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).
I had been working on a couple of spooky projects for the past few months, and as Halloween approached, I decided to throw a costume party for a couple of friendly poets and literary scholars who are always down for my shenanigans. Cellur, a young scholar of Cantonese literary writing and enabler of all my ridiculous proposals, immediately sprung into action. Wielding his newly discovered superpower known as dirt-cheap Chinese online shopping with free and near instant shipping, he started looking up all sorts of Halloween costumes for all of us: Statue of Liberty, Jesus, Cruella, No Face, Chiikawa… It was all fun and games until he showed me a costume meant for the cat in the house we’ll be having the party at. He wanted to turn the beloved orange cat into a giant brown cockroach, complete with shiny wings, fuzzy legs and long antennae. That’s the one costume I banned him from getting. I’m not letting Tarzan the cat become Siu Keung the roach.
Siu Keung (小強 siu2 koeng4) is a common euphemism for cockroaches in Cantonese. The “real” name of the insect is gaat6 zaat6 (曱甴) in spoken Cantonese, and zoeng1 long4 (蟑螂) in standard written Chinese. Seeing that many people are scared of roaches, having an anthropomorphised nickname makes mentioning the six-legged brown minion of food safety hazard a bit less intimidating. But the name Siu Keung is more than just a linguistic veil to drape over the name of the sneaky carrier of pathogens that sometimes shows uninvited up in your food: it is also an affectionate nickname given to the insect by some of the most prominent comedians in Hong Kong.
The nickname Siu Keung for roaches originated from the classic 1993 Stephen Chow comedy Flirting Scholar (唐伯虎點秋香). Tong Pak-fu, played by Chow, was the most famous and sought-after scholar in Ming Dynasty China. However, he was tormented by his eight rowdy and gambling-obsessed wives via arranged marriages, who had so little respect for his poetry, calligraphy and painting that his best works were used as table mats for their endless games of mahjong. Feeling dejected, Tong went on a quest to find a woman who can truly appreciate his talent, and fell madly in love with Chou-heung, the most beautiful maid in the House of Wah. The problem was that Chou-heung, played by beauty icon Gong Li, already had a crowd of suitors just as rich and famous as Tong. A local boatman made a daring suggestion to Tong: disguise yourself and gain employment in the House of Wah, so you can get close to her from within!
With the boatman lying on a cart pretending to be Tong’s deceased father, Tong put on the persona of a poor orphan and attempted to sell himself as a servant to the House of Wah. Kind-hearted Chou-heung and her colleague Shek-lau were touched by his sob story, yet just before they made an offer to buy Tong, another orphan showed up with a cart carrying the corpses of his six family members with the same request to raise funds for his family’s burial. This started a comedic battle with Tong and the poor man one-upping each other to see who had it worse and was thus more deserving to be bought. At a critical moment, the poor man’s dog whimpered and died in his arms. Holding its little body, he apologised profusely to his beloved wong6 coi4 (旺財) — a generic name for pet dogs in Cantonese — for being so poor that he never managed to properly feed it when it was alive. Feeling threatened, Tong picked up a cockroach crushed by Shek-lau’s foot and started his performance: Siu Keung, are you ok? Siu Keung, don’t die on me, you’re like family to me, my dear Siu Keung! I raised you and educated you, I can’t bear to bury my little brother like this, Siu Keung!
In an interview, Vincent Kok Tak Chiu, one of the playwrights and actors of Flirting Scholar, said that he decided to give the roach a name typically associated with a younger brother so that people would care about the roach in such an absurd scene. It worked: Tong made it into the House of Wah as a servant, and Chow’s portrayal of immense grief towards a roach with a human name and supposedly human-like importance was so iconic, Siu Keung became synonymous with cockroaches throughout the Cantonese speaking world.
This legacy of naming roaches Siu Keung was carried on by later Stephen Chow movies, and in 2000 the name reached its peak popularity in the iconic TVB sit-com War of the Genders (男親女愛). Witty solicitor Frances Mo, played by Carol Cheng Yu Ling, reluctantly shared a house with her cocky paralegal advisor Yu Lok-tin, played by comedian Dayo Wong Tze-wah. Throughout the 100 episodes of their enemies-to-lovers adventure, Yu had a pet cockroach Siu Keung roaming freely in the house. At first, Siu Keung got on Mo’s nerves and she hated the creature fervently. Eventually she grew fond of it, even sharing her instant noodles with it and protecting it against Yu’s girlfriend, who came home one night carrying every type of roach spray and bait under the sun. Mo and Yu constantly spoke to Siu Keung as if it were human, and at one point it was even played by a human actor appearing in Yu’s dream. Unlike the Siu Keung in Flirting Scholar who died in its first scene as a stand-alone joke, this Siu Keung was a recurring character with significant influence on the storyline, even earning itself a girlfriend and its own insert song towards later parts of the show.
With record-breaking ratings, War of the Genders is often cited as the reason why Hongkongers associate roaches with the name Siu Keung. Hong Kong is a food paradise, and the price we pay for access to cuisines from all over the world is having to run into cockroaches every so often. Naming them Siu Keung makes encounters with them slightly less disgusting, just like how Hongkongers often nickname sewer rats mai5 kei4 (米奇) — Mickey Mouse — so they seem more like cartoon characters and less like reminders of the plague.
Perhaps when I’ve gained Tarzan the cat’s approval to dress him, I could dress up as a plague doctor and Tarzan can wear tiny red shorts and Mickey Mouse ears for Halloween? I don’t know if Tarzan would like that, but no matter which costume he ends up approving, Siu Keung is definitely not invited to the party.