Travel
Feathers & fins
by Hamish McKenzie
At a Chinese New Year feast, the delicacies may include goose ankles.
We were halfway through our nine-course banquet at the Bauhinia Seafood Restaurant in Hong Kong’s bustling Mong Kok district when my girlfriend asked me if I knew what I was eating.
The gooey liquid seemed to congeal in my mouth as I prepared for the bad news.
“It’s shark’s fin soup,” she said.
I’d heard about this delicacy often enough in Hong Kong, where I have lived for eight months. And I had studiously avoided it. Though it’s prized in Chinese culture, especially for banquets, the soup is far less popular in other more shark-friendly societies. Often the fins are cut from living sharks and, because their meat is worth so little, they are tossed back into the ocean, where they die slowly and painfully.
Quite apart from the cruelty, “finning”, as it is called, has been blamed for a recent sharp decline in shark populations. In 2005, pressure from animal welfare groups forced Hong Kong Disneyland to drop the dish from its menu. Last August, Chinese NBA star Yao Ming swore off the dish forever. Filmmaker Ang Lee and film star Jackie Chan have made similar stands.
Still, none of that changes the fact that it tasted pretty damn good.
I finished my bowl, telling myself that I’d never again eat the stuff, and tried to fight back the guilt through the remaining five courses. This was, after all, my first bona fide Chinese New Year feast, and I wasn’t about to upset my hosts – about two dozen Chinese twentysomethings – by rejecting one of their favourite dishes.
New Year – which starts with the new moon in late January or early February – is the most important date in the Chinese calendar. For two weeks, Hong Kong shuts down. The city that usually breathes heavily at all hours finds a moment to rest. The aluminium doors on storefronts are rolled down; families get together in poky apartments to play mah-jong; crowds flock to giant lantern displays in public parks; and, at the holiday’s culmination, they flock again, this time to the edge of the harbour that separates Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, to gaze at the 20-minute fireworks extravaganza touted by some – locals, mainly – as the world’s best.
But the most treasured tradition is eating, and at our banquet we did that with a formidable application and devotion to duty for over two hours. As we feasted, tireless waitresses ferried to our table tremendous dishes, overspilling with comestibles. The food came from the earth, the sea and even the sky (the bottoms of geese’s legs) and everything was cheerfully washed down with Tsingtao beer and red wine.
Much of the food to grace our lazy Susan was laden with symbolic value, often representing one of three auspicious motifs: health, wealth and happiness. We started with a baby pig (eaten at every happy meal, and served with its head and tail for completeness), moved on to dried bean curd (the Chinese name, fu juk, sounds like the word for happiness), cracked into a chicken (happiness and marriage) and devoured a fish (yu, a homonym for abundance). Impressed by its tenderness, and unsettled by its beady eye, I turned to the guy beside me and asked what sort of fish it was.
“Good fish.”
Yes, but what did it call itself in happier times?
“I don’t know the name,” he said, mid-mouthful, in halting English, “but it’s yummy fish.”
The most propitious dish of all, though, consisted of scallops, oysters and a rare seaweed called black moss, a double-whammy combination that signified both wealth and good business. Black moss, according to researchers, also has no nutritional value and contains a toxic amino acid linked to degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia. If that wasn’t bad enough, just cultivating 50g of the algae plant can intensify desertification of two standard-size swimming pools. Oh, and in China it’s considered an endangered species.
Still, none of that changes the fact that it tasted pretty damn good.
