many Sikh gentlemen wrapped their hair in turbans in public. The police force allowed these Sikh policemen to wear turbans instead of standard police caps, and Cantonese speakers wasted no time in giving them a nickname of 大頭 (daai6 tau2, big head).
Sikh policemen were not the only ones with nicknames based on their uniforms. As neither European nor Indian policemen spoke Cantonese at the time, local Cantonese people were recruited into the police force and given the lowest level of trust and status. These Cantonese policemen had a different uniform compared to their European and Indian counterparts: while others wore navy blue suits with black leather shoes and either a white bell-shaped hat or a turban, Cantonese policemen wore a dark green suit, white stockings with black Chinese cloth shoes, and a white conical bamboo hat in Qing Dynasty fashion. They also carried no firearms and were only equipped with a long baton and a whistle to call for backup on their patrols. These uniforms and equipment were immortalised in a classic nursery rhyme:
ABCD，大頭綠衣，捉賊唔到吹BB
ABCD, daai6 tau2 luk6 ji1, zuk1 caak6 m4 dou2 ceoi1 B B
ABCD, big head and green coat, blow a whistle when they let a thief go
The first line of the nursery rhyme refers to the different ethnicities in the police force and their respective indicators on their police identification numbers (A stands for European, B stands for Indian, and C stands for Cantonese). The second line refers to Sikh and Cantonese policemen by their turbans (daai6 tau2) and green clothes (luk6 ji1), and the last line mocks the policemen for being incompetent and powerless as they could only blow their whistles (known in colloquial Cantonese as BB from the sound it makes). This classic rhyme reflects the discrimination many police officers suffered, and the different treatment they received because of their ethnicity.
Now where does dan6 dung1 gu1 come in? Well, beside green clothes, the conical bamboo hats donned by Cantonese policemen also captured people’s attention as their shape resembled Chinese mushrooms. If the Cantonese policemen were promoted from uniform to plainclothes, they could get out of their green clothes and mushroom hats, but if they made a mistake in their new roles, back on patrol in the streets in their widely-mocked uniforms they go. The act of being demoted is thus nicknamed “stewed Chinese mushrooms”, as the word 墩 (deon1, to be bumped from a high position) sounds like 燉 (dan6, to stew) and 褪 (tan3, to back down or fade out), and comparing demotion to a plate of stewed mushrooms in an oyster or soy sauce glaze makes the euphemism all the more juicy.
Now, most police officers in Hong Kong are Chinese, and the old colonial uniforms of turbans and green clothes are relics in the Hong Kong Police Museum, but the phrase dan6 dung1 gu1 remains commonly used to indicate someone is demoted in their job. I can’t help but wonder why a dish associated with such unfortunate connotations is still routinely served at Cantonese banquets where many items are on the menu solely because their names form auspicious puns, but I guess stewed mushrooms are simply too delicious to be demoted from any menu.