Hunting for snacks on Hong Kong’s Cheung Chau Island

The best thing about travelling to Asia are some of the amazing food stands selling things you can’t find anywhere else. Whenever I go to a new city I can’t wait to sample all of the snacks from the street vendors. Sometimes these are as good as dinners in restaurants at a much cheaper price, and I can afford to try several different foods at one time.

I start by visiting the Cheung Cheuk island, only thirty minutes by boat from central Hong Kong. In many ways, the densely populated urban centre of Hong Kong is just one side of the region. The many small islands of the archipelago are another side of the bustling city centre of skyscrapers and car fumes.

The entrance to the tiny beach at Cheung Chau. Everything is small scale, incuding the signage.

Because the islands are not too developed, they can be walked around easily and the lack of pollution or road traffic means that they are ideal for a causal stroll without the constant stream of traffic you find in Hong Kong’s streets. Getting off the ferry gets you right to the heart of the island.

There are no cars of any kind on the island. Use a bike or hike to get around.

It’s time to try the snacks. You can’t miss the typical fish balls – they are everywhere. Pay 10 Hong Kong dollars for two of the balls of compacted fish paste. You can choose from a range of flavours such as plum sauce, bbq or curry. Watch the sauce doesn’t spill everywhere, and be careful not to scald yourself as they are served just below boiling. The taste is not as important as the texture, which has a slightly springy bite to it.

These gigantic fish balls are fun to eat, but quite filling.

Turn left from the harbour, past the McDonald’s, and you will see a guy with a grill and some dried squid and octopus. Make sure you try these as they are really unique, and go down great with beer. The squid are air-dried whole, then cooked on an open grill and coated with a soy based dip, then sliced into strips. Good as a healthy, low-fat snack.

The translation of the stall’s name is ‘Long Island Sea Street Snack‘.

Turn back to the main square, and you will see several stalls serving the aforementioned fish balls. You can buy ‘sa bing’ which is similar to bubble tea, and you can find a whole load of interesting flavours such as taro and sweet potato, for less than you would pay on Hong Kong Island itself.

Various flavors of sa bings.

Also in the Main Street is a guy deep frying ice-cream. This is something I learned to do at cooking school – as long as you keep the surface of the ice-cream coated, it will stay cold as the batter forms a protective seal around it. Unfortunately they use mass-produced ice cream so the effect is ruined.

The deep-fried ice cream

Many stalls sell Mochi and this is always one of the best sweets you can buy. Mocho is a Japanese dessert made of sweet rice flour which is stuffed with various fillings and served cool. I’m crazy about the gooey texture of the wrapper and the sweet fillings inside. They are so chewy and soft, and very light tasting, consisting only of flour and sugar.

Another dessert snack is the Chinese steamed red bean cake (see picture). Like a tart but without the pastry, its eaten on a stick like so many of the snacks here.

Steamed red bean cake

Other than the snacks of the main square, you can find any seafood restaurants along the harbor. You won’t be able to walk five minutes without being accosted by ladies wielding menus trying to drag you in. It’s not only Chinese restaurants here. You can find several International restaurants, such as Morocco’s.

I still prefer the quiet stalls inside the square. For a more substantial snack, I can recommend the freshly made sushi at Japanese tea house, which are made into temaki rolls with a range of fillings such as crab roe and sausage.

Getting there

Cheung Chau is easily reached from the central pier, number 5. You don’t need to book a ticket in advance, just turn up and use your Octopus card to go through the turnstiles. There are some hotels and guesthouses but most people tend to visit for the day and head back in the evening.

Parasite plot holes and inconsistencies

Spoiler alert!

When Ki-jeong frames the driver by leaving her underwear under the back seat, she does so without him noticing. If she can do this with such ease, it suggests she could more easlily make money as a stripper or karaoke hostess (which, lets face it, is probably the job a woman in her situation would have).

In a later scene, the Kims are eating in a canteen for what looks like taxi drivers and chauffeurs. If the father already has talent for driving, why isn’t he already earning money doing so? Not to mention the ease with which the Parks dismiss their former driver. If they valued him at all they would have confronted him about what happened..

When the former housekeeper returns, she finds the family behaving extremely innapropriately., getting drunk on expensive whisky and throwing snacks around. Yet she carries on as though this is normal.

Guen-sye, the husband under the cellar. Where to start with this one? The explanation for his hiding there is that there was an underground bunker built by the previous owners of the house. When her husband borrowed money from loan sharks, she sent him down here, obviously caring for him whilst she worked as a housekeeper. If this was before the present owners moved in, it would mean that he has lived there longer than 17 years (!) by which point, wouldn’t the sharks have given up chasing him? Then again, Pieta……https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet%C3%A0_(film)


The kid’s birthday party. Something strange about this; there don’t seem to be any kids here. Instead, there’s a woman singing o mio babbino caro, and a huge fire in the middle, not to mention an axe.

The killings. This scene was so badly shot that its actually difficult to see what happens. But lets see: Ki-jeong comes with a cake, which she smashes into Geun-sye, but after he has lunged at her with a knife, fatally stabbing her. This is in full view of the guests, who seem not to notice a deranged man with blood seeping from his forehead carrying a knife. Just before this, her brother is bludgeoned twice with a rock, seems to be out cold (but later makes a miraculous recovery). Someone kills Geun-sye with a barbecue skewer, the boy faints, and Ki-jeong dies. All of this could have been done better, but in a further bit of unlikeliness, the father stabs Mr park with a knife, killing him.

What do the Kims do with their money? Working at the Parks should have brought then some material benefits. strangely, despite all working good jobs, they continue to live in the tiny, semi-derelict flat under the ground.

Right at the end, we see Ki-teok writing a letter to his father (who uses morse-code signalling to send messages to his son). Except there is no way of Ki-teok getting the letter to his father. But wait. Immediately after killing Mr Park, Chung-sook can be seen running to the side of the house, down into the basement. In other words, it can be reached from the outside, which means the son could quite easily post messages directly to the father, give him food, even help him break out.

Whilst Mr and Mrs Park wait for their son to come out of the tepee, they make love on the sofa. As he starts to caress her breasts, she instructs him to move in clockwise direction. It’s clearly done for laughs, but it’s not really obvious why she would gain more pleasure from this.

On my first viewing, I felt that the Parks were parasitic of the Kims. When I watched it again, it was the other way round. I’m not sure the film is such a strong statement of class ( as has been claimed). The film highlights the social divide in South Korea, without really telling us anything interesting about it. Not to mention, the Kims hurt each other, displace hard-working people and are responsible for the murder of an innocent man.

All this means that I still enjoyed watching the film, I’m jsut surprised that the flaws seem to have gone unrecognised. The recent Japanese film Shoplifters looks at a family who struggle in poverty but act in a more human and believable way.

The truth about ‘yellow fever’

One of the things that annoys me by the glib term ‘yellow fever’ is that it only looks at one side of the equation. If you’re a white guy and you prefer to date women of a particular country, for example, China, you might feel a level of stigma for doing so. Maybe you prefer Asian women because of their interesting personalities. Or you like their unique dress sense. It could be that you have a unique feeling when you spend time with them that you never have when you are with women of other nationalities. Like creatures of habit, we Asian fanciers know from experience that we want to be with the yellow women, and it’s going to take a lot more than the disaproval of a bunch of angry man-hating liberals to make change our ways.

Yellow fever

It is a bit rich to criticise men for favouring ‘eastern’ women, when those women profess an equally strong preference for men of Caucasian race.
Another oft-mentioned claim is that white men exploit Asian women who they consider an easy target. This is not only a gross oversimplification, but it ignores something far more noticeable. The lack of desirability of many white women, along with their ridiculous levels of expectation, means that most white guys don’t stand a chance with women of their own race. If you were constantly ridiculed by women growing up, and seen as a loser by women in your surroundings, how are you able to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex? Its because men who move to Asian countries experience such a positive response from the
women there that they begin to see themselves in a new light, and finally have the confidence to start approaching women in a natural and healthy way. It’s this new-found confidence that gives men the ability to start trading up – giving them the opportunity to meet girls considered out of their league back home.


Game playing
If you’ve ever been on a date with someone whom you met through a datingapplication, be it tinder or similar, you probably faced a whole load of questions about things. Should you pay for the first date? Do you kiss her? Where do you go? Should it be somewhere expensive, or just a causal place? The problem is, no-one knows the answer. It’s why dating has become so much harder, especially now that women want to be seen as equals, whilst still clinging to the idea that men should pay for everything.
The other thing you hear is that men dating white women have to jump through so many hoops, prompting one internet writer to declare that the real reason whitewomen are against men dating Asian women – they don’t want other men to see how easy it is when there are no games to play and you don’t need to go to great lengths to win her approval.


Stereotypes
You hear so much about white men and Asian women, but what about the
reversal? If you’re a woman who likes Korean or Japanese culture, you’re
probably equally interested in men of the culture. Surely all the fans screaming at BTS aren’t just excited about the music? Yet, nobody has suggested that these women are racially stereotyping these men.

Why I prefer Asian women

Not that I’m some kind of pervert or anything, but I do happen to believe that Asian women have the nicest bodies of women anywhere. I have tried women all over the world, so it’s not like I’m an experienced loser who likes Asian women because those are the only women he has been with.

Ho says in her bio that she wants a man to take care of her. I’m crazy about flight attendants and would do anything to be with one.

Do Western women even want to dress nice and make an effort? Lets face it, they never wear the clothes and accessories that men like. If they wore some nice skirts with tights and heels, wore make up an went to the gym, I might have a scintilla of interest. As it is, they way they dress makes me want to cover my eyes in shock.

I’m chatting to Luna (who is Chinese) on weChat. She messages everyday, and always takes in interest in what I am doing.

You can bet I was swiping right on all of these. A fair few girls still like to wear denim cuttoffs, and why not? As I said, it’s all about looking as good as you possibly can. True, these aren’t the youngest women, but with my age fast approaching 40, there’s not too much I can do about that. Sometimes I think about settling down ( I will, eventually). But at the moment, I’m having so much fun getting to know these wonderful women. London has more Asian women than I will ever be able to date and I have no intention of ever stopping. All I can say is they have changed my life and they have changed it for the better.