Yick Fung, Fish Maw, Marijuana and You
I was talking to Maxine Chan last weekend in Yick Fung. She corrected me about what I've been telling people about how the store was mostly wholesale to other businesses. She stressed it was a general mercantile store in the beginning, only later do the stores start to focus on a specific area - that is why the green boxes above the grass jelly near the TV are full of clothes. I had asked, you mean like restaurant clothes? She said, no, just ordinary everyday clothes.
She wants to bring out the fish maw and hang it like it was displayed in the store. I doubt Bob is gonna like that idea, especially if we have to dust it. I think over time we'd start dusting bits off. OTOH, it isn't like we can't buy more fish maw. Is the purpose of the fish maw to preserve Uncle Jimmy's fish maw forever or to preserve the look/feel/smell of the store forever? I had been given the impression that debate was closed and the store was being frozen as is. But Max seems to indicate the store may be in for some changes.
Max missed the smell of wintermelon. I said, "huh?", because I'm reel article late like that. One winter melon, you don't notice it but they had up to 10 tons and with that much, there is a smell (her word, we should use 'aroma'). After 1980 she stopped noticing it but she ignored it at the time because she thought maybe it was a seasonal thing. Since the melons were so large, it was common to have a melon cut open, they'd hack off a hunk kind of like you ask a butcher for a hunk of meat. My Mom remembers that, we didn't need 10 pounds of winter melon, a one pound hunk worked better for a family of four.
We left before James' 3:30 tour came and Max chatted with the Johns (E and N) and the rest of us about the store. She mentioned fish maw again and I asked why it was considered so prime and she said it was big. I said, so what, the only way I've seen fish maw used is in soup - it gets diced up anyhow. She likened it to marijuana, there is the bud and there is the shake. Both will get you stoned but people prefer the bud. John E liked the analogy. Me, I was lost. Later I googled it and learned that shake is the broken bud bits left after everyone else took the buds. So the difference between offering someone a whole cookie and offering the equivalent in crumbs. A whole cookie, you see you got a cookie. Pile of stale crumbs, you see you've been dissed. Same mass, same calories, not the same thing.
Maxine Chan wants to sit all the docents down and talk to us for an hour about the store.
::: Michael Kan ::: November 3, 2015