In Pop Cantonese, author Eva Wong Yi offers 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 recently had my first collection of letterpress artwork presented in Print Art Contemporary’s exhibition Beyond the Ordinary: Contemporary Book Art, and during the creative process, I was surprised by how often I was reminded of Hong Kong Cantonese’s uniqueness compared to Mandarin and standard written Chinese. Yes, we all know that Cantonese has its own grammar and vocabulary, but it’s especially visceral when you see unique Cantonese words forged into a solid piece of metal, in the form of moveable type made in Hong Kong when we still had foundries all over Central. Before offset printing pushed commercial moveable type printing into obsolescence, these words were used by local typesetters to print business cards, newspapers, and stationery for dim sum restaurants, providing a physical record of which words were used in written Cantonese at the time.
The two sets of traditional Chinese moveable type I’ve been using at Print Art Contemporary were donated by retired typesetters, with a limited number of words in specific fonts and sizes. Since there are no longer any moveable type foundries in Hong Kong, I had to mail order extra pieces from a Taiwanese foundry to complete my artwork. 10 of the common Cantonese characters I wanted were unavailable, which was expected since that foundry serves a primarily Mandarin-speaking clientele. What surprised me was that the word 餸 (sung3) was unavailable: it’s a word that is so commonly used that I had forgotten it was Cantonese.
An attempt to explain what 餸 is feels like trying to write a dictionary entry for “nighttime.” Nighttime is defined by its opposite, daytime, much like 餸 is defined by its opposite 飯 (faan6, rice). In a Chinese meal, 餸 is the part of the meal that is not the rice. So for a plate of char siu rice, char siu is the 餸. For a family meal, the steamed fish, braised chicken, and stir fried vegetables are all 餸. I can’t think of a good direct translation of 餸 in English, because Western cuisines do not categorise food in the same way. Yes, 餸 can be an entrée, but we rarely eat 餸 on its own without the rice like one would eat a a grilled salmon steak with three pieces of asparagus, and eating a whole plate of sweet and sour pork on your own without the rice is inconceivable for a Chinese person.
Although some 兩餸飯 (loeng5 sung3 faan6) places in Hong Kong translate their menus as “rice with two sides,” 餸 is not really a companion on the sidelines, but the main character that defines the meal. Perhaps this is why going grocery shopping is called 買餸 (maai5 sung3): yes, everyday staples like rice and noodles are always stockpiled in the kitchen like extra toilet paper, and you can always whip up something using canned and frozen foods. But fresh produce is always expected for a proper home cooked meal unless acts of god made groceries shopping impossible, such as a typhoon or a sudden pandemic lockdown. If there are no groceries at home, there will be no proper 餸, and eating out or ordering in feels way less depressing unless you really don’t mind eating fried spam on rice.
People around the world love home cooking and fresh produce; how they approach grocery shopping, cooking and sharing their food says a lot about their culture and way of life. In a city as busy and crowded as Hong Kong, people’s obsession with having fresh produce to cook their 餸 whenever humanly possible gave rise to groceries delivery apps that sends riders to wet markets to 買餸 on your behalf, seasoned ingredients packs (餸包 sung3 baau1) ready to become steamed spareribs with black bean paste or steamed fish with ginger and scallions in your own kitchen after a long day at the office, personal groceries shopping trolleys (買餸車 maai5 sung3 ce1) that allows you to lug an entire family’s worth of groceries home on public transport, and competitive vegetables shopping in supermarkets and wet markets when a typhoon is expected.
Buying groceries and cooking family dinners is such a big part of Hong Kong life that TVB has a classic cooking segment called 今晚食乜餸 (gam1 maan5 sik6 mat1 sung3, “What’s Cooking Tonight”) in their long-running daily shows 婦女新姿 (Woman Today) and 都市閒情 (Pleasure & Leisure), where famous TV chefs like Mrs. Lee Tsang Peng-chin (李曾鵬展) and Ben Li Kam-luen (李錦聯) demonstrated everyday cooking for several decades. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, which supervises all of the government wet markets around Hong Kong, also provides a special service called 今日買乜餸 (gam1 jat6 maai5 mat1 sung3, “What groceries to get for tonight”) that helps people find inspiration for cooking everyday.
On some wet market noticeboards, colourful menus are posted weekly with recipes for a four-course dinner (three dishes and one soup, or 三餸一湯 saam1 sung3 jat1 tong1) for each day of the week — Saturdays and Sundays share one recipe, because home cooks also deserve a day off. The multilingual versions updated weekly on their website are written in Chinese, English, Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesia, reflecting the fact that a lot of family dinners in Hong Kong are cooked by migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.
You may have guessed what’s cooking in my project with the need for the word 餸 in my moveable type artwork: more on that in the next story!