The ritual of meals at my home
by Edmond
After some serious thinking about my family history, regrettably, I could not come up with a dish that bears a particular meaning for my family. Instead, what we do to food may have more to tell than what we eat in specific. My mum was from the Chiu Chow (潮州) of Guangdong Province, but now she does not cook any special dish from the region anymore, since she has long accustomed to the Hong Kong society and learned to cook local family dishes. My mum is arguably the only one who is in charge of all the meals in the family. Every time when a dish that requires much effort is done, it will not be put on the dining table right away. Rather, it has got to be ‘eaten’ by the gods whom our family believes in.
What she, or sometimes we the children, do is to place the dish in front of the worship cabinet, light up a thin bundle of incense and say our prayers in a soft voice, hoping that we will be rewarded good luck, health, wealth and things like that. The children don’t do it on their own initiative, so the prayers, for most of the time, are empty. What is even more interesting is that, there is a hierarchy of assigning different dishes to different gods. Usually the ancestors of our Chan family are served with the best ones, for example, fried chicken wings and steamed fish; the God of the Earth has the more common food. However, don’t ask me about how the allocation system exactly works. It only makes sense to my mum’s mind.
Another peculiarity to note is that my mum says the prayers only in the Chiu Chow dialect, never in Cantonese although she is fluent in it. Maybe there are some ideas or wishes that can only be communicated perfectly through the dialect, or the local gods do not understand Cantonese? Now I learn that while some religions like Christianity are global, some are still local and bound to other cultural customs such as language.
Without any doubt, Chiu Chow has a lot of food that can stimulate your appetite to offer, just that my family has moved to Hong Kong for a long time and abandoned cooking most of the traditional dishes due to the time and space constraint of cooking them. Only essential parts of the original rituals are kept and practiced. I suspect that it is a common phenomenon for most of the families that moved to Hong Kong from mainland a long time ago. And that makes the important local gods of their original places emigrate with the people!
Caption: A bunch of banana is dedicated to the local god of Chiu Chow (伯公)
by Edmond
After some serious thinking about my family history, regrettably, I could not come up with a dish that bears a particular meaning for my family. Instead, what we do to food may have more to tell than what we eat in specific. My mum was from the Chiu Chow (潮州) of Guangdong Province, but now she does not cook any special dish from the region anymore, since she has long accustomed to the Hong Kong society and learned to cook local family dishes. My mum is arguably the only one who is in charge of all the meals in the family. Every time when a dish that requires much effort is done, it will not be put on the dining table right away. Rather, it has got to be ‘eaten’ by the gods whom our family believes in.What she, or sometimes we the children, do is to place the dish in front of the worship cabinet, light up a thin bundle of incense and say our prayers in a soft voice, hoping that we will be rewarded good luck, health, wealth and things like that. The children don’t do it on their own initiative, so the prayers, for most of the time, are empty. What is even more interesting is that, there is a hierarchy of assigning different dishes to different gods. Usually the ancestors of our Chan family are served with the best ones, for example, fried chicken wings and steamed fish; the God of the Earth has the more common food. However, don’t ask me about how the allocation system exactly works. It only makes sense to my mum’s mind.
Another peculiarity to note is that my mum says the prayers only in the Chiu Chow dialect, never in Cantonese although she is fluent in it. Maybe there are some ideas or wishes that can only be communicated perfectly through the dialect, or the local gods do not understand Cantonese? Now I learn that while some religions like Christianity are global, some are still local and bound to other cultural customs such as language.
Without any doubt, Chiu Chow has a lot of food that can stimulate your appetite to offer, just that my family has moved to Hong Kong for a long time and abandoned cooking most of the traditional dishes due to the time and space constraint of cooking them. Only essential parts of the original rituals are kept and practiced. I suspect that it is a common phenomenon for most of the families that moved to Hong Kong from mainland a long time ago. And that makes the important local gods of their original places emigrate with the people!
Caption: A bunch of banana is dedicated to the local god of Chiu Chow (伯公)
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