Lantern Festival: 02 (湯圓 / 汤圆)

 

湯圓 / 汤圆

tāng yuán

“soup round”

The 15th day of the first lunar month is celebrated to mark the appearance of the first full moon of the new lunar year.

    The full moon theme is expressed through round lanterns being put up (usually in the streets or outside shops, not so much in private homes), as well as the sweet round dumplings eaten on that day, called 湯圓 / 汤圆 / tāng yuán.

    They are made with glutinous rice for the skin, and for the filling, originally (when the tradition first started in the Song dynasty / 宋朝 Sòng cháo, 960–1279) black sesame seeds and white sugar, later ground-up roasted peanuts as well, with lard to hold it all together.

    I was first taught how to make it in Taiwan when I was working there.  Got back to Singapore and thought I could have a go.  What could be so difficult about mixing up a glutinous rice dough, taking a lump, rolling it into a ball, flattening it, putting a dollop of the filling on it, then closing it up?

    Well, that was how I was taught it in Taiwan.  Being so rubbish at cooking, to have been taught how to cook a dish is one thing, producing something that’s actually edible is another matter.

    I went through the whole process enthusiastically, eagerly looking forward to my first bowl of 湯圓 / 汤圆 / tāng yuán made by my own fair hands.

 

    Boiled up a pot of water.  Put the dumplings in.

    The dumpling skins opened up (I’d obviously not closed the balls properly), spilling out the filling, so that I ended up with a pot of pieces of glutinous rice dough, and lumps of sesame seeds, sugar and ground-up roasted peanuts, all floating together in a soupy mélange.

    It took me days to finish that sweet lumpy soup.  Yes, by myself.  No one in the family would go anywhere near it.

(Singapore, 1977)

Phone tapping? (London)

 

I worked part-time, very briefly, on a TV project about MI5 or MI6 (can’t remember which now), after The Heart of the Dragon aired in 1984.

    I was playing only a peripheral secretarial role, typing up the script the way the producer wanted it:  text on one side, time codes aligned on the other.  This was a bit tricky in those early days of the computer as we know it today, as every time a change was made in the script, the alignment would go askew, so it took a bit of fiddly tweaking on the word processor.  Fiddly, but nerdy distraction therapy for me, as such things take my mind off the horrible developments in life.

    My other part-time job at the time was working at SBTC (Sino-British Trade Council, now CBBC / China Britain Business Council), which offered (then-)free advice to British businesses wanting to get into the Chinese market.  They were partly sponsored by DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), so they were a quango (quasi NGO / part non-governmental organisation).

    One day, the TV producer rang me to talk about the script.  A couple of minutes into the call, the line went CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK.  The producer asked, “Where are you?”  I said, “At work.”  He said, “OK, hang up and I’ll call you tonight at home.”  (No, I didn’t give him my home phone number at that point as he had it already, and I wouldn’t, anyway, after the CLICK CLICK CLICK.)

    I’d played a few minor roles at SBTC.  

    One of them was compiling their regular Trade Opportunities publication, which was just a list of Chinese establishments (mostly government departments at that stage) that wanted to go into partnerships of various kinds with foreign organisations, plus details of their products and how much investment they were looking for.

    Another one was a stint as Information Officer, taking phone enquiries from British businesses wanting to go into the Chinese market.  I was, therefore, on the phone most of the time, yet that CLICK CLICK CLICK episode never got repeated.  No sensitive key words like MI5 or MI6 to prick up the tappers’ ears, I guess.

    I’d originally thought, “That’s a bit stupid of the phone tappers, being so careless, giving themselves away like that.” 

    Forty years later (yes, my brain tends to catch the slow bus / train), it’s occurred to me that maybe it was the tapper’s way of telling us not to continue with the phone conversation — even though it was only a clerical matter about the script, nothing sensitive at all.

(London, 1985)

MI5 lying to three courts (London)

 

An article came out in Metro (free newspaper) on 13 February about MI5 lying to three courts to protect the identity of a spy.

    I said to a student who loves such subject matters that MI5 is being true to its trade, because surely it’s oxymoronic for a spy (and an espionage-related institution) to be honest.

(London, 2025)

The repair man (China)

 

When China first re-opened up to the outside world in the 80s, foreign companies or businessmen couldn’t just rent a space for the office or rent accommodation outside among the local populace for the employee(s), not even a separate self-contained flat (not that they were actually available at all, anyway).  They had to get a hotel suite, with one room as the office, one as the living area.

    I heard this story in 1984 about a white British businessman who could speak Chinese (rare in those days), stationed in one of these hotel suite set-ups.

    One day, a repair man turned up at his door.  Assuming that the white man couldn’t speak Chinese, the Chinese worker pointed at the ceiling light in the office space, indicating that he’d come to fix it.

    The Brit thought, “That’s strange, I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it,” but let the man go ahead all the same.  He retired to the other room, to get out of the man’s way.

    The repair man duly climbed up his ladder, got his tools out, and fiddled around with the ceiling light.  

    When he saw that the foreigner was safely in the other room, out of visual range, he tapped on the ceiling light fixture, and said, “喂，喂，听得到吗，听得到吗 / wéi, wéi, tīng-de-dào ma, tīng-de-dào ma / hello, hello, can you hear me, can you hear me?”

(Beijing, China, first half of the 80s)

Lantern Festival: 01 (元宵節灯笼 / 元宵节) (Singapore)

 

元宵節 / 元宵节 

yuán xiāo jié

“first night festival”

Yesterday (12 February) was the Lantern Festival, so I’m going to catch the topicality with my memories of the occasion, or I’ll have to wait another year (cf. nobody talks about Xmas in January.)

    In Chinese, it’s “the festival of the first night” because it’s the first full moon night of the new lunar year (hence worth celebrating), being the 15th day of the lunar calendar month.  (Every first day of the lunar calendar month is new moon, every 15th day the full moon.)

    In English, it’s called the Lantern Festival, because this is when lanterns are put up in the streets — the round lanterns for the shape of the full moon, the light of the candle for the brightness of the full moon.

    The big round lanterns are the public display ones.  For children, there are small concertina ones, which can be collapsed once the festival is over and stored away, rather like the Xmas tree decorations for Westerners.

    We were five children in my family, and six next door, so for Lantern Festival, we’d get together at my house (a bungalow) for the ritual.

    The story we had learned as children was that on that night, the 天狗* tiān gǒu / “sky dog” will try and swallow the full moon when it appears, so we’d try and scare it away.  Or, if we couldn’t see the full moon, it was because the 天狗 had swallowed it, so we’d try and scare it into spitting it out.

    We’d walk in a row, one behind another, around the house with our concertina lanterns.

    The first child in front would have an improvised noise-making contraption, something like a tin can or even just the lid, beating it with a stick.  It could also be a tin can filled with stones, to shake and produce a rattling noise.  (Children in those days, and in a third world country as well, had such simple entertainment needs.)

 

    The rest of the children would chant something that doesn’t make any sense really, just some form of clamour to scare the 天狗.  In my dialect, it was “oh oh, teh niao teh”, over and over again as we circled the house.

    We didn’t stick steadfastly to it — we’d stop when the full moon appeared (we probably wouldn’t even start if it was an overcast or rainy night as we’d be there all night), or if we got bored, which was fairly soon, as it was so monotonous.

    If a child didn’t insert the candle properly at the outset (there’s a little spike for pushing the base of the candle into), the walking would dislodge the candle and the lantern would go up in flames.  End of the game for that child.

* (Chinese) 天狗:  To be distinguished from the Japanese 天狗 / てんぐ / tengu, which is not quite the same thing.

(From googling) “天狗”是中日两国均为人熟知的妖怪，中国现代的天狗形象是生活在天上的狗，而日本的天狗则是半人半鸟或长着长鼻子红脸的狰狞形象。

(Google translate)  “ 天狗” is a well-known monster in both China and Japan. The modern image of tiān gǒu in China is a dog living in the sky, while the Japanese tengu is a ferocious image that is half human, half bird or with a long nose and a red face.

(Singapore, 1960s)

A pot of pot? (London)

 

I stumbled across a word “smirting” (flirting when smoking with someone), and shared it with old friend Lars, among others.  He then started to talk about kretek (Indonesian clove cigarette).  

    The WhatsApp text exchange that ensued has awakened a memory that somehow never got converted to a blog, so here’s making up for it.

    Lars, history lecturer at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), had co-written a book on opium*.

 

    A Korean chap back in 1996 had taught me how to make kimchi/kimchee, which his peers and other Koreans had said was excellent.  I used to make it regularly to give to my students (need to bribe them to come to class, you know…).  

    As it’s loaded with raw garlic, I’d wrap up each jar with a plastic bag doubled over, tied down with plastic bands to seal it further, in case I got ejected from public transport.

    When Lars and his co-authors gave a talk at SOAS on the book, I turned up with a jar of my kimchi for him, presenting it to him in the room just before the talk began.  He, therefore, had no time to put it away, so he stood it on the far corner of the table at which the three of them sat.

    As the jar was fortified with double plastic, the contents were not visible.

    Throughout the talk, I could see that all the audience’s eyes were on that mystery jar, sitting there on the top corner of the table.

    Since the topic of the talk was opium, the audience must’ve assumed that it was a pot of pot, to be passed around after the talk — to look at and smell only, of course…!

(London, 2004)

• Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs In China by Frank Dikotter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun (2004). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

The Chinese love of word play: 03 (The career ladder climber)

The mainland Chinese modern drama series I’m still watching that has given the husband stealer the name of 胡莉 Hú Lì (which sounds like 狐狸 húli / húlí / fox, vixen) has a second word play on the name of another woman.

    This second woman’s name does not so obviously reflect her character as 胡莉 does for the crafty woman who steals someone’s husband and tells barefaced lies (about being pregnant, to snare the man into marrying her), among a host of other nasty deeds.

    She works in a publishing firm, and is keen to climb to the top, which is understandable enough, except that she uses underhand ways to undermine the female protagonist to get there.

    Her name is 沈冰 Shěn Bīng, with 沈 being a common enough surname and 冰 bīng / ice also fairly normal as a choice for a woman’s name.

    The word play is with the verb 生病 shēng bìng / to be sick.  

    Don’t forget, word play does make allowance for tone difference; cf. 胡莉 Hú Lì and 狐狸 húli / húlí.

    Now, you might say, “OK, tone variation is accepted, but 沈 Shen has an ’n’ ending, whilst 生 shēng has an ‘ng’ ending.”  That, too, is allowed in word play, which doesn’t have to be that strict.

    Besides, in real life, there are regional variations that don’t quite match the standard pronunciations of Mandarin (the lingua franca), for example:

    In Taiwan, “聽 / 听 / tīng / listen” is pronounced “tīn”, so there’s the n / ng variation for Taiwan.

 

    In Yunnan (S.W.China), “孔 kǒng / hole or surname [e.g., of Confucius]” is pronounced “kǒm”; “蟲 / 虫 chóng / insect” is pronounced “chóm”.

    Southerners do not distinguish between s and sh, so 上海 Shànghǎi comes out as Sànghǎi in southern pronunciation.

    It is, therefore, good enough to give the horrible publishing house woman the name of 沈冰 Shěn Bīng as a word play for 生病 shēng bìng.  

    Any Chinese will immediately make the association without nit-picking on the slight variations in the initials or finals, just as tone variations are not a problem either.