Snack
Momentarily forgetting if I’m memorising or memorialising. Steam rises through the pots, conjuring up the magic of a home adopted. (Rinkoo Ramchandani, Imprint 22, pp. 155-158)
I stand outside a Mong Kok 7-Eleven eating cheung fun, poking at the rice rolls with flimsy bamboo skewers. I scroll the bowl to get the right combination of sauces swimming around its many folds, savouring each bite as the buttery peanut, plum and soy flavours mix in my mouth in a burst of street-side symphony. After a few minutes, they inevitably swirl around, becoming inseparable, an indescribable colour yet to be Pantoned, an amalgamation of memories of a childhood in Hong Kong.
Mom used to call the snack chee chow fun, Indian accent and all. I’m not sure she would approve of me buying it at a 7-Eleven, though, given that she only ever ate it at dai pai dongs. Her most recent favourite spot had been on Tak Shing Road, near Jordan, but she had been known to frequent one in Sham Shui Po – I never learned where. Unfortunately, there never seemed to be enough time to ask.
Mom wasn’t always a vegetarian, but she mostly ate plain cheung fun among the many Hong Kong street foods. Though I also recollect her occasionally digging into haau faan syu, the oven-roasted oversized sweet potato with its caramelized stringy orange flesh and starchy taste. It’s sold wrapped in a brown paper bag, which immediately begins ripping in places from the moisture of the steam within. Peddled on rollaway carts that dot every bustling neighbourhood, the food’s appearance signals the beginning of the city’s mild Autumn season.
Unlike Mom, my siblings and I were drawn to other snacks as well, from yu dan to chow mein, siu mai and gai daan zai – always from the vendors before or after school on the busy streets of Tsim Sha Tsui before gentrification forced the stalls to move away and shut down eventually. In addition to the street foods, growing up there was always choi on our table at dinner time, even if the main course was Indian. I cannot remember what it’s like to eat daal chawal without a generous helping of garlic-sauteed choi sum or chicken curry unaccompanied with crunchy, juicy pak choi.
Mom didn’t eat cheung fun regularly, but if she was out with one of us at a doctor’s clinic or picking up a one-size-up school uniform on Prince Edward Road, it wasn’t unusual for her to stop on the way home for a quick bite. This was the first authentic Hong Kong Chinese food she fell in love with after immigrating from India in the mid-70s, and she ate it like the locals. After placing her order in basic Cantonese and asking for the optional chilli sauce, she would stand on the street side outside a dai pai dong, scooping the rolls off a wax paper placed on a melamine plate with a faded floral pattern. Mom’s Cantonese was like Papa’s, fragmented and coarse, but they made themselves understood and comfortable in their adopted home.
In the late 70s and early 80s, when the burgeoning community of Sindhi businessmen in Hong Kong started to thrive, my father’s business improved, allowing him to buy a Mercedes Benz and hire a driver to take us around, but that didn’t stop Mom from frequenting her usual haunts. She would get herself and the driver a large order between errands as they sat in the new car, eating the steaming hot rice noodles from a plastic bag while double-parked in the narrow, bustling side streets of Yau Ma Tei.
Papa was the only family member who didn’t take to these street snacks, preferring instead the foods of the nouveau riche in over-airconditioned family restaurants where he ordered lobster salad and shark fin soup – and though we relished these with the same raging appetite, we have since all but forgotten about them.
Sometimes, we would buy roasted chestnuts on the way home from the park, where we played with the neighbourhood children. Unable to wait for dinner, we passed the brown paper bag around, falling into a trance-like silence except for the repeated sounds of cracking shells. Instead of reproaching us for spoiling our appetites, Mom would join in. A nutty, warm aroma filled the tight space of our living room and mixed in with sweat and the urgency of a tribe of ravenous and rumbunctious adolescents. Adolescents, now a middle-aged band of five brothers and sisters still snacking their way through the years who include the next generation in their pursuits.
My younger brother cannot pass by a traditional candy and coconut wrap vendor without buying some for himself and his three children. When his son, Akshay, was ten years old, I took him out for yum cha and let him eat eleven pieces of haa gaau in addition to other foods, then waited anxiously outside the men’s room for what seemed like a very long time, imagining my little nephew being sick all by himself. Finally, I asked a kind-looking stranger to check on him, and when the man emerged from the men’s room, he smiled at me and said, “Your nephew’s fine; he just needs a few minutes.”
Karina came home from her first year at university and insisted on eating gai see chow mein every time we went out for a meal – even if it wasn’t to a Chinese restaurant.
Then there’s Aanchal, my mild-mannered middle niece, who asked her father to detour past her favourite yu dan joint on the way home from the airport on school holidays, then proceeded to eat the snack every day for a week. And when she lamented the quality of instant noodles available in Boston’s Chinatown while at university, her mother shipped her a box from Hong Kong. Aanchal later sent us a video clip of her slow dancing with the package to an Ed Sheeran love ballad.
Finishing off my cheung fun, I smile at the memory of the overjoyed teenager and her noodles – a chip off the ol’ grand block. I contemplate getting seconds, then remind myself that my metabolism is almost fifty, not fifteen.
Reluctantly, I start heading home through the Fa Yuen Street market and see a dai pai dong I hadn’t noticed before. Like others, the outlet sold a wide range of siu sik, creating an overpowering and unidentifiable pungency. I make a mental note to try this place next time as I stand there, momentarily forgetting if I’m memorising or memorialising. Steam rises through the pots, filling the air around me, conjuring up the magic of a childhood loved, a mother adored, a home adopted.
By Rinkoo Ramchandani. First published in the 22nd edition of Imprint, Women in Publishing Society Hong Kong’s annual anthology. Imprint 24 launches on 4th March, 2026—buy your launch party tickets here.
