Tea cafés and the Hong Kong identity: Food culture and hybridity

Abstract

This article examines the meanings of caa caan teng (茶餐廳, local cafés) in Hong Kong and the implications of such cafés on the Hong Kong identity. It argues that the local café is a representation of Hong Kong culture because it reflects Hong Kong’s political, economic, and social developmental paths and mirrors the everyday life of its people. I investigate how the interaction of different immigrant cultures in Hong Kong has resulted in the invention of hybrid foods at the local café. These foods demonstrate hybridity as the transgression of boundaries through the negotiation of cultural differences among migrants, as well as those between migrants and colonialists. I argue that hybridity in local cafés reflects the power relations among the locals in Hong Kong, between locals and colonialists, and between locals and the new authorities in Beijing. Hybridity found in local cafés symbolizes the Hong Kong identity, as an entanglement between the multiplicity of Chinese ethnicities and the colonial modernity as characterized by flexibility, efficiency, choice, and diversity. These features differentiate the Hong Kong people from the colonialists and the mainlanders, thus constructing their identity and subjectivity, as former colonial subjects now living in the ‘periphery’ of the motherland.

Keywords

Hong Kong identity heritage food culture hybridity tea cafés colonialists migration

This article examines how the development of the caa caan teng (茶餐廳, literally tea café) and the invented local foods there are related to the Hong Kong identity as a hybrid creation. On the invention of cuisines, past research suggests that it is often caused by dramatic socio-economic and political changes in societies, such as globalization and nation building. In postcolonial nation-states, cookbooks have often been created with invented national cuisines that represent part of national identities.¹ Globalization has made people in different places around the world aware of cultural homogenization and the decline of local traditions, and people are thus urging for the revival of local cuisines and the reaffirmation of local tastes.² Similarly, decolonization and Hong Kong’s integration into China have been particularly pivotal political events that have driven the Hong Kong people to invent food heritage, to search for foods representing themselves, as well as to construct a link between food and identity.³ The caa caan teng has been called a Hong Kong-style restaurant and has entered the discourse of public narratives since the 1990s.⁴ It has become a local heritage which helps locals to construct their identity as Hong Kongers and differentiate themselves from the mainland Chinese.⁵

This article also interrogates how the invention of ‘local food’ and the ‘Hong Kong-style tea café’ informs us about the postcolonial Hong Kong identities. On food and identity, existing studies have shown how food serves as an important symbol for a nation to create its ‘imagined community’, ‘imagined tradition’, and cultural identity.⁶ A national cuisine is often an invented cuisine which asserts ‘a set of shared practices with continuity of the past’,⁷ and aims to connect people living in the same nation through claiming a common national taste in the imagined community.⁸ The Indian cuisine in new Indian cookbooks is a classic example of an invented national cuisine because it is actually developed from the ethnic cuisines of selected regions.⁹ Similarly, the Japanese cuisine is a modern invention conceived in the midst of the 20th-century historical dynamics.¹⁰ A persistent homogenization of regional food practices, attitudes, and subcultures in various parts of Japan is a defining feature of the ‘modern Japanese’ cuisine,¹¹ while regional inflection and national standardization are key features found in the invented Indian cuisine.¹²

Following these studies, this article attempts to investigate how the interaction of different immigrant cultures in Hong Kong has resulted in the invention of hybrid foods at the local café symbolizing the Hong Kong identity. Hybrid foods in local cafés have to be addressed as strategic practices resulting from politico-institutional and socio-economic changes, such as the Cold War, the influx of refugees from mainland China, industrialization, globalization, the inflows of Japanese and Korean popular culture, and the reunification with China.¹³ Hong Kong has played different roles in the past; it began as an ‘outpost of British imperialist forces’ from the 19th century, after which it was the frontier borderlands for China’s national salvation in the 1930s, and subsequently became an ‘on-the-brink position’ in the Cold War period and ‘China’s channel to the world’, before finally falling into the periphery of being an ‘autonomous’ region under the ‘one country, two systems’ regime.¹⁴ In the 1930 and 1940s, some Chinese fled from mainland China to Hong Kong due to political, economic, and other hardships.¹⁵ There was a continuous influx of immigrants of various Chinese ethnicities from different parts of China to Hong Kong after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, during the Cold War, and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, especially given the relatively relaxed immigration policy in Hong Kong in those periods. The migration history, colonization, decolonization and reunification of Hong Kong with China have created Hong Kong’s position as a symbolic ‘in-between’ place, a ‘borderland’ or a ‘third space’, for nurturing hybrid food cultures in the local café. By relating to socio-political and economic changes, as well as Hong Kong’s borderland background, this article adopts a processual and relational approach to examine how the local café has become a hybrid representation of Hong Kong culture and heritage.

Current research on local cafés mostly focuses on the discussion of tea cafés in relation to decolonization, the historical development of tea cafés, and how Western food is consumed by the working class at affordable prices.¹⁶ Studies on hybridity in local cafés often simplify it as an aggregate of Chinese and Western cultures,¹⁷ and assume ‘local’ or ‘Chinese’ as a single category. Other research on hybridity focuses on the mixture of local-national culture (Chinese-Hong Kong identity), which resulted from an intersection of a core-national and a periphery-local culture.¹⁸ This article adds value to existing research by delineating the complexity of hybridity found in local cafés. First, I pay attention to the diversity and hybridity of the local Chinese population, which has grown largely due to wave after wave of immigrants of various ethnicities from China and Southeast Asia. Locals are therefore a hybrid group, constantly constructing hybrid food cultures in the tea cafés. Second, I argue that hybridity in local cafés reflects the power relations among locals, between locals and colonialists, and between locals and the new authorities in Beijing. Hybridity symbolically empowers the locals in Hong Kong and facilitates the local imagination and construction of a boundary between Hong Kongers and either mainlanders or colonialists. This is also different from existing research on hybridity, which merely focuses either on the interactions between ‘colonizers’ and ‘colonized’¹⁹ or among the colonized people.²⁰

This article will show how the caa caan teng acts as a perfect site for us to analyse Hong Kong as a place of refuge for different Chinese migrants. I will examine how ‘local’ food served at the caa caan teng demonstrates hybridity as a transgression of boundaries through the negotiation of cultural differences among immigrants, as well as those between immigrants and colonialists. I delineate how the process of inventing local food at the caa caan teng reveals the shared migration history of the local people and helps to connect them through their imagined local taste. The diversity of food is a feature found on the menu of the caa caan teng, symbolizing the imagination and synthesis of different migrant tastes in the city. In addition, I investigate how hybridity, through the heritagization of four types of food and drinks served at the caa caan teng, acts as a generative force to mark Hong Kong’s identity and addresses the ambivalence towards the colonialists and the Chinese in the motherland. The way in which the caa caan teng helps us to understand different layers of identities in Hong Kong will also be discussed. On the one hand, different Chinese ethnicities are acknowledged in the local café. On the other hand, the newly invented local food in cafés reveals the hybrid nature of the Hong Kong identity. Finally, I explain what local people think about the caa caan teng and how people trace their daily lives to it. I argue that the characteristics associated with food in the caa can teng – hybridity, inclusiveness, diversity, flexibility, and efficiency – reflect colonial modernity and the Hong Kong identity.²¹

This article draws upon anthropological research conducted in Hong Kong from September 2014 to January 2016. I carried out general observation at 10 tea cafés in two neighbourhoods and one business-shopping district at different times of the day and on various days of the week. These ordinary tea cafés have existed for a few years and some have been operating for more than a decade; some are family-run while others are chain stores.²² Repeated visits were made to three tea cafés in residential areas. In-depth interviews were conducted with bosses, workers, and customers. Menus and media reports were also collected for analysis.

Caa caan teng as a place of refuge for immigrants: Colonial history and the multiplicity of Chinese ethnicities

The tea café is said to have first appeared in the 1940s and it was known as bing sat (冰室, literally ‘ice-room’), which was an imitation of British-colonial-style coffee shops and the Western style of life. The bing sat was more affordable since Western food and drinks in high-class hotels were too expensive for ordinary people. The distinguishing characteristic of the bing sat is that it sold the imagined and ‘compressed Western’ food, such as Western drinks (coffee, milk tea), cold drinks (chilled red bean drink, fruit punch, pineapple punch), canned meat sandwiches (luncheon meat and corned beef), as well as deep-fried buttered toast.

Since the mid-1950s, the bing sat started to offer meals and additional types of food and drinks for lunch and dinner and became known as the caa caan teng. They have become popular eating places as dining out became a routine and a necessity for the growing working population.²³ Today, such cafés are familiar, modest and common eating places in Hong Kong. There is at least one in every neighbourhood and some have even emerged in tourist districts and at the airport in fancier, modern, or nostalgic styles in the last two decades. A typical local café has as many as 365 items, including 20 types of set breakfast, set lunch and set dinner choices.²⁴

This section argues that the diverse food and ever-changing menu served in the local café reflect Hong Kong’s identity as a migrant society, a former British colony, and a global city. Firstly, ‘Western’ food is available there as a result of the influence of colonial culture. Various types of sandwiches are found, such as corned beef sandwiches, luncheon meat sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches, tomato and egg sandwiches, club sandwiches, pork chop baguette, French toast, toast with peanut butter, and so on. Unlike Western sandwiches which have special dressings and cheese, most sandwiches in tea cafés do not have them. Ham and cheese sandwiches are the exception, with a slice of Kraft cheese often added. Besides, one could also find fried steak, pork chop, chicken chop, and fish, each of which could be served with salad, French fries or rice, and accompanied with one of several sauce options: onion sauce, black pepper sauce, or ketchup. The steak is most likely served well done (not optional) while salad includes cucumber, potatoes, and sometimes lettuce and canned mixed fruit with mayonnaise. Soya sauce is often used in the seasoning of the meat and thus these foods are often called ‘soya sauce Western food’.

Secondly, as a reflection of Hong Kong’s migrant society, diverse as well as stereotypical Chinese food of different ethnicities is found on the menu. Although the majority of immigrants in Hong Kong are Cantonese, some are from Fujian, Xiamen, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and so on. Different stereotypical ethnic Chinese foods are imagined in local cafés, such as Fujian fried rice, Yangzhou fried rice, Xiamen fried vermicelli, Shanghainese pork slices with pickled vegetables and rice vermicelli in soup, Chaozhou-style beef noodles, and Cantonese-style wonton noodles. The flavour of these dishes is often different from those found in their respective places of origin. Occasionally, some dishes are merely inventions as they did not previously exist, and hence cannot be traced to any ‘place of origin’. For instance, Yangzhou fried rice is not found in Yangzhou. Indeed, these Chinese dishes of different ethnicities are to a large extent an imagination of the respective stereotypical cooking styles of Fujian, Xiamen, Yangzhou, Chaozhou, and Shanghai with a Cantonese regional inflection, since the majority of the locals are Cantonese. The hybrid taste in these dishes is a result of the interaction of immigrants from different places.

In addition, the tastes of diasporic Chinese from Southeast Asia as reflected from their migratory path to Hong Kong have also contributed to the diversity and hybridity of food and drinks served in local cafés. A well-known drink, which is a mixture of coffee, tea, and milk, was introduced to tea cafés by Southeast Asia immigrants in the 1960s. Malaysian beef curry served with rice and Singapore fried rice vermicelli have also been available in the local café since the 1970s. While this Malaysian beef curry is less spicy as compared to the original one in Malaysia, Singapore fried rice vermicelli is a Hong Kong invention which is not found in Singapore. This Singapore fried rice vermicelli has curry powder as a condiment and Cantonese barbequed pork slices together with shrimps and egg slices. Such a hybrid invention reflects the stereotypical imagination of Southeast Asian cuisine as a result of the interaction between the locals in Hong Kong and the Chinese from Southeast Asia. In fact, many Southeast Asian Chinese studied in China in the mid-1950s and 1960s, and moved to live in Hong Kong in the mid-late 1970s or 1980s.

Thirdly, Japanese food also began to appear in the caa caan teng in the 1980s; examples include Japanese fried seafood udon or Japanese ramen in soup. This was a response to the popularization of Japanese culture in Hong Kong as well as the globalization of Japanese culture. Following the popularization of Korean culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s, Korean food has also been served in some caa caan teng. Similarly, these foods are to a large extent inventions constructed by the local people through their stereotypical imaginings and are adaptations of local taste that are very different from those served in the respective places of origin.

In sum, foods in the local café are often imagined and hybrid constructions resulting from a combination of three kinds of interaction: between the colonizers and their subjects in the colonial days, among the immigrants of various ethnicities, and between different flows of global and local cultures. Different imagined Chinese ethnic cuisines served at the caa caan teng reveal the awareness of culinary others and the acknowledgement of different Chinese ethnic identities, such as people from Fujian, Guangdong, Shanghai, Chaozhou, and so on. The café is a symbolic place for the displaced and reterritorialized immigrants to construct ethnic boundaries and to imagine the tastes from other hometowns. Various Asian and Western dishes and the ever-changing menu reveal how the Hong Kong people react to colonial culture as well as the influx of immigrants and global culture over time. The diverse, ever-changing and hybrid food served at the local eatery symbolizes the openness, inclusiveness and fluidity of Hong Kong’s identity in this migrant city.

Turning the culinary others into ours: Hybridity and transgression of cultural boundaries

This section further delineates how the food that local cafés serve reveals a continuous process of turning ‘foreign’ food into local foodways, transforming the ‘culinary others’ into ‘ours’, and inventing hybrid food. Such a process demonstrates the negotiation and imagination of different culinary cultures and the constant intermixing of cultures resulting from colonization, migration and globalization.

The breakfast set is a classic and one of the most popular meals served in the caa caan teng. The breakfast set was invented as the result of interaction between the colonizers and the colonized, revealing hybridity as the transgression of ethnic boundaries.²⁵ This set is basically a Western breakfast which includes a drink – such as coffee, milk tea, or lemon tea – combined with scrambled or fried eggs with ham or sausages, as well as toast or bread with butter, as well as noodles. The highlight of the set is beef with satay sauce, or chicken slices, luncheon meat or barbecue pork with instant noodles or macaroni soup. This dish reveals the blurring of the boundaries between the ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ breakfast because it includes Asian (i.e. Chinese noodles soup, satay sauce from Southeast Asia) and Western food (i.e. macaroni).

As for lunch and dinner, many popular dishes also demonstrate a transgression of ethnic boundaries, for example fried pepper beef spaghetti, fried barbequed pork spaghetti, Western fried rice, and oven-baked pork chop with fried rice. Spaghetti is not served al dente but stir-fried Chinese-style. For Western fried rice, the rice is fried with ketchup. For oven-baked pork chop with fried rice, the dish is baked with tomato sauce and cheese, utilizing both Western and Chinese cooking styles and condiments. These newly invented local dishes demonstrate a transgression of ethnic boundaries.

In addition, four representative types of food and drink deserve our special attention as they are popular hybrid food and drink items that Hong Kongers are proud of. They are milk tea, jyun joeng (鴛鴦, milk tea with coffee), pineapple buns and egg tarts. They are hybrid and invented food that resulted from the interaction between the colonizers and the locals. Among the four items, milk tea is the most frequently consumed among Hong Kong people. It was believed to mimic the British milk tea which in the days of old was offered exclusively in high-class hotels. Milk tea was first served at bing sat at an affordable price to locals. However, this milk tea is different from the British tea in three major ways. Firstly, instead of having a single kind of black tea in each drink, such as Darjeeling or Assam, several kinds of tea leaves (including Pu’er and Ceylon tea) are mixed together in a secret recipe, with slight variations unique to each café. Secondly, the mixing of several kinds of tea leaves was initially intended to cut costs, but was also found to strengthen its flavour. The mixture of tea leaves is placed into a white filter bag and boiling water is poured into it. This process causes the white filter bag to turn brown, hence its nickname ‘stocking milk tea’. The tea would be collected in a container placed below it, strained through the filter bag repeatedly and left to simmer. The skill involved differs with each tea master because each person pours the tea from different heights and with varying speed.²⁶ This skill is key to the flavour and smoothness of the tea.

Thirdly, instead of adding fresh milk to tea like the British, evaporated milk is used instead. This is the milk tea served at the caa caan teng. Sweetened condensed milk can also be added to the tea upon request from customers. The use of evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk was initially a coping strategy in the economically deprived era when fresh milk was too expensive for ordinary people. This, however, makes the Hong Kong milk tea creamy, smooth and full-bodied, which differentiates it from the ‘light and diluted’ flavour of British tea.

Apart from milk tea, jyun joeng – a mixture of coffee and milk tea – is also a drink in local cafés. It was originally a popular drink in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s. Condensed milk was added to the tea and coffee and was often consumed by labourers there. In Hong Kong, evaporated milk is used and the drink is mostly consumed by the working class. Instead of calling it ‘caam’ (mixture) or ‘loeng kau’ (mixture of two) in Cantonese like the Southeast Asians, the poetic name, jyun joeng, was invented by Hong Kongers. It literally means a specific type of mandarin duck, which to the Chinese symbolizes a couple mated for life; jyun joeng is a harmonious combination of coffee and milk tea.

The pineapple buns and egg tarts served in the caa caan teng are also common food for locals. Invented after the locals learnt baking skills from the British colonialists, locals use lard instead of butter. They reinvented ‘Western’ bread by adding sugar, egg and lard, and so a sweet soft bun with a crunchy sugar coating on top was born. It is known as pineapple bun because the sugary crust on top is golden brown in colour and resembles the outermost layer of a pineapple. In the caa caan teng, the pineapple bun is served with butter during the afternoon tea break. Egg tarts were also a staple served at the bing sat in the old days and at some caa caan teng nowadays. It was said that egg tarts were first invented in Macao, the former Portuguese colony, which is just an hour from Hong Kong by ferry. Egg tarts were brought into Hong Kong, reinvented, and subsequently became popular as an afternoon tea snack.

Among all the representative drinks in the local café, Hong Kong-style milk tea has captured the most attention. It was selected and reported as the representative of Hong Kong beverages, and sales were estimated at 900 million cups per year.²⁷ The milk tea served at the caa caan teng was also renamed as Hong Kong-style milk tea about two decades ago. This shows how the Hong Kong identity has been embedded in the beverage. Indeed, many locals love drinking milk tea at breakfast or tea breaks. Some people drink it daily, and are so addicted that they would feel ‘uncomfortable’ if they skipped the drink even for a single day.

In 2009, the Coffee and Tea Association initiated a Golden Tea Competition, which since then has been conducted annually. Participants compete for the title of the best maker of Hong Kong-style milk tea.²⁸ The inaugural competition took place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre during the Food Expo in 2009. In the following year, the competition was jointly organized by the association and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. The process of milk tea-making is published on its website and widely reported in the newspapers.²⁹ One of the websites offers a list of addresses of the respective tea cafés where these tea masters work. To attract customers, cafés with these award-wining tea masters also advertise their achievements. Tea-making skills are acclaimed in these competitions and also cherished in tea-making workshops regularly organized by the association. Introducing competition to milk tea-making has symbolically elevated the status of milk tea from an ordinary drink in everyday life to something special. Tea-making has also become a spectacular performance. Such a performance also demonstrates the pride that locals take in this drink. ‘What is private or hidden becomes publicly exhibited; what is small or confined becomes exaggerated, grand or grandiose when we make a spectacle of ourselves. And our comrades or strangers are forced into the role of spectators to our unusual behaviour.’³⁰ Instead of emphasizing the tea leaves and the porcelain bone China cups used, as is the case in British tea, skill and the secret recipe involving the blending of several types of tea leaves are emphasized as the key in making Hong Kong-style milk tea. The best milk tea is said to depend on skills (craftsmanship) and the mixture of tea leaves (hybridity).

In 2014, because of the traditional craftsmanship involved in the making of egg tarts, milk tea, pineapple buns, and jyun joeng, these food and drink items were officially declared as Hong Kong’s intangible cultural heritage by the Hong Kong government.³¹ Milk tea is an example of hybrid food that, in Homi Bhabha’s words, resulted from ‘double articulation’.³² Firstly, double articulation takes place when locals assert originality and admit mimicking authenticity at the same time. Foods such as egg tarts, milk tea, pineapple buns, and jyun joeng are an imitation of colonial food but appear to be rather different. They are in fact mimicry and hybrid, which mask the colonial or original heritage. Milk tea in the caa caan teng is now called ‘Hong Kong-style milk tea’, which is almost the same as the colonialists’ milk tea, yet subtly different, denying the original through differentiation. As Bhabha suggested, ‘Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable “other”, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.’³³ The description of milk tea offered by a popular writer, Lee Pik-Wah, clearly echoes Bhabha’s argument. She wrote that the milk tea was ‘concocted freely, even roughly and wildly’; it is a tea that is ‘fragrant, strong, thick, and smooth’, served in ‘a ramshackle, cheap white porcelain’ cup, the only decoration being ‘a coloured line painted haphazardly at the rim’, and that the porcelain is ‘befittingly thick, heavy, sturdy, throbbing with life’.³⁴ Hong Kong-style milk tea symbolizes a strong, lively, and vibrant life. This is a radical contrast to the colonialists’ English tea of upper-class origin, with elegance and delicacy being distinctive features of the way it is prepared and served.

Secondly, milk tea, egg tarts and pineapple buns are recognized as both colonial objects and a local hybrid invention. Identifying these foods as Hong Kong heritage symbolizes the re-evaluation of colonial representation (in foods such as Western bread, pastries, milk tea, and coffee). It symbolically highlights the new authority of ex-colonial subjects, which acknowledges local craftsmanship, creativity and reinvention and reveals what Bhabha calls mimicry and double articulation disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse, the disavowal of the colonial power, and denial of knowledge of colonial heritage through subversion.³⁵ Indeed, the sign of ‘colonial authority’ or authenticity, as symbolized by British tea and Western bread or pastries, has now become a facade, or even a mockery in Bhabha’s words.³⁶ Notably, the heritagization of these hybrid foods reveals how colonized subalterns translate or negotiate cultures, and symbolically challenge the structure of colonial domination.

More importantly, hybrid food and the tea café as embedded in colonial history have given a sense of superiority to the Hong Kong people in their dealings with mainlanders and the Chinese regime. It is not uncommon to find websites and tourist guides recommending tourists from mainland China to try local food at the local café, namely buttered pineapple buns, milk tea, egg tarts, jyun joeng, French toast and beef-and-egg sandwiches.³⁷

Evidently, the local café constructs a sense of the ‘new as an insurgent act of cultural translation’ in Bhabha’s words.³⁸ It began as an imitation of the Western coffee shop and has become a totally different local eatery with the invention of hybrid food and imagined dishes of various Chinese ethnicities. The caa caan teng is a hybridization of culinary cultures through the incorporation of various imagined culinary others and the transgression of one another’s boundaries. The food culture in the local café symbolizes the transformative process that mixes different Chinese ethnicities in the former colony into the hybrid creation of the Hong Kong identity. Hybrid foods at the tea café help the Hong Kong people to construct their uniqueness and invent their local heritage, which symbolically subverts the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, and draws the boundary between themselves and the mainlanders.

Hybridity: Food, spatial setting, eating etiquette and order-taking

Not only is hybridity evident in the food served at the local café, it is also found in the way people consume the food, the café’s flexible management style, the way in which waiters take orders, and the spatial setting of the local café. In terms of the spatial setting, a cashier is always located near the entrance so that the customers pay their bills before leaving. As for the tables in tea cafés, booths are usually located on the sides while small round tables for four or six people are often in the middle. Round tables are typical for traditional Chinese restaurants although the size of those round tables in local cafés is smaller. Booths are an imitation of seats in Western coffee shops, which offer privacy. Once customers step into the restaurant, they are impressed by the menu displayed on the walls as well as on the tables. The most striking feature is the bar at the inner corner of the local café. It is an interesting imitation of the bar in Western coffee shops or pubs. However, it does not serve alcoholic drinks or cocktails, as most locals do not have the daily habit of consuming such drinks.³⁹ Instead, it is an area where hot drinks, cold drinks, and breakfast (toast or sandwiches, and instant noodles) are prepared. In sum, the combination of small round tables, booths and a bar reveals a hybrid of Chinese and Western-style restaurants.

In terms of eating etiquette, even the ‘Western three-course set meal’ is served in a Chinese way. ‘Different courses’ are not strictly served sequentially in a succession of courses. The food or the drink may come in any sequence whenever the kitchen is ready, rather than according to the advertised or usual sequence of starter, main course, followed by tea or coffee. The key is efficiency, which is an important dining feature and management strategy at the caa caan teng. From my observations, people often ate the ‘Western three-course meal’ in the same way they ate a normal Chinese meal: multiple courses were served almost at the same time. Not only that, but the use of different cutlery and the casual dining etiquette at the caa caan teng also evidenced hybridity. It was not unusual to see people having a meal with chopsticks together with knife and fork.

Moreover, the way in which the waiters take orders also demonstrates how a special hybrid code is used. Simplified Chinese characters, traditional Chinese characters, English alphabets, numbers and signs are all used in writing orders (see Table 1). For all cold drinks, the waiters use the letter ‘C’ to indicate cold. For all drinks with lemon, such as lemon tea, ‘0’ is used to represent lemon because the first syllable of the word ‘lemon’ in Cantonese rhymes with the Cantonese pronunciation of the number zero. Both simplified and traditional Chinese characters are used although Hong Kongers learn traditional Chinese in schools, which is different from the mainland Chinese who learn simplified Chinese. However, most Hong Kong people understand some simplified Chinese as some of these characters are often seen, especially in wet markets where hawkers often use them since fewer strokes are required, and hence easier to write. In sum, the use of both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, as well as English, reveals the preoccupation with efficiency in order-taking, as well as the flexibility and the state of ‘in-betweenness’ which characterizes how the people of Hong Kong feel.

Table 1.

Abbreviated forms: Hybridity in taking orders.

Logic	Food/Drink	Ordering code
Combination of English alphabets and numerical rhymes	Cold lemon tea	C0T
	Hot lemon tea	H0T
	Milk tea	T
	Cold milk tea	CT
Combination of English alphabets, numerical rhymes, and Chinese characters	Cold Ovaltine (阿華田)	C田
	Cold Ribena (利賓納)	C利
	Cold lemon Ribena	C0利
	Lemon Ribena	0利
Cantonese rhymes	Iced red bean drink (紅豆冰)	斗
	Fried rice (炒飯)	炒反
	Fried vegetables with pork (菜心炒肉片)	才心玉片
	Tofu roasted pork rice (豆腐火腩飯)	付火反
Numerical and Cantonese rhymes	Lemon steamed mullet (檸檬蒸烏頭)	0正烏頭
Short form in simplified Chinese characters	Iced pineapple drink (菠蘿冰)	罗冰
Short form in simplified Chinese characters	Iced mixed fruit drink (雜果冰)	什冰

Comfort food and familiar foodscape

In a competition organized by one of the most popular local radio stations in 2014, the caa caan teng was voted as the most representative emblem of Hong Kong. The caa caan teng is also an important microcosm of local daily life and a representative site with which the Hong Kong people identify and connect their daily lives. It is a popular place for the working and middle classes to have lunch. It is a site for quick dining where customers share a table and leave immediately after finishing the food, especially during peak hours. Men, especially those of working-class background, are particularly fond of dining there because of the diversity of food, generous portions, affordable price, and efficient service. Teenagers and young people are less frequent customers as compared to middle-aged and older men. Young women are less likely to patronize tea cafés alone, although they have lunch with colleagues there or with their families on weekends. Chinese tourists from mainland China, who are usually seen in the business district and tourist areas, sometimes dine at the caa caan teng.

The caa caan teng often serves as a site for communal interaction in neighbourhoods. From my observations, the regulars were old men dropping by in the late morning on weekdays, often just for a drink. Waiters would place orders without any prompting from them, since they are regular customers ordering the same items each time. Housewives with children were regulars at lunch time on weekdays. Some regulars claimed to miss the ‘home’ food served at tea cafés whenever they were away from Hong Kong for a while, especially milk tea and breakfast.

In neighbourhood local cafés, regular customers often chatted with each other and with waiters. The typical conversation at the caa caan teng included: casual chats about children, gossip on celebrities, and comments on the stock market and everyday news. Different views on sociopolitical topics were often heard in casual conversations between customers and waiters in response to the TV news broadcast at tea cafés. The caa caan teng as a site for different voices is best reflected in the popular commercial radio drama programme 18th Floor Block C, which has been aired since 1968. The programme is set in a caa caan teng where the sociopolitical topics of the day are discussed by customers and waiters alike. This tolerance of diversity at the café is unlike the tension between new immigrants and locals reported in the media.

On horse-racing days, which are usually on every Wednesday night or Saturday afternoon, caa caan teng located next to Jockey Club betting branches have also become a popular site for gamblers to gather, chat and watch horse races on television. I observed that customers were predominantly male and that they came alone and often spent the whole afternoon or night there. They ate and drank at the café, chatting and sharing their views on horses with other customers as well as with the waiters. While watching horse-racing on the TVs at the caa caan teng, gamblers, waiters, and sometimes even the café owner cheered for their favourite horses in each race. I also found that some customers left their food and drinks on the table after requesting the waiters to reserve their seats, while they dashed to place more bets at the Jockey Club betting branch next door. Some customers went back and forth several times in an afternoon or evening to place a series of bets before each race began. Waiters at the caa caan teng knew who these customers were and did not ask them to pay their bills when they stepped out of the café, trusting them to do so when they finally left.

When English Premier League football matches were played, these matches were shown live in some caa caan teng on cable TV and hence they attracted large numbers of customers. Customers were mainly male football fans on these occasions. Shouting, swearing, and cheering could often be heard when the matches were played.

Many locals also had nostalgic communal and family memories of the caa caan teng. An informant said, ‘My parents brought me to caa caan teng regularly when I was young. As like now, it was a casual place, a bit dirty as well, but the waiters were very kind, and we recognized each other and often chatted at length. The atmosphere at the caa caan teng is different from other restaurants.’ Emotional memories were often evoked when recalling these occasions of eating out together with the family. In addition, some older informants recalled fond memories of courtship and dating at the caa caan teng in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Some elderly people told me that tea cafés were the most popular place for matchmaking sessions, when a single man or woman was brought to meet a prospective spouse in the company of family members or matchmakers.

When asked about special features of local cafés, all informants highlighted the features of food diversity, flexibility and efficiency and claimed that these traits represented Hong Kong. Diversity and flexibility also reveal the ‘freedom of choice’ which is integral to the Hong Kong identity.⁴⁰ Freedom of choice is an important core value to the Hong Kong people because Hong Kong has been a place of refuge for different Chinese immigrants in the last century. Flexible arrangements can be found in drinks, food, or set meals, though some combinations may involve extra charges (e.g. cold drinks usually cost more than hot ones). Finer changes in the specifications are also possible; for example cold milk tea can be prepared with condensed milk or evaporated milk. Cold lemon tea could be served with less sugar or with less strong tea. Other options are also offered: the bread in the breakfast menu could be served as toast, instant noodles with different brands could be served, noodles or udon could be served instead of rice vermicelli, and steak could be served with spaghetti, rice, or French fries and vegetables.

Efficiency is another striking feature found in this Hong Kong-style teahouse which Hong Kongers appreciate and take pride in. This efficiency is seen in the time spent on ordering, on cooking and delivering the food, as well as on checking the bill. Waiters usually came to take orders within 10 seconds after customers enter the café. After taking an order, the bill is left on the table for the customers to keep and bring to the cashier upon completion of the meal. Within two minutes after taking the order, customers are served with their food or drink.

In sum, efficiency, diversity, flexibility and choice at local cafés are features found in all caa can teng despite differences in the range of food served. These features reveal the capitalistic and entrepreneurial spirit of Hong Kong and its identity, symbolize colonial modernity and facilitate the construction of an imagined cultural boundary between Hong Kong people and those in mainland China. Furthermore, the popularity of the caa caan teng can be observed in various media reports. These reports cover a wide range of topics, such as the origins of caa caan teng, the unique food and drinks served there, old and new tea cafés in different districts, personal childhood memories there, as well as the communal relationships forged in the tea cafés.⁴¹ The caa caan teng has been introduced as a common background in many Hong Kong movies, especially since the eve of decolonization in the 1990s. Local Hong Kong movies such as C’est La Vie, Mon Cheri (新不了情, 1993), The Lucky Guy (行運一條龍, 1998), Crossing Hennessy (月滿軒尼詩, 2009), In the Mood for Love (花樣年華, 2000), and 2046 (2004) all had scenes shot in caa caan teng. Tea cafés have appeared in the scenes of everyday life in popular Hong Kong movies, whether as dating sites, or even places for members of triads to pick fights. Besides, the caa caan teng have played a key role in movies that portray with nostalgia Hong Kong in the 1960s, such as the classic In the Mood for Love directed by Wong Kar-Wai.⁴² Caa caan teng nostalgia is also an expression of the pride over local uniqueness, and a yearning for Hong Kong heritage and tradition.⁴³ This is clearly a response to the reunification of Hong Kong with China. In fact, since the eve of decolonization, the people of Hong Kong have been actively searching for their own heritage in order to construct a cultural difference between themselves and mainlanders. By the mid-2000s, there were many public voices urging for the caa caan teng to be recognized as Hong Kong’s intangible cultural heritage.⁴⁴

Since the 1990s, the caa caan teng have also started to appear in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom as a result of the steady flux of emigration of Hong Kongers to these countries due to fear and uncertainty after reunification. With the increase in the number of Hong Kongers working in various cities in mainland China over the past three decades, tea cafés have also emerged in different cities in China. The names of these tea cafés often come with a prefix: Hong Kong-style. In addition, the Hong Kong Tourism Board and other websites for tourists now promote tea cafés which are identified as the place for a Hong Kong-style dinner and touted as a recommended food experience, while milk tea has become a ‘must drink’.⁴⁵ Many tourists from mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan have made trips to famous tea cafés to try the milk tea and food there.

In sum, the caa caan teng is a site where Hong Kongers can trace their daily lives, recall family memories, remember communal relationships, rekindle attachments to food and people, and feel proud of the diversity of food and drinks served there. To the locals in Hong Kong, tea cafés serve ‘home’ food, which is neither Western nor Chinese, but Hong Kong-style food. Many give the example of milk tea to illustrate their argument that Hong Kong style is a mixture of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ food. The hybrid nature of the food, with both Chinese and Western origins, has often been highlighted by informants in this study as a representative attribute of the caa caan teng while the diverse Chinese ethnic food served there has, however, been downplayed and ‘forgotten’. Indeed, through highlighting the caa caan teng as neither a Western nor Chinese restaurant, the marginality of Hong Kong Chinese as former colonial subjects is evident, while drawing the symbolic boundary between the Hong Kong people and the Chinese in the motherland.

Concluding remarks

My analysis on the caa caan teng goes beyond other researchers’ claims of the tea café as a place where the ‘East meets West’⁴⁶ or where ‘local meets global’.⁴⁷ It urges us to think about Hong Kong food, cultures and identities beyond narratives of originary (Chinese), binary (West vs East, colonialists vs colonized) and essentialist culture. I argue that the hybridity found in local cafés symbolizes the Hong Kong identity, as an entanglement between the multiplicity of Chinese ethnicities and colonial modernity with flexibility, efficiency, choice, and diversity as its features. The café is a symbolic space for the subaltern voices of immigrants and refugees – as ex-colonial subjects and ‘peripheral’ subjects of the motherland. It is also an interconnected social space where different displaced Chinese migrants and refugees find a new common and symbolic ‘home’. The collaboration, contestation, and innovation of the ethnic cultures of immigrants and colonizers are observed in the process of inventing various local foods. ‘Local’ foods or culture in the caa caan teng are the result of interaction among the immigrants and between the colonized and the colonizers. They are hybrid inventions, imaginations and strategies of representation as formulated by immigrants of various ethnic origins. The local café symbolizes Hong Kong as a borderland where the transgression, translation, negotiation, inscription, and articulation of food cultures are found.

The caa caan teng is a place where locals, old and new immigrants, as well as mainland tourists come together, whether as waiters, workers or customers, to construct colonial modernity with the features of efficiency, choice, diversity. This cooperative practice of everyday capitalism at local cafés is in contrast to the existing situation in Hong Kong, where conflicts between locals and new immigrants are often reported. In this ‘in-between’ space and new ‘home’, old and new immigrants are not looking for the familiar smells and tastes of their hometowns, but they are also looking to share their survival strategies, exercise creativity, invent newly acquired tastes and imagined food heritage in hybrid form, as well as to address different layers of identities.⁴⁸ On the one hand, the local café is a zone of displacement and deterritorialization, where one finds many culinary ‘others’ in imagined form. The identities of immigrants in terms of their places of origin, such as Fujian, Chaozhou, Shanghai, and Guangdong, are openly acknowledged. On the other hand, it is a place for reterritorialization, where the locals enjoy comfort hybrid food and may appreciate the communal spirit in this migrant society. Indeed, the caa caan teng has been imbued with multiple layers of significance involving heritage politics and identities, remembering and forgetting, the interplay between local and global, as well as the interaction between immigrants of different ethnicities. It is an interstitial zone of hybridity, displacement and reterritorialization of immigrants, and is a place for elaborating strategies of the Hong Kong identity in the postcolonial context.

Unlike other studies on postcolonialism in which hybrid culture has become a source of nationalism and resistance to the colonialists, Hong Kong’s hybridized ideology enables the locals to relate to the Chinese regime by a discourse of ‘othering’ China.⁴⁹ It is in this context that the colonial heritage is fondly highlighted as a key feature of hybridity, while the multiplicity of Chinese ethnicities is downplayed. Heritagization of the four caa caan teng items (milk tea, jyun joeng, egg tarts, pineapple buns) related to the colonial food heritage further illustrates that the locals take pride in the hybrid food of colonial heritage. Diversity, flexibility, efficiency, and choice as the features of colonial modernity also enable the locals to construct and imagine the difference between themselves and mainlanders. Hybridity and colonial modernity differentiate the Hong Kong people from the colonialists and the mainlanders, thus constructing their identity and subjectivity, even though they were colonial subjects who now live in the ‘periphery’ of the motherland.

Footnotes

The author is very grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their advice and comments.

Notes

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