Dispatches from Elsewhere: Mostly Eating
Day 14: Macau
Hello friends! I am ambitiously starting this entry today as I am waiting for the elevator. It’s 4:50pm right now and it has been a very easygoing day. Finally.
I just spent about two hours watching dramas and half an hour napping, and I feel like a luxurious cat.
Our day started early, as the bank opened at 9:30am, we set out at 9 for 光輝 (Café Kwong Fai). It’s an old favourite of ours for their tossed (thick) wonton noodles, but we haven’t visited in years as locals kept telling my mom it’s no longer good. Luckily, we saw crowds pouring out of it the evening before, and it’s enough to convince my parents to go.
And listen, I will wax poetic until the cows come home about the grief of changing cultural landscapes and the dissolution of whatever Macanese values exist in my memory/imagination, but the place still slaps hard. I don’t care what anyone says. Also, the server has to be the chillest guy in all of Macau, speaking in a soft baritone no matter the circumstance. It feels like I’m in a secret club when he asks if I want the noodles spicy or mild.
These noodles are unlike anything we’ve come across in Vancouver. Our thick noodles are often very thick, covering up the flavour of sauces and soups with the doughiness of the noodle. These guys are still wider than your average wonton noodle, but thinner than what you’d find in Vancouver, and quite thin, perfectly capturing the sauce blend beneath.
Side note: Chinese is a context-based language. We call these noodles…noodle (麵-mian/mien). Chow mein uses a different noodle, but we also call them by the same name. We don’t really differentiate unless it’s made of rice vs dough. Rice noodles tend to have a lot more names in this region. Here is a pretty extensive guide if you’re interested.
For us, wonton noodle (雲吞麵) refers to the whole dish, including the soup and soup dumpling. When ordering, Chinese menus look extensive, but it’s all a game of mix and match. For instance:
- “Wonton Thick” (雲吞粗) implies wontons with thick wonton noodles.
- Mixed-filling (pork, fungus, shrimp usually) dumpling noodle (水餃麵) = different dumpling with thin wonton noodles
- Fish ball rice noodle (魚蛋河) is a soup with fishballs and broad, flat rice noodle, while fish ball [thin] rice [noodle] (魚蛋米) refers to thin rice noodle that is not vermicelli (米粉)
- The differences between 麵，河，and 粉 probably requires a whole dissertation in itself as it’s super clunky to explain in English. And that’s not even adding other Chinese regional favourites like 米線 (“rice string”) and 涼皮 (“cold skin”) or noodles that have since evolved/transformed/translated into other cultures, such as ramen vs 拉麵 (la mian)
TLDR; I love noodles and I love language and I can probably go on. I just thought about how fun it would be to make an infographic of different types of noodles in Chinese for comparison, but that might be too extra. (Or would it??)
Back to our breakfast.
My parents and I each order a pork chop mixed noodle (豬扒撈粗) and my sister orders an egg sandwich (蛋治). The egg sandwich is a fond memory for her, as she doesn’t eat red meat. It’s a simple egg sandwich, but with the fluffiest white bread and the fluffiest egg imaginable. It lives perfectly up to her memory.
We meander a bit after my sister’s bank appointment, but it starts getting pretty warm pretty fast. I end up dropping her off at the appointment and go off on my own to meet my friend, O.
I’ve known her for years now, and always make a stop to see her every time I come back. She’s my connection to the changing culture in Macau, especially the state of the youths. We meet at Chok Chi Sam and I get a lovely honey, lemon and lime drink and a really disappointing rice dish that I typically get in Vancouver. She picks a Macanese minchi dish, one I learned from her and later recreated in Kelowna to great success.
I ask O how she’s able to drink hot drinks in such hot weather, and she tells me all the ways she’s trying to protect her skin. I’m pretty shocked, but I’m also immediately feeling validated, as my skin has been going crazy since I’ve been in Asia. I’m bitten in like fifteen different places (I finally bought a citronella bracelet), but that doesn’t explain how allergic to the air I seem to be. It wasn’t that bad when I last visited, and I end up wondering out loud if it’s typhoon season moving the pollutants and irritants around. Or I’m just getting old.
O doesn’t have an answer for me, and she’s somehow fine in a full long-sleeved Lolita outfit. (Her outfit is Eevee themed, and she explains that she’s heading to Zhuhai for a Pokemon expo after her Medieval calligraphy class and before her evening dance class. She further explains that she crams all of her activities on her one day off, and I marvel at all the pop up stores and events across Asia and it’s a wonder anyone has time for anything. I also ask if she’s dancing in that outfit, and she says no. The backpack she carries around has an additional cloak for her costume, but she’s going to change before dance. I’m amazed once again at what people are capable of in such hot and muggy weather.) O and I catch up over lunch, mostly chatting about the updates in our lives since October, and the new interests we’ve been exploring. She informs me that the Thai actors I watch frequently come to Macau, and I tell her that I know—I’ve seen a few of the vlogs, but I actually don’t think I’d want to meet them in real life. The industry feels too extensively manufactured. Plus, people do say one should never meet their heroes. That said, I know she got tickets to Mamamoo, and I’m only a little jealous, as they’re playing in Macau a couple days after I return to Canada.
Time flies, and soon we bid our goodbyes with promises to visit each other soon. I meander home, popping into a little store selling Tomica car figurines. How cool would it be to find the Peel Trident, I wonder to myself. For old times sake. Sadly, it’s a bit too niche.
Soon, I return home to rest, bringing us to the start of this post. Watching dramas, napping, and hiding from the sun.
My sister skips lunch, so she is ravenous by the time we head out. She’s nostalgic for McDonald’s shake-shake fries, so that’s where we hang out for a bit. We have a dinner planned for later, so I just go for a fun looking drink—an Ovaltine dinosaur crunch with pearls. It’s basically Ovaltine with milk, but with additional crystallized crunchy Ovaltine bits that somehow doesn’t dissolve or soften in the milk. It’s tasty, but it does feel a little cursed. I don’t care much for the pearls.
My sister and I meander a bit between her meal and dinner. Here are some things we saw:
We meet up at a restaurant near Auntie A’s house. Every time we visit, we gather for dinner here. They know the staff and owners very well, so it’s a familiar favourite over time. They order some hits and misses, but I appreciate Auntie A’s efforts nonetheless.
After dinner, we go up to Auntie A’s house. My sister has to do some bank stuff, and there is continued jovial conversation around the kitchen table. I make a beeline for the massage chair. It’s a big black egg that cradles you gently. Uncle helps me turn it on, and he picks a pre-determined massage that focussed on my feet and lower back, and I am oscillating between relaxed and screaming. It’s amazing nonetheless.
Each massage is fifteen minutes long, and no matter the setting, they donate good knead of your hands, feet, and legs. If you pick Thai massage, they even stretch you out by making you bend backwards as if you’re doing the bridge. I’m pretty ticklish, so I am screaming, laughing, and crying during my stint. The second time, I’m a bit more used to it, and it’s lovely except for the parts where I’m screaming, laughing, and crying again.
Tomorrow, it should be a pretty chill day as it’s supposed to rain. Auntie A is taking my parents to Zhuhai to play, so my sister and I are probably just going to meander. We’ve yet to visit landmarks with my sister, and honestly, I would love to take her to see the old Portuguese houses where my parents shot their wedding photos, and to Cotai to see a side of Macau she’s probably never seen. Macau is in the midst of establishing a light rail system, so transportation will hopefully become even more convenient, if not more crowded as the traffic flow increases. But as Macau becomes increasingly integrated into China, the money situation is increasingly inconvenient. Most places don’t take credit, but they do take AliPay and WeChat Pay. Macau has their own system too with M-Pay. Last time I visited, M-Pay had a free money event where they were spending for a chance to spin a wheel and grab free cash. America has a long way to go to be the Brave New World that China has nearly perfected. Regardless, M-Pay is the easiest way to get around, and we will have to look into getting a more permanent Macanese phone number next time. A phone number is absolutely essential in China, and it has to be because it is connected to all of your identification documents and is a vital piece of surveillance technology. You can’t do anything in China without a phone number.
All of this to say it’s hard to even flag a taxi without all of this set up, so maybe this won’t be the trip to show my sister around.
Maybe in a couple of years, it would be nice to spend a month or two here. If I could rent a room and work from home, that would be perfect. For now, I will just enjoy the last couple of days of this old ancestral home.
Until next time! Flor, out!
P.S. While writing this today, my mom came in with my grandpa’s rock collection, which is very cute.
