An entry about meat in bread [Vancouver suburbs romance / the ethical weight of food waste versus food theft]
▣ The Richmond Public Market is an iron and concrete barn. It was not intended for the Chinese, I imagine. What I mean is that its stalls would ideally have been occupied by vendors of foraged mushrooms and local mead, like Granville Island Public Market. This is what I have been told. Tourists should have stopped off there to buy blueberries from the fields to the south, or spot prawns delivered from Steveston. Nobody was willing to travel to a farmer’s market in Richmond. And so, it became a Chinese market. I imagine the rent was cheap. ▭ I will write in the past tense, even if all of this is still true. I think of it in the past tense. It is unlikely that I will ever see it again. ▭ The bottom floor had a florist and a butcher, several vegetables and fruit shops, a lottery kiosk, a tofu store, a bookseller, and an electronics store. I bought a bootleg DVD of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance there. On the upper floor were restaurants mostly devoted to regional Chinese food. Everything in the Richmond Public Market was run by the Chinese. ▭ I need to be more specific than that. I don’t mean the first generation of Chinese that dug the drainage ditches for Richmond. I don’t mean the Hong Kongers that came much later. I am talking about Mainland Chinese, mostly from Fujian. But even this is too vague. ▣
▣ One of the few pieces of fiction I have published starts with a woman arriving at the Richmond Public Market and lifting the shutter on a stall. I said that it was tucked in a corner beside Xi'an Cuisine and a point-and-go sunlamp buffet run by a woman from Zhuhai with green tattooed eyebrows. She came every morning at six every morning, boiled rice from the day before into porridge, and made soup from pork bones in tall stainless steel pots. I was thinking of a stall that had closed a year before I wrote the story, which sold rice porridge with dried mustard leaves. I imagined her hearing the market on the lower floor coming to life, the sound of the birds in the bookseller’s shop, clanking dollies… I wrote about the man that I had seen coming there early in the morning with an enamel bowl to be filled with the thinnest porridge, milked from the top layer with delicate pushes of her ladle. ▭ I spent a lot of time there. I lived a few minutes’ walk away. I had a rented room on Number Three Road. ▣
▣ Good weeks, I ate almost every day at Xi’an Cuisine. It was usually when I was coming back from UBC, after grinding down Broadway on the 99 B-Line, then forcing my way onto the Skytrain. I bought a beer at the liquor store downstairs. I ordered the same thing each time. An order of ròujiāmó, which was two rounds of baked bread stuffed with braised pork, and an order of pídàn—the shiny, black preserved eggs—doused with vinegar and chili oil. Everyday. Everyday. ▭ It is good to have a regular place. I rarely spoke to the proprietor. It was enough that he remembered my order. ▭ On the weekends, I ate the special, which was fěnzhēngròu. This was pork shoulder, pork leg, some pork belly cleavered up, mashed up with ground rice meal, then steamed for hours. It was served with three steamed buns. ▭ Sometimes these meals became a luxury that I could barely afford. Sometimes, I went hungry. I ate for weeks at a time a daily loaf of ninety-nine cent bread from Safeway. ▭ The cashiers knew me. I practiced Chinese with them. I remember them fussing over me. ▭ Tracy brought me cold noodles and watched me eat them at the tables beyond the registers. I thought she wanted to dissuade me from stealing tins of tuna or jars of Nutella. I will admit to those crimes; I was very hungry. Thinking back, maybe she was just being kind, or perhaps her meals were a romantic gesture that I failed to pick up on. ▭ I treasured my ròujiāmó; I was very hungry. ▣
▣ Maybe ròujiāmó can now be found in most civilized cities in the world. I could walk right now to Ameyoko and get some. Maybe it doesn’t need any description beyond “baked bread stuffed with braised pork.” Maybe I could still quote Jia Pingwa's essay on ròujiāmó. I should tell you that I read it first at the table in Richmond Public Market. He specifies làzhīròu as the filling, which is pork belly cooked in a soup flavored with salt, rock sugar, the white part of the green onion, ginger, anise, cassia, and cardamom. He says that the bread should be báijímó cooked in a clay oven. I cannot say for sure whether he would support the addition of chopped green chilies, cilantro, or julienned vegetables. ▭ That is how I prefer it—with green chilies. When I order it, I usually ask for the lean meat, too. ▭ It was not easy to find ròujiāmó in Vancouver, then. Lumingchun in Yaohan sold them, and a shop in Crystal Mall that added iceberg lettuce to theirs. ▭ I will admit that the Xi’an Cuisine version might not measure up to any standard. But I prefer that version, or I would take it over any other ròujiāmó. I will probably never eat it again. ▭ It was bland. It was pork fat in white bread. It was a white-on-white canvas. ▭ It was the same every time. ▣
▣ I wept once, reservedly, when I returned to Xi’an Cuisine after years away, and was recognized by the proprietor. ▭ I was surprised. I felt that I had returned as a different man. He had known me as a sad sack, as a bum that drank beer out of a paper bag. How could he recognize me? ▭ I was happy. I was no longer hungry. I took a town car from the Fairmont at the airport. I was flying to Tokyo the next day. I took A■■■■ on a tour of the places I had once known. I walked with her past the fountain in the temple out of which I lifted enough change to buy X■■■■■ and myself boxes of chicken from the KFC up the road. ▭ I will admit to that crime; I was very hungry. I still don’t understand why X■■■■■ will not think of it as a romantic story. I was delusional enough to think our poverty interesting and literary. ▭ The ròujiāmó was as I remembered it. It was the same every time. ▣
▣ It takes effort to remember that even that last visit was almost a decade ago. The regular meals were fifteen years ago. ▭ I will never see that place again. There are many places I love that I will never see again. ▭ That sounds pessimistic. I might add that there are places I will love that I have not yet seen. ▭ I will tell you something happier. I ate ròujiāmó with Jia Pingwa in Xi’an once. I forget the name of the shop. It was not particularly good. He kept ordering and I kept eating. He sent a boy across the street to bring back a bottle of red wine. He thought of me as the type of drinker that he must have been years before, who needs a steady supply of liquor the whole day through. I ate and drank until I felt sick. I am ashamed to admit that I pocketed the final ròujiāmó offered to me. I set it gently in my hotel room wastebasket. That was wasteful. That was a crime worse than stealing a loaf of bread. ▣