The Invention of China by Bill Hayton

Author:Bill Hayton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300234824
Publisher: Yale University Press

6

THE INVENTION OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

guoyu – national language

To its tens of millions of fans, the fishball is the defining taste of Hong Kong. To most foreign palates, its elasticity can be disconcerting. The prolonged pounding of the raw fish flesh forms a spongy paste that vendors mix with rice flour and shape into spheres of springy delight. Some streetside cooks boil them in broth and skewer them on a stick. Others fry them in oil and slaver them with sauce. For the disenchanted, the result is merely gelatinous bycatch, but for the true Hong Konger, street-food fishballs epitomise local city culture.

And there is no better time to enjoy a proper Hong Kong fishball than lunar new year. The seasonal celebrations call back the many mainlanders who have moved to the Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region over the past few years. For native Hong Kongers it’s like turning back the clock to a time before 1997, when mainlanders were kept out by high fences and British foot patrols. And there is no better place to enjoy a Hong Kong fishball at lunar new year than Sham Shui Po, a high-rise, working-class district of northern Kowloon, home to many former refugees from the mainland. For three days, unlicensed hawkers set up stalls alongside the buzzing streets to cater for the revellers: low-paid workers selling low-cost snacks. Their business is illegal but typically the police turn a blind eye. It’s a festival, after all.

Monday 8 February 2016 was not a typical new year fishball-eating night. By the time Monday evening had turned into Tuesday morning, forty-four police had been injured and twenty-four people had been arrested. It started with a crackdown on ‘illegal’ stalls, organised by officials from the city’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department. To escape them, the hawkers headed south into Mong Kok, the shopping and entertainment neighbourhood, sometimes described as the busiest place on earth and also as Hong Kong’s ‘true heart’. They settled on Portland Street, the red-light area parallel with the main shopping district on Nathan Road. It wasn’t long, however, before the officials arrived in force, threatening to arrest anyone operating a stall. The hawkers retreated into side alleys. The stage was set for confrontation. A group of protestors appeared and began to escort the hawkers back to Portland Street. They had come prepared, carrying home-made shields, masks and banners. A stand-off ensued, police riot squads were called, and the result was a ten-hour street battle featuring batons, bricks, bottles and two bullets fired into the air.

As the street-cleaning teams swept away the wreckage, it became clear that this was not really a battle over the right to sell illegal fishballs on the street. The 2016 ‘fishball riot’ was a defence of ‘localism’, an outburst of resistance against a government in Beijing that was perceived to be trying to homogenise national culture and thereby eradicate a way of life that made Hong Kongers feel special. That it happened in a gritty, vice-ridden area with an underworld

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