Mmmm. More Sign Language
Yesterday I was out walking in Causeway Bay. And when I looked up to admire this lovely example of classic Hong Kong restaurant neon, I realized I'd left out an important category of Hong Kong street signs in the article below.
These are the signs that say one thing in Chinese, and then say something completely different in English. I call these the "It doesn't work in both languages so why bother trying to translate it?" signs. There are concepts that just don't travel well from language to language. As one of our readers points out, sometimes a name or phrase that sounds just fine in Chinese can sound really bad in English, and vice versa. That's when you need to forget about trying to translate, and start from scratch.
It's fairly common for Hong Kong restaurants to have two different names, in English and Chinese, that don't bear any relation to each other. Like this place, the "Red Pepper Restaurant". The Chinese characters aren't a translation of "Red Pepper" at all. They say: Naam Baak Lau, which means "South North Restaurant".
"South North" is a very catchy and informative term for Cantonese speakers, for "north" and "south" are shorthand for regions of China. So a Hong Kong person will understand from the name that this restaurant serves a variety of dishes from different Chinese cuisines--that it is not a Cantonese style eatery (although there may be some Canto-dishes on the menu).
Most Western customers would not get this at all. So the restaurant has re-branded itself in English as "Red Pepper", which makes the place sound very attractive to foreigners, many of whom are used to eating some variation of Hunan-Sichuan cuisine in their home countries, and who expect "authentic" Chinese cuisine to set off a fire alarm in their mouths .
Hong Kong Cantonese, by and large, are not big fans of the hot stuff (although that's changing in the younger generation). A big restaurant that called itself "Laat", hot-spicy, would probably fold fast--nobody's grandmother would go near the place.
Two languages, two names, for two kinds of customers. Hey, it works.
By the way, I've never eaten at Naam Baak/Red Pepper restaurant, so I can't vouch for its food (the menu looks heavy on the Sichuan dishes). Let me know what you think if you've tried it.
But I love their old sign. Sadly, I've found that the Hong Kong restaurants with the most spectacular neon signs often fail to live up to the promise of those bright blinking lights. One big exception is the classic 24 hour downtown cha chaan teng, Tsui Wah where the sleepless can go sip tea and munch on fa saang do si, peanut butter toast, under blazing-bright flourescent tubes at 4am.
And then there's this place, right around the corner from Naam Baak/Red Pepper, which should be at the top of your "Things to do in Causeway Bay" list. Sorry, I can't find a good shot of Yee Shun Milk Company's terrific neon cow sign in my files. But never mind, we should just cut to the heart of the matter...and it is a wonderfully milky, velvety, delicate matter. Get ready to taste one of the most extraordinary treats Hong Kong has to offer:
Skillfully hand-made ginger syrup double-boiled milk!
巧手薑汁燉奶
I can't even remember how I landed in here the first time. Swallowing spoon after spoon of the intoxicating, warm and tangy milk custard that comes in these sweet little bowls is such a heady experience that I'm afraid it has messed up my memory. I think I wandered in on my own, drawn by the blinking neon cow and the jiggling, tender bowls of custard. Yee Shun's always packed, and if you come in alone you'll be seated with a stranger. Maybe a kind Hong Kong stranger across the formica table was the first person to initiate me into the cult of geung jaap dan naai.
Speaking of spoons, for the ginger juice steamed milk, you'll be offered a choice of porcelain or plastic scoop. While the porcelain is more aesthetically pleasing, you'll soon discover the plastic one is a better bet, because it is sharp-edged, and your repeated scoops will not cause the fragile custard to break up and turn watery. Oh, and when the server asks if you want yours hot or cold, you say yit ge, hot, of course.
In the back kitchen of Yee Shun Milk Company, which has branches in Mongkok and Macau, they are constantly steaming milk custards for their huge turnover of customers. That's why this custard has no equal anywhere else in the world--it's the kind of last minute-y preparation that only works as a business if you have a lot of customers, and a famous place dedicated to making the specialty. Over and over, perfect every time.
I've seen "double boiled milk custard" on the menu in other places. One cold New York winter's night, longing for Hong Kong, my friend Ping and I ordered it at a Chinatown place called Sweet and Tart. Big mistake. It had so much egg white binding it together you could taste it, and I swear there was gelatin in there too. New York is a cold, custardless place.
To that Chinatown cow's milk, ngau naai, I said nay. An English word which doesn't quite capture the elusive sound of the Cantonese ng. Ng is hard to describe, for it is one of the few Cantonese pronounciations that has no English (or Mandarin!) equivalent. The ng is as special to the Cantonese language as ginger steamed milk is to Hong Kong.
If you want to ng, think nasal, put your tongue in the back of your throat, then go mm. That's still not quite it. Actually, ng is not that easy for Cantonese speakers to say either, and that's why it is an Endangered Sound.
Seriously, linguists predict it may not exist in Cantonese for much longer, since Hong Kongers of this generation tend to drop the hard-to-say ng altogether. And an initial "n" sound often morphs, lazily, into an L. So ngau (cow) has become au, naai (milk) is usually laai. It's totally confusing and I have enormous difficulty keeping my ng, my n, my au's and aai's straight. Thank goodness I am lucky to have some sharp-eyed and terrific readers of this blog to help me.
When Ng stands alone, it turns into a low, thoughtful sounding Mm. Hong Kongers refer to the Civic Party's brilliant pro-democracy legislator as Margaret Mmmm.
(Many Ng -surnamed Cantonese people, concerned about their name's evaporating presence in the world of pronounciation, have opted to change the transliteration of their surname to the Mandarin equivalent, Wu. But they can't hide for long, because the cute little stick figure man character 吳 in their Chinese name gives them away. John Woo, the famous Hong Kong director, is actually John Ng. )
Anyway if you want to hear the perfect ng before it's extinct, you should sign up for Cantonese lessons with a good teacher, fast. And then head down to Yee Shun Milk company, where ngau naai--with ng's and n's and a creamy, delicious taste intact-- is in no danger of disappearing.
Yee Shun Milk Company
85 Percival Street, Causeway Bay
Hong Kong
(P.S. There are also two in Macau, one right on Senado Square, and one on San Ma Lou. I think these are the original shops, but don't quote me. To me the custard in the Macau shops has a slightly creamier texture and milkier taste than the Hong Kong version--different ngau naai, maybe?)
The background you have given about the present circumstances of the "ng" sound in Cantonese is very true, but for the pronunciation of 奶(milk) in Cantonese, it should actually be "naai", starting with an "n" rather than an "ng" sound.
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"奶"這個字，香港人多說 "laai"，扮晒讀音正確的就會讀 "naai"。但未聽過人讀 "ngaai"呢，那較像"捱"字。
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Hats off and thanks to my two sharp readers. You are right. Naai is laai and ngaai is not aai. At least when it comes to milk. I have been fighting off a fever all day and my cows (ngau) are mixing with my milk Or something like that.
Anyway, corrections are in the works.
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siu82, there's no such thing as "扮晒讀音正確", naai is ALWAYS the correct pronunciation, there's no need to "扮". Only people who fail to pronounce "naai" will keep saying the correct pronunciation is not necessary.
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Hope your fever will leave you and you will feel better soon. In the mean time, I found you some pictures of the milk company.
The sign,
http://flickr.com/photos/76066262@N00/128346679/
And a collection of pictures that was returned by my search,
http://flickr.com/search/?q=Yee%20Shun%20Milk%20Company&w=all
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Thanks for the pix, Kempton. It looks like the Mongkok branch, not the Causeway bay one.
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Being a Hong Kong person who has been living in New York for a long time, I found your language experience fascinating. Both branches of Sweet & Tart in Chinatown, unfortunately, have been closed. I used to go there very often. Ping's, which is right next to S&T, is a very nice dim sum place that me and my girlfriend go every Sat, rain or shine.
I am very interested in how foriegners learn Chinese characters since they are pictoral, while English characters and sentences require some form of logical deduction. These all go back to the same tired argument about asians being good at memorization while Euorpeans are better in logical thinking. Silly question is, are you getting better with your memory?
The other story I wanted to share (sorry for dragging on) is I once went to an British University on an English training course with a group of HK police officers. The language instructor was picking on the bad pronuciations of the students. So, my friend, officer Ng, raised his hand and asked the teacher, can you pronounce my name? It took her a few seconds and she got it wrong!
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Love the story about Officer Ng.
About your other question--actually I think that learning Chinese characters is as much about logical deduction as it is about memory. For one thing, you are not just learning indivdual characters, but character pairs, which are often related to each other, meaning-wise, the same way that English language root words will show up in related compound words. For another, when you study traditional characters, radicals become a way that you can "analyze" a complex character to try to divine its meaning, or at least to categorize it.
In other words, I think this memorization vs. analytic Chinese vs. Western stuff is nonsense.
What I do think, however, is that the style of pedagogy that developed over centuries to teach people to read Chinese characters encourages memorization over analysis. Because when you are starting out, memorization is the most efficient way of learning the basic 500 characters. And that pedagogical style, at least in HK, seems to have spread to all the other subjects.
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I really love your writing and the way you explain these things so clearly. Not that there's a lot of other people doing what you're doing, but I can't imagine anyone doing it better.
What I don't love is how this shows up in my RSS reader - one long paragraph, no breaks, photos omitted. Sure I can click over and view the post in Firefox (as I end up doing) but if there's some way you could improve the RSS feed, that would be nice.
Is this Red Pepper Restaurant the one on a side street near Times Square and Jardine's Crescent? Terrible place. Sichuan food for westerners, not even close to being authentic. Their ads have proclaimed for years that they were named "best sichuan restaurant." They never say who bestowed this honor on them ...
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Can't help with the RSS feed, as I am so tech-challenged I am not even sure what it is! I do believe it is automatic and that I cannot alter it from this template blog software. Can you bookmark the blog and just read it through Firefox?
Thanks for the warning about Red Pepper restaurant. I suspected as much.
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"Sweet and Tart", I guess you're talking about 糖潮? There's only one left, which is in Flushing. Sadly, it's not that good anymore.
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You mean both of the ones in Chinatown are gone? The last time I was in New York, in October, they'd closed the one at the lower end of Mott, but the one near Canal side was still open.
Ah, but compared to any tong seui joint in HK, Sweet and Tart just doesn't stand up.
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First off, a great website. Fascinating insights to a town I lived in back in the nineties.
Specifically, this post reminds me of my favourite hotel in Addis Ababa. In Amharic, basic consonant sounds are amended to give the tagged vowel sound. It was Hotel Gloria. On one side of the sign it said in English Hotel Gloria, and in Amharic characters below that, a direct transliteration. On the other side the English rendering was Hotle Gloria, and the Amharic read beautifully as 'Hotle Gloria'.
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I used to live with a guy surnamed Ng. He taught me a LOT about Hong Kong and Cantonese culture. Sometimes, but only in jest, I'd ask him how one would shout his name. Say he was at one end of the airport terminal and I was a limo driver at the other, how should I try and yell "hey Mr. NGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!"
Ahh...good times.
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Ha!
By the way, if you have time, check out the little link I just added in the "Mmmm. More Sign Language" article. (It's linked to the words "Endangered Sound"). If you have Apple Quick Time, you'll be able to hear a recording of a native Cantonese speaker (one of my CUHK teachers, actually) doing the definitive "Nnnnnggggggggghhhhh."
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Not sure if this is where you're talking about, but I did take a photo of a sign with a large cow that had neon lights... (not lit up, though)
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~adora/adoraatberkeley/china_summer2004/hk_cityscape001.jpg
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