Street food
I spotted him walking quite briskly in his flip-flops right in front of
me – an elderly man with all his tools of the trade on his shoulder. It was
something like a made-shift wooden stand with a plastic bag labelled “Love the
Earth. Recycle the bag” hung on one side and a container with bamboo sticks on
the other. He might be one of those street-hawkers selling traditional Chinese
tea-cakes, those steamed in bowls and extracted with bamboo sticks! He was
quite light-footed, perhaps because he had sold off all his tea-cakes and was
now on his way home.
This man took me down memory lane. These days, there are fewer and fewer
hawker stalls not only because government policies do not encourage hawking but
also because we are so worried about hygiene and in particular food-poisoning
that we hesitate to patronize. In my childhood days, there were no big shopping
malls but only small stores and street hawkers. The latter offered all kinds of
delicacies – the aromatic bovine offal and braised squid, stinky tofu, sugar
crepes, egg puffs and pickled carrots soaked in vinegar throughout the year. There
were seasonal delights like roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes and ginkgo in
winter and popsicles and frozen fruit slices in summer.
Streets in many districts whether industrial or residential were lined
with Dai pai dong or the street
cooked food stalls preparing fish ball noodles, sweet soups, steamed rice rolls,
stir-fried dishes and claypot rice right there before the customers. Dining
there in open air could be steaming hot in summer though a big electric fan
might be roaring behind and chilly in winter days though fire was raging in the
charcoal burners.
Though hawker stalls can still be found in some parts of the old
districts, most of these street goodies have now been upgraded and “housed” in
posh restaurants. To hope for the best, the taste is still there but what is
missing is the coziness and the intimacy of interactions that we are now
deprived of. Or perhaps, it’s all so beautiful in my memory as Barbra Streisand
sings The Way We Were!
Mem'ries may be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget
So it's the laughter we will remember
Whenever we remember the way we were
