Reflections on a Long and Blessed Life No. 58: Food in Hong Kong

I love to eat. So enjoying good food is among the many good memories I have of living in Hong Kong. However, before I can speak of that I must face the reality that when we first arrived in Hong Kong in 1956 there were many, many people there who were going hungry. They had fled for their lives bringing with them nothing or only the barest of necessities. They lived on the street, in stairwells, in hillside shacks. When thy had a little rice thy cooked it right there in the open. They often went hungry or underfed. I will never forget my early experience of seeing people on the verge of death due to starvation.

Fortunately we were a small part of the many efforts to feed the hungry. Lutheran World Service provided food for thousands. When their food trucks arrived people lined up orderly but eagerly for milk or rice packets. At our schools we regularly served milk to our pupils. This was a challenge because except for mother’s milk it is not common for Chinese to drink a lot of milk. When we strongly urged our students to drink milk they often had diarrhea as the initial response and that, of course, made it even more challenging. We added a bit of sugar to the milk and that helped. But what really helped is that it soon became obvious that those who drank milk every day were the ones who were gaining weight.

We faced a bit of a moral challenge I Macau. We had lots of flour and milk, but this was not what the people could easily use. They certainly had no money or space for baking ovens. We negotiated with a baker to use the flour and milk to bake fresh buns, which were enjoyed. We did not have funds to pay the baker in cash so we paid him “in kind” which technically we were not to do. But the arrangement did really save some lives and gave daily nourishment to others.

Inviting guests to share a meal is one of the basic forms of Chinese hospitality. This is almost always done in restaurants. In my ten years in Hong Kong I do not recall ever being invited to a Chinese home for a meal. Of course, most of the people with whom I worked lived in tiny, tiny apartments and hardly had room to accommodate guests. For people living in the Resettlement Estates it was not unusual that they had their small eating tables attached to pulleys and when it was not meal time those tables were pulled up close to the ceiling to make room for movement or a place to sleep.

One of the eating customs is to have the number of courses served be the same number as the number of guests at a table, usually ten or twelve. This can make for a wonderful varied meal but if funds are short it can present a challenge. I remember very early one. We had a big dinner for the teachers who had corrected the entrance exams at Concordia.  We had little money but we needed 12 dishes so we ordered the most economical and that is why, for example, at one meal we served blood soup, fish stomach and similar very low-cost ingredients.

At our home we always had plenty of good food. We learned to go without any fresh leafy vegetables because they were all raised using human excrement as fertilizer. The local chickens were scrawny but good, especially in soup. Fish from near-by waters were fresh and wonderful. Lamb came from Australia. Pork from the New Territories and China was excellent. I survived 5 years without ever having a steak.