My grandfather died in a place that doesn’t exist. He died in a place in my memory, a Hong Kong that was, for a boy from the New Jersey suburbs, a pinball machine of noises, colors, and flavors. I loved my childhood summers there. I remember walking through honey-thick humidity to my favorite noodle shops, where the steaming pots and the steamy air gave resonance to the wontons, dumplings whose name literally means “swallowing clouds.” I remember my grandfather taking me to the landmark restaurant Fook Lam Moon, where waiters would greet him by name, where there was never a menu but instead conversation and a negotiation about freshness, where he would squeeze my arm and ask what I wanted to eat.
When people ask me how I got so into food, I think of those summers. I think of my grandfather, about how he came up so poor he couldn’t afford to have his children live with him, but when he finally made his fortune, he dedicated it to eating and sharing food. My parents used to put me on his bony knee and tell him about my good grades in school, but it was at the table where I most felt his pride, as he watched my small, clumsy hands aiming chopsticks at the particularly prized morsels, the things he could once only dream of being able to provide. “This one,” he would declare, “knows how to eat.” It sounded like nothing could be more important.
He died almost 15 years ago, well before he could see his hungriest grandson turn his appetite into something approaching a respectable career. So, these many years later, I find myself in Hong Kong and mainland China, going to places I remember him taking me to, going to places I only remember hearing about, looking to find something about him, about his love of food that came down to me. Great-Uncle Nine, the last of my grandfather’s brothers, offered to be a guide. He holds a place of respect in my family, not just because of his seniority, but also because he has an almost supernatural palate. “I’ve seen him eat a piece of fish and tell how long it was out of the water,” my father whispered to me while glancing surreptitiously at him, tiny and unassuming, at the other end of the table. “He can tell if a chicken’s ever been in a refrigerator.”
Great-Uncle Nine and his wife carry their own bottle of soy sauce around town. I learned this while having dim sum with them at the Renaissance Harbour View Hotel, when she pulled out scissors from her purse to trim rice-noodle rolls that hadn’t been cut to the appropriate size. “How can you enjoy them if they crowd your mouth?” Great-Uncle Nine asked as he uncapped his sauce. The night before, he had asked our waiter to scoop our rice from a particular place in the pot. This is who I’m descended from.
His amazing sensitivity and memory for flavors mean that, in our world of compromise, Great-Uncle Nine frowns through most of his meals and treats the declining quality of chicken as an existential crisis. But one morning during my visit, even he had occasion to smile at a dish of pepper-crusted smoked beef tongue. We spun the lazy Susan around at an alarming speed, throwing the kick-ass scent of Texas barbecue into the otherwise refined air of the room. My mother-20 years and counting of vegetarianism under her belt-turned to me and said, “Son, get a piece of that and wave it under my nose.” This is who raised me.
Despite the elation brought on by a truly good smoked tongue, Great-Uncle Nine frowned when I suggested we go to Fook Lam Moon. “Your grandfather isn’t here,” he said. “They don’t know us there anymore.” But I protested that a good restaurant should be a good restaurant no matter who you are, and he relented.
Although it has undergone a sleek, angular makeover, I instantly recognized the elevator banks where hostesses used to lead us, radioing upstairs that Mr. Lam was here. I remembered how tall they seemed, how beautiful in their silk, elegant and gracious as they held the doors open, tipping their heads slightly.
A woman behind a host stand pointed to the elevators and told us which button to press. Upstairs, we walked past shelves of extraordinary wines labeled with the names of regulars, a roll call of the Hong Kong elite. We ordered some of the classics by memory, and I was amazed at the crackling, paper-thin skinned suckling pig: sweet fat dripping down pencil-width ribs. But when the chicken came out abused by the fryer and the lotus-infused rice tasted of little other than rice, I couldn’t help but wear the disappointed face Great-Uncle Nine was too polite to make. I watched servers dote over a nearby table of men in suits and wondered: Was it the place that had changed or our place in it? Was the culture of this city still fixated on food, or had I inherited an obsession that was now merely personal?
“Maybe you should see an old street market, to see how things used to be,” my father suggested, in part to be helpful, and in part, I think, just to cheer me up. I had always thought of my grandfather as being old, and even before he passed I regretted not spending enough time with him, not getting to know him and the world he lived in. Now, trying to do that a decade and a half too late, I realize that my father is an old man, too. I love walking around this city with him, having him guide me. I love how he knows the place and when to turn, curbing my tendency to find and lead. I feel like a kid, led by a grown-up. I feel like his son. I feel like the name my parents have called me my entire life, “Jai Jai,” which means “little boy.”
He might have felt it, too. As we walked down Hennessy Road, he spotted a tram station and turned to me as if by an instinct he hadn’t exercised in decades, asking, “Wanna take the trolley car? We can sit upstairs so you can see out the window.” As if he, too, misremembered his son as a wide-eyed three-year-old.
Graham Street’s name in Cantonese is Ga Hahm, which sounds a lot like “Make it saltier,” and it’s a raucous old-line street market, the pavement slick with water from the fishmongers and covered in bruised and trampled-on vegetables.
My father and I stood next to a rickety stall that looked as if it were made of magazine covers. Under them, a woman sold baskets and baskets of eggs from Thailand, Holland, America, Beijing, Germany. We watched a fishmonger across the way clean eels with a cleaver as big and thick as a novel. He pinned them down with a pair of awls at either end, and I heard the crackle of eel bones breaking as he slid his blade through. I heard the deep thud when he jammed his knife into his heavy board, standing it up at the ready for his next eel.
“Hello! Hello!” the egg lady called. “What are you doing?”
“Watching,” I said.
“Well, watch somewhere else. We’re trying to do business here.”
In the middle of the market, there is an ancient store, the Wing Woo, in a building 130 years old and looking like it. Bags of noodles hang from the ceiling, bumping into bare lightbulbs when the wind blows. Jars of herbs share space with a feather duster and tilting bags of mushrooms--it’s the kind of place where everything leans into everything else. Wooden planks identify wavy piles of rice like grave markers, and bottles of ancient Worcestershire sauce are behind glass cabinets, nearly obscured by cans of creamed corn. The owners weigh each purchase carefully in a rusty iron balance scale, their ingots strewn haphazardly across their work area.
As I walked around the market, I marveled at how something so resolutely unmodern could coexist with gleaming skyscrapers here in Central, the Wall Street of Hong Kong. Then I remembered an iconic tourist poster of those skyscrapers standing behind an ancient Chinese junk floating in the harbor: This city is a meeting place of the very old and the very new. It is so small, so packed together, that even in Central people have to live, and people have to shop for food. Beneath glass and steel, there still has to be an earthy underbelly. I held this thought for weeks, buoyed by it. Later, I would hear that the market is slated for demolition. Spectacular tensions between the old and the new tend to have a way of resolving themselves, I guess.
Maybe I was just afflicted with a bout of romantic nostalgia for a place I never really knew. But when Great-Uncle Nine led us into mainland China, even I didn’t know how to romanticize our family’s ancestral village. When my great-grandfather left to find work a century ago, it was a tiny village tilling lean soil that was never good for much more than a little bit of rice and a few sweet potatoes. It’s still an absolute nowhere, but now a nowhere that is home to over 100,000 and a shoe factory that makes its own clouds. On the way, passing through the city of Guangzhou, Great-Uncle Nine talked about being there when the Nationalist army beat a retreat from Mao’s Communists, running for their lives and threatening to gun down anyone in their way. We drove by a once grand hotel, where he had seen a piece of shrapnel the size of a man shatter the street, just a few feet from the crowded lobby. I grew solemn, imagining the terror, when he said, “And over there, there used to be this place that had the most delicious squab.”
A day later, we were in Zhishan. The sky was a stern gray. The streets felt like they were made of dust. I saw a chicken break out of its cage, running from its owner across a parking lot.
We went to the five-story lookout tower my great-grandfather helped build, with gun turrets at the corners to protect the village from bandits. The tower was to double as our family home, but he never found it in himself to move back. It has been empty, but for a few photographs on the walls, for all this time. Its caretakers greeted us with warmth and tangerines. We walked, our shoes clacking on the hard floors, echoing through the boxy rooms. A bed here, a pair of ancient ebony chairs there; a small shrine to those passed away-portraits of my great-grandfather, his wife, his concubine; a photo of my grandfather, tinier than I ever remembered.
On the roof of the tower, I looked out to the land. There were mountains, hills really, covered with abnormally ordered trees. They were stripped bare, someone told me, and replanted to prevent fires. I tried to imagine the taller buildings-apartments, factories-gone, leaving the squat clay-shingled homes. I tried to place myself here, in this village, in this house without ghosts. I couldn’t. Maybe it’s because my family doesn’t actually have people here, only a haphazard legacy of forgotten photographs. “I don’t know what to do with this,” I thought.
I do know what to do, though, with the bag of rice I brought home from there, the rice of my people. At the border, going back into Hong Kong, I was stopped by an incredulous customs officer; I guess it made for an alarming X-ray. “You’re carrying twenty-five pounds of rice?” she asked. “I went to my old village …” I began to explain. “Oh,” she said. She waved me through.