Human beings have an instinctive sense of belonging to food. A bowl of hot soup on a cold day or a piece of cake with tea on a lazy afternoon is somehow uplifting and delightful, and even watching an American drama or movie in front of my laptop, I have to knock on a melon to feel satisfied. When the Late Night Cafeteria manga was published in China last year, I was commissioned to write an article about my love for traditional Hakka food, and the two items I listed were stuffed tofu and freshly brewed ring tea. But these delicacies, which were often available as a child, have become harder to come by as I slowly move further and further away from home.
When I was a kid, I lived across the street from an old hotel in town, and when I say hotel, it’s actually the most common small restaurant on the street now. At that time, the commercial area of the town was still small, and it might not take two minutes to walk from the street to the end of the street. Even to buy vegetables, you had to get up early, because the women who came from the villages to sell their own vegetables opened at six o’clock and closed at eight o’clock on time. Naturally, there were few restaurants, and except for the occasional breakfast for the morning market, few people would eat there during the regular meal times. Most of the time when I was a child, breakfast was meatball soup and soup or fried rice noodles, where we call the rice noodles “water know”, Chaoshan people call the rice noodles “kuey teow”.
I once saw a restaurant chef making meatballs and rice noodles with my own eyes, in those days there were no machines, it was all done by hand, a very time consuming and physically demanding job. After buying fresh pork from the slaughterhouse, the meat was chopped by hand into meat paste (similar to the movie “God of Food” by Karen Mok), and the original pork meatballs were made without adding anything, but I don’t know if the taste of pork has become more and more stinky in the past few years, or if diners’ tongues have become tricky, but nowadays some meatballs are made with pepper, celery or mushrooms.
Place the meat paste in your palm, knead it into a circle like a small dumpling, and then put it into boiling water, the meatballs will be formed quickly. The tenderness of the meatballs is complemented by the strength of the cook when chopping the meat paste. Adding bones to the boiling water where the meatballs are cooked creates a pot of broth, which is the secret to the delicious soup base. Authentic soup noodles can never be made with plain boiled water, but must be boiled with meatballs and stewed with bones. The strange thing is that these soups never add any MSG, but taste sweet and tasty.
The rice noodles are even more complicated to make, the original handmade rice noodles, you need to pound the rice into a rice pulp the night before, then the rice pulp is placed in a bamboo sieve that does not leak liquid, into the pot and steamed for half to an hour, and when these rice pulp is shaped, then take out and cut into strips, this is the final river noodles we eat. Because of the time-consuming and labor-intensive, since I was in high school, I live in a town where no one is willing to do river noodles, with the words of my master across the street is “simply do not earn a few money, once upon a time are neighbors love to eat so do.” When I went home for New Year’s Eve this year, I found that the old restaurant, which had existed since I could remember, had closed down and was now replaced by a grocery store.
Meatball soup and river noodles, the two things that I remember as the most representative of Hakka breakfast. For example, in Zijin County, people like to eat river noodles with beef balls, as well as soup and the so-called eight treasure soup (a fresh soup made from eight parts of the pig, which I never liked much because I don’t like offal); in Shuizhai County, people will like to drink lean meat soup with Hakka pickled noodles (I went to high school in the county, and when I was studying In short, unlike the traditional soy milk and doughnuts, my childhood breakfast seemed to take more thought and time.
The street below my former company is said to be run by Zhanjiang people from Guangdong, who brought all kinds of delicious late-night snacks (casserole congee, baked oysters and dazzling Cantonese snacks) to Shanghai, but no one has ever opened a simple breakfast restaurant selling river noodles. So for most of the four years, my breakfast consisted of wontons, fresh meat mooncakes, or a random bun with a cup of soy milk from Bobby’s Buns. People living in the city don’t take breakfast seriously anymore, not to mention simple breakfast, as long as they still insist on eating breakfast is not easy enough for many people.
I only occasionally return to Shenzhen when I can still eat the breakfast I ate as a child – a simple pig noodle, just across the street from where I live. The owner was not Hakka, but Chaoshan, but both my sister and I found the taste surprisingly similar to what we had back home when we were kids. I always asked the owner to remove the pork liver or other offal, and he could have just removed it, but every time he insisted on giving me back some pork balls, sliced meat or lean meat. He seems to be very friendly, speaks with a strong Chaoshan accent, and often does not charge us for the change.
Because of the fear that the next time I return to Shenzhen from Shanghai, this store will close down with the same old restaurant, so as long as people in Shenzhen, will go to eat once a day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes noon and evening will go to eat, and sometimes with friends singing K to four in the morning, before entering the home to eat a bowl again. Every time you order rice noodles, a big bowl full, eat up than ramen is also full. Since the beginning of two or three years, the store’s noodles are still only 10 yuan, and the amount inside has never been less.
I didn’t know what “Hakka” meant until I took “Lingnan Culture” as a freshman, and my teacher told us during the introduction to Hakka culture that the so-called “Hakka My teacher told us during the introduction of Hakka culture that the so-called “Hakka people” are “people who call the Hakka land their home, and the place they live in is not their hometown”. He said that the Hakka people were nobles who fled from the Central Plains to the South 2,000 years ago because of the war, so there are Hakka people in Guangdong, Fujian, Taiwan, and New Malaysia and Thailand. When I heard this, I was happy to hear that they were nobles after all. Afterwards, I felt very disappointed because my teacher said that only the Hakka could not find the exact origin of the eight major language families in China, just like most Hakka people, they had no idea where their ancestors came from.
The Hakka family was plagued by war, and eventually left their homeland to make it their home, without a sense of security and belonging. My family’s ancestral tablet reads “Wen County, Taiyuan, Shanxi”, but almost all of us, including me, have never been to Shanxi in our lives, and we may speak the same dialect as people in a village in Shanxi, but we do not have a sense of belonging to Shanxi. Many Hakka who were born in Guangdong have already felt that they are Cantonese and that the original “Hakka land” of Guangdong is their hometown.
In my opinion, most of the young people who survive in the city are “Hakka”, having left their hometown, like a duckweed coming from their hometown to the cities in the north, in Guangzhou and in Shanghai, and may be rooted in the area and may have children there, but occasionally they still feel they are in the “Hakka land” and feel they are “Hakka”. But occasionally I still feel that I am in a “guest land” and feel that I am “a person who has a guest land as his home”.
For thousands of years, what has remained unchanged, or rarely changed, is the food that has been passed down to us. Like my natural love for noodles, dumplings or river noodles, it is perhaps a compromise proof that my blood comes from a tribe in the Central Plains 2,000 years ago, because I have a strange innate sense of belonging to these foods that did not belong to the South. History has erased everything about that tribe, and only these foods have been passed down from generation to generation, turning them into a history, a kind of imprint.
But, sadly, these foods are becoming increasingly difficult to eat or are about to disappear.
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