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). In this edition, Wong explores the first of two chicken-related expressions ahead of the upcoming lunar new year.
Getting fired sucks, but not so much if it comes with a generous severance package. That’s where a surprising type of dish comes in: fei4 gai1 caan1 (肥雞餐, fat chicken meal). The term is likely derived from another expression, heartless chicken (無情雞 mou4 cing4 gai1) — more on that in next month’s Pop Cantonese. It usually describes the very generous voluntary severance or early retirement packages offered to civil servants at different points of Hong Kong’s history.
In response to rampant corruption in the colonial government and the police force, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) was established in 1974, and civil servants’ pay were raised significantly based on the philosophy that well-paid civil servants are less prone to taking bribes. Hong Kong’s civil servants are so well paid that Chief Executive John Lee’s monthly salary is roughly double that of US President Donald Trump. Being a civil servant also means that job security till retirement is almost guaranteed, to the point where they are said to have a unbreakable and highly sought after tit3 faan6 wun2 (鐵飯碗, iron rice bowl).
Whenever the government wanted to cut down on labour costs and downsize the civil service, it would take more than a piece of boney chicken head to break their iron rice bowls without everyone rising in protest. That’s when the very generous voluntary severance packages came in. Everyone loves money, and if the fei4 gai1 caan1 is fat enough, it goes down a lot easier. For many, choosing to accept the fat chicken meal means starting to receive their generous pensions earlier in life, and retaining the many benefits they are entitled to as retired civil servants. It is often spoken of as a lucky win for civil servants that happened to benefit from a golden handshake leading to early retirement.
Xi Xi, the late, legendary Hong Kong author beloved by readers all around the world, accepted one such offer as a government primary school teacher. In the 1970s, there was a surplus of school teachers due to changes in population make-up, so generous early retirement packages were offered to many government school teachers at the time. In 1979, then 42-year-old Xi Xi accepted her fat chicken meal and focused all her time and energy on reading and creating. This allowed her to write over 50 books of prose and poetry in her lifetime, many of which continued to influence generations of writers, scholars, and students of literature.
Her decision to retire early was not without struggle: her small pension could not keep up with her family expenses and inflation, and at one point she had to work as a substitute teacher to make ends meet. Besides, stories she wrote at the time documented criticism towards people like her who were educated but chose not to continue to “contribute” to society. In her well-known short story “The Bowl” (碗), published one year after her retirement, Xi Xi wrote of a young teacher named Yip Chun-chun who retired early, and her old schoolmate Amelia Yu, who was highly critical of Yip’s decision to leave the teaching profession. Xi Xi wrote a long, almost unpunctuated monologue that captured Yu’s criticism of people like Yip (and herself):
“It seems to me that if someone does not work, it amounts to becoming a parasite on society. Modern women should cultivate their own independent economic potential. It’s impossible to have a sense of security without a monthly income of $5000 in salary. Someone who has been to teachers’ college and undertaken specialist teacher training would be letting down society’s investment in their education and wasting taxpayers’ money if they fail to contribute what they have learned to society. In a society where inflation is so acute, to abandon a perfectly good professional suggests mental instability. People who don’t like to work are lazy, irresponsible, antisocial, misanthropic, uncooperative, isolationist egoists!”
(This text was translated from the Chinese by Bonnie S. McDougall and Wong Nim Yan.)
Luckily for Yip, she was blissfully unaware of Yu’s criticism, and genuinely enjoyed herself reading in the sun, gazing at clouds, and visiting animal friends at the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Gardens. Luckily for us, “The Bowl” has been in the secondary school curriculum for years, inspiring generations of teachers and students on its dual narrative structure, the imagery of bowls in a discussion of jobs and values, and the very different values held by the two protagonists. And luckily for Xi Xi, she got to focus most of her time and energy on what she truly loved: reading, writing and creating, without caring too much about other people’s praise or criticism, even when she was repeatedly rumoured to have had a real shot at winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her work taught me so much about the endlessly marvellous possibilities to play with language, to care about the small, the everyday and the marginalised, and to stay focused in a world of distractions and challenges.
In my own creative life, whenever I struggled with wanting more time to write but having to fulfill my teaching duties first, I would think of Xi Xi and become slightly envious of her for being offered a fat chicken meal, and her courage and determination to take it so that she could devote the second half of her life to full-time creating. I had the great fortune of becoming her friend when she was alive, and humbly took on the duty of curating the Xi Xi Space, dedicated to keeping her legacy alive after she passed away in 2022. She left us with so many treasures in her literary works, drawings and doll creations, it would likely take a lifetime to re-read and appreciate everything she did.
This amount of creation would not have been possible if she did not take the leap of faith when the offer to retire early came around. As a fan of Xi Xi since my introduction to Hong Kong literature 20 years ago, I have never been so grateful to fat chickens before.