Food and Love and Something More

Kampung Gum-Gum

I know this is a heretical question but is Kampung food, the subject preoccupies so much of our conver sation, actually better than other peoples' food?
This isn't some scintillating challenge - just (as) an idle thought to throw into the rich alphabet soup of our intellectual life as a nation.
Perhaps the sarcasm would be more palatable if i added the essential sprig of sardony. Sounds like a bitter herb, no? OK, the word, it seems, can't be found in the dictionary (and would be swept off the Scrabble board - tragically - together with the 50 extra points for getting rid of all my letters.)
BUt that hasn't prevented it from existing. It has set up tents everywhere; it has a following of ardent practitioners who will go on minding it till kingdom come.
Sardony - one of these inversions that are going out with the tide - like other fine bits of self-consciousness belonging to the Old Dispensation.
But, to come back to the food question, in what way was I being sardonic, that is, directing sarcasm at myself? Well, I've recently had proof of the survival of the Kampung-ians interest in food against all odds. In my own behaviour.
The land-changes of 10 years away, mostly in town of Sandakan, living through such rigours as chicken rice on the one hand, and on the other the dawning enlightenment that a great civilisation need not be built on a preoccupation with food - have made no difference to this atavistic national fixation as it has lived on in tours truly.
Thus, on my recent three-hour odyssey through Kampung Gum-Gum, despite weather humid enough for catfish to sing in, I raced and retraced my steps along what used to be remenants of Pasar Tamu, looking for the prawn mee shop I used to lunch in when i was in my kindergarden years ...
Driven purely by the dream of culinary epophany - to know once again the subtle fire of the soup, marvel once more at te fine- leaved kuay teow you could shine a torch through.
But the shop isn't there anymore. Or rather, it's physically there but it's lost its interior. New, glassed stalls break up the space. And Cheong Kee - or, pronounced in the Cantonese way - Cheong Kei, the large, rambling place at the corner, where I used to wait for my aunt to collect me, is gone too.
But Lai Foong, the bluish triangular overhang at a corner of what used to be called Kah Don, is still there, swarfed by the new buildings, shrunken with age, grinly virginal, resisting all re-devoration.
It was filled with students in much the same way, the odd hawker woman, arms akimbo, calling across the heads for Kak Mastura, or, as they say so misleadingly in translations of Malay novels, Elder Sister Mastura.
ElderSister Mastura? No, that is no translation, more a harakiri display of dead offal.
Never mind, I had wantan mee, with the sweet, pale, pickled green chillies, and it was much the same as before, though somewhat less than an epiphany - of what with the entire realm of leviathan drains of S'kan crowdindg in one olfactory reception.
Our love of stall food - what's in it? Noodles especially. This noodles habit is abit of Chinese culture that has extended to everyone else its comfort value. its all - in - one holism. But there's more to this than meets the eye, for it's the ubiquitous bowl that counts.
In Chinese you never ask for "prawn noodles", or "some prawn noodles", or "a prawn noodles" - though all of these are good English grammar in the context of restaurant orders.
In Chinese you must mention the bowl. You say, "Please materalise a bowl of prawn noodles." ( " qing lai yi wan xia mian") translating not just the grammar but also the sentiment...
Yes, it's the bowl, the hot steaming bowl that can be held in the cupped hands in the middle of cold night, and drunk straight from, the womblike bowl - with intestinal noodles? Oh dear, how carnivorous that sounds. But then, aren't we ...?]
Stall food is the people's food. Our civilisation is underpinned by this feeding from the hands of the less privileged, those closer to labour than we are. Who can bring the sweetness out of soup, bestow on us the heat from the kitchen of the body, the swear from the struggle of survival, the garlic cut from the fingers, the unconsciousness in which true flavour flowers.
And the people. the generations that have filled Kampung Gum-Gum deavede after devade, have changed so little in 10 years, while the buildings have crumbled about them.
Behind the new plate glass, the tacky plastic, wouldn't the solid wooden counters for bookkeeping still be there? The fingers so carefully choose after the pea to pea, the male body cool in the singlet, the children sqyatting over homework? Beyong the five-foot away,working, working?
Wouldn't they still be there, the shadowy generations layer on layer, if the South China Sea rose and slid over the land?