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).
As a fiction writer, creative writing educator and radio host, I often joke that I’m so longwinded that thousands of words can spew out of my mouth in the short span of a sneeze. When I branched into printmaking using moveable type, where every word takes up extra space and labour, one of the first obvious challenges was to keep things short and sweet. The second, less obvious challenge was having to find a way to write interesting content with the limited number of words, spaces, punctuation marks, numbers and symbols available in the typecase.
The typesetters who donated the tools of their trade to Print Art Contemporary upon retirement primarily printed business cards, receipts and wedding invitations, so the same Chinese character in the font size I preferred often appeared in the typecase no more than twice. Also, there wasn’t a lot of punctuation in the collection, making narrative-based writing extremely challenging.
My solution to this unique creative writing challenge? Menus. Menus are naturally short and sweet, they don’t often require lots of punctuation, and it’s entirely possible to write a menu without repeating a word in Chinese. On top of that, most menus were printed using moveable type before offset printing took over, so creating funny menus using moveable type felt like the perfect approach to celebrate this historical method of printing.
The first menu I made using moveable type is called 母親節無功者飯餸不留溫馨親情大餐, or Unconditional Love Mother’s Day Menu in English, featuring the very Cantonese phrase 無功者飯餸不留 (mou4 gung1 ze2 faan6 sung3 bat1 lau1) in its title. The lesser known full version of this phrase is 有功者留飯不留餸，無功者飯餸不留 (jau5 gung1 ze2 lau4 faan6 bat1 lau1 sung3, mou4 gung1 ze2 faan6 sung3 bat1 lau1), which means those who contribute get leftover rice but no toppings — and those who do not contribute get no leftovers at all.
Don’t be late
The phrase is commonly used by Cantonese mothers to show their dismay when family members fail to show up to family dinners on time. It likely originated from the workplace. In the past, many traditional Cantonese companies provided catering for their staff during work hours as part of their compensation. At lunch or dinner time, communal meals would be served for everyone on a first-come, first-served basis.
If you happened to miss it because your boss sent you out on official business, they’d save you some rice but not the more precious 餸 (sung3) — see my last column to learn the meaning of that word — since at least you were contributing to the company (therefore 有功 jau5 gung1, “performed a service”) during your absence. But if you missed the meal because you were late for work or snuck out on a personal matter, then too bad, you wouldn’t even get any leftover rice because you contributed nothing (無功 mou4 gung1). This rather cruel arrangement is a relic from the time when companies still provided catering for its employees, but resources were scarce enough to be stingy about it.
A mother’s admonishment
For some reason, despite complimentary communal catering becoming extinct, this saying survived and found a more permanent home in the family setting. Set in 1947, the popular 1997 TV drama Time Before Time (大鬧廣昌隆) is a story about a female ghost trying to find her lover through interactions with people associated with the warehouse store Guang Chang Lung.
Dai-kwong, a lazy 25-year-old coolie played by Gordon Lam Ka-tung, kept making excuses to avoid work at Guang Chang Lung, citing illness or the warehouse being haunted. One morning, he woke up to find his bowl and chopsticks discarded by his mother and sisters, and was told that they didn’t prepare his serving of breakfast congee and fried dough sticks. When he complained and asked for a reason, his mother said: 有功者留飯不留餸，無功者飯餸不留! (Jau5 gung1 ze2 lau4 faan6 bat1 lau1 sung3, mou4 gung1 ze2 faan6 sung3 bat1 lau1!)
The whole family then joins in to scold him for being lazy and full of excuses. Nowadays, mothers would show their dismay over a child being late for family dinner by saying 無功者飯餸不留 (mou4 gung1 ze2 faan6 sung3 bat1 lau1), withholding leftovers and making them miss out on her home cooked food.
Chinese mothers are overlords of the domestic realm, wielding as much power over the inhabitants of her household as a boss does over his employees. Food is often their way of communicating emotions. Withholding leftovers is a way to say, “Don’t take my cooking for granted.” Announcing “dinner is ready” after an argument is their way of saying sorry to their children without actually doing the unimaginable thing of apologising with words.
This is why I created the Unconditional Love Mother’s Day Menu, a bilingual menu printed using traditional Chinese and English moveable type featuring imaginary Cantonese dishes with classic insults from mothers embedded in their funny names, and its English “translation” that consists of a list of compliments offered by parents to their children.
The English title and contents on the menu are all gentle and loving, completely opposite of the Cantonese side, which resonated with so many Cantonese-speaking visitors to the exhibition. I wanted to juxtapose the two languages and attitudes, and invite the viewer to think about the values and conventions behind styles of parenthood in Cantonese and English. I haven’t invited my mother to come see my work yet; let’s hope I will at least get leftover rice after I do so.