Stories

It's been about a year since I last posted - this is the reason why...

Watch the trailer for Sik Fan Lah! - episodes drop weekly on TVNZ1 and TVNZ+ starting 10am Sunday February 12^th!

[VIDEO::https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH2YpjG24zw]

When it’s time to eat, we say SIK FAN LAH! Come with us on a culinary adventure across Aotearoa New Zealand, uncovering hilarious and hearty stories of modern Kiwi-Chinese life through our universal love for food.

In each of the six action-packed episodes, a different Kiwi-Chinese host journeys into the far corners of our country to chase new takes on classic dishes and the secret recipes only true insiders know. Don’t expect it to be easy - they’ll need to hack at cabbages, fend off horrifying cicadas, cross steaming mud pools and pummel mooncakes into submission if they’re to get a real feed.

But the spiciest part is mixed in between bouts of laughter and hungry mouthfuls, when our friends and family share intimate tales of being Chinese in the place we call home.

Whether it’s Palmy’s 65 kilogram whole roast pig, claypot chicken rice cooked in the Otago goldfields, or geothermal Chinese pāua from Rotorua – there’s plenty to munch on!

Made with the support of NZ On Air.

This is part three of four from a series of film photos I took while working on Granny Knows Best in January 2019. Nainai is Chinese for grandmother.

After an arduous shoot across four Chinese provinces in December, I flew back to New Zealand for a few days; a much-needed Christmas break. On my flight back to China, I felt refreshed and hopeful that we would overcome our challenges in the second half of production.

Arriving in grey-skied Guizhou, I realised that things were not going to get any easier.

I had spent months in this province before, field directing a Discovery doco, China's Treasure: Guizhou. We had the full support of the provinicial government, great planning and plenty of time in the schedule. Guizhou had long been joked about in Chinese rhymes as an inaccessible, mountainous backwater, full of rainy days and hunger. When we shot the doco, Guizhou was the focal point of the CCP's incredible poverty alleviation drive. We were taken on a tiki-tour of mind-boggling technology, infrastructure and tourism development. It was a sanitised but still uplifting showcase of outstanding characters and culture.

Flash forward to Granny Knows Best - which was all about rawness and authenticity. Unfortunately that meant we'd have to face the rawness and authenticity of Guizhou's past: destitution and hardship. Not the best subject matter for a light and heartwarming show.

It rained every day. My mind was so occupied with trying to find the light in the stormclouds that my memory of this time is as hazy as the photos you're about to see. So there might not be much text this time...

At first, when I processed these photos, I tried to push the vibrant colours and add warmth, but it ended up making the photos look sickly and unnatural. I've since learned that there's a lot of beauty in the grey.

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Zhelu Village - Guizhou Province

Zhelu village's old wooden houses were being torn down and people were moving into unfinished brick and concrete abominations. At our guesthouse, there was no insulation or air conditioning. Lights weren't working. No running water (let alone hot water), which was especially disastrous as our producer was vomiting from a stomach bug. Not the best start to a shooting block.

The key nainai talent still lived in her traditional home. I liked that she kept pigs in the basement like in the past, though I understand why people would prefer to move to sturdier apartments if they had the money. Unfortunately we could barely communicate with her and we found out she wasn't confident in her cooking skills.

It was a ghost town, really. We saw only about a dozen or so cheerful faces as we walked around, but judging by their number, most of the houses must be derelict. There was a spark of an interesting story by the river and we shot a scene with some fishermen using cormorants to help pinpoint the fish. Not much is caught in this deathly season. The water was a thick, impenetrable green.

We stayed one sleepless night in this village and decided the next morning that we had to cut our losses. As we packed our bags, we met a beautiful nainai roasting sesame seeds on a coal fire. Perhaps she had interesting stories to tell, but it was too late. The main takeaway lesson: there's nothing more precious than time spent in research and prep.

 

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Shuipa Village - Guizhou Province

We left Zhelu for a second option - Shuipa village, also littered with many old, abandoned houses. But walking around this town gave me a better feeling - that some villagers really cared about preserving their traditional way of life.

Meng-nainai (蒙翠芝), belongs to the indigenous Sui minority. She lives alone in the huge house her late husband built with his own hands 40 years ago. As soon as we entered the front door, we were greeted by an ancestral altar, flanked by food offerings.

Meng-nainai's children live in distant villages and her daughter visits only occasionally. It was bittersweet to see Meng-nainai, by herself, keeping the fire alive in the house to fight the rot, rather than allowing the house to crumble like its neighbours.

Sweeter and less bitter was the Whittaker's chocolate I hauled from New Zealand - can't go wrong with that gift in China. It also turned out to be one of her grandchildren's birthdays so she put on a feast for us and her family. What a blessing after a damp start to our shoot.

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Zhaoxing Dong Village - Guizhou Province

I absolutely adore the villages of south-east Guizhou's Dong minority. A perfect balance of aesthetics and function that modern cities should emulate. Cascade-roofed 'drum towers' are the beating heart of the village. Its open-air design allows smoke from bonfires to ventilate out, while sheltering the gossipers below from the year-round rain. These are paired with ornate 'flower bridges' that doubles as river crossing and gathering spot. There's so much warmth and close community here, designed around surviving the elements together.

Zhaoxing Dong Village has five of these drum towers, named after five Chinese virtues: Ren, Yi, Li, Zhi, Xin - benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust. It seems to be thriving with its new tourism economy - not surprising considering how beautiful it is - though I'm less impressed with the architecture of the new buildings encroaching on the old farmland.

Lu-nainai (陆锦兰) was an ex-teacher, now running a restaurant with her husband. She demonstrated probably the most unique traditional recipe of the show - fermented cow gut soup! No pics here sorry, I was too busy marvelling at it while filming.

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Huangyao Village - Guangxi Province

A half-day's drive south of Guizhou takes us to Huangyao village in Guangxi province, surrounded by misty karst mountains. What was most special to me about this village was the ancestral halls that extended family members could call their own, offering incense in front of plaques of those who have passed.

The people (and puppies) in the village seemed very lively - especially the wannabe Ip Man kung fu master and energetic Guo-nainai (郭美妹), who loves Chinese plaza dancing more than anything.

[VIDEO::https://youtu.be/DqkjOVgpnmY]

As well as showing us how to cook taro pork belly, Guo-nainai took us on plenty of cheerful walks, pausing at every boombox that music leaked out from to bust out some shuffle-steps. She reminded me a lot of my mother.

The locals spoke Cantonese. I saw a gate to a street bearing the same name as the Guangdong village my maternal grandfather ran from before settling in Malaysia. I discovered an ancestral hall bearing my mother's (admittedly quite common) family name and wondered if we might be distantly related. I found myself feeling closer to home than I had ever been while working in China.

This is part two of four from a series of film photos I took while working on Granny Knows Best in December 2018. Nainai is Chinese for grandmother.

Sometimes you have to look backwards to see where you are and know where you're going. I'm sure it's a familiar theme for many of my migrant friends who went through quarter-life-crisis, struggled with identity and longed for deeper roots. If I could meet my 20-something younger self, I'd show him these grandmothers and say, "These are way better role models for you than Peter Jackson."

As I sift through these snapshots, I realise how that theme of 'looking back' influenced me in the years from that shoot until today: living with my parents and seeing their wrinkles deepen; joining the Pan-Asian Screen Collective to find a way forward for minorities in the New Zealand film industry; learning about story sovereignty and respect for elders while working on projects like Take Home Pay and SIS; writing a nostalgia-filled film story based on my childhood memories of Hong Kong cinema; not to mention the whole Covid thing that forced us all to stop and reflect.

Today, I'm confident that I'm no longer the little shit I once was. And hopefully I won't turn into one again.

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Zhonglu Village - Sichuan Province

The land scrunches up into steep mountains and valleys at the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. Some ancient folks decided that this would be a great spot to put a village. I've read that Zhonglu was a fortress, with the steep terrain offering defensive advantage. The watchtowers jutting up between houses are proof of this heritage. One of the locals told me that families build a new tower when a son is born. Apparently there were 300 across the village at one point. I'm sure there were more than 300 sons.

I was pleased to see houses still preserved in their original style, though most of them would be renovated with heat pumps to combat the harsh, lifeless winter. (My photos deceive—boy it was cold and the days short!) Rows of corn from the autumn harvest adorn rooftop terraces, left to dry under the scarce mountain sun. The village is on such a steep slope that every home has a view, like a titanic amphitheatre. In such a photogenic place, we met an even more photogenic grandmother.

When I directed this show for Chinese viewers years ago, I didn't think twice about the name of our Tibetan grandmother. To the majority of the audience, her sinicised name is fine: Xiage Achong (呷哥阿冲). Today, I am ashamed of not learning her name properly, especially on a show like this. It's like when our Asian names were butchered at school and we just shrugged it off (thanks to the talented Celine Dam for a great write-up).

Our wonderful producer got in touch and found out her Tibetan name – དཀར་གོངས་ཡར་ཀྲགས་ – romanised as Kargong Yartrak. (Quite a difference isn't it? I prefer romanisation as sinicisation takes the name far from its native pronunciation due to limitations of the Chinese written language.)

In grandma Kargong's courtyard, I was hit with the stench of pig's innards hanging on a wooden rack. To make it through winter when there's not much growing, and to live in such a remote location, the locals traditionally relied on preserving meat. We filmed a pig being yanked from its pen, screaming hellishly. The Tibetan butcher lit some candles, offered a prayer and slaughtered it in full view of its terrified stablemates.

Those of us who buy ready-packed meat from supermarkets would surely feel repelled at such a gruesome scene. I was more shocked to see Tibetan Buddhists taking life – but the butcher explained that this was still compatible with Buddhism. Sure, monks and lamas would strictly uphold Buddhist tenets. However, for farmers like grandma Kargong it's about survival. They need meat to give them the strength to toil long hours in the fields. I was doubtful that this scene would make it into the final cut but I'm glad it did - it's unnatural how modern life disconnects us from the food we eat and I felt we needed to show this raw truth.

As if to fully respect the precious life they had just taken, they harvested as much of the pig as possible. Grandma taught us how to cure pork hock, how to make blood sausages by stuffing blood into intestines, and how to make 'yawo' – pig's stomach with lean meat and spices sewn inside. Yawo is also called 'cuckoo meat' as it would be hung to dry on the rack for months until the Spring Festival, when the call of the cuckoo echoing around the valley signals the right time to unwrap the delicious parcel.

I failed to learn the Tibetan name for our next Tibetan grandmother. We called her by her sinicised name, Gemachu (格玛初). Her son had just finished building a modern guesthouse but kept a room in the traditional style. It had an ingenious Tibetan indoor hearth at its centre, which can be used to warm the family as they gossip about the annoying neighbours as well as for making dinner. It was a little disappointing to hear that none of the other houses in the village have preserved a hearth like this. I think I'll steal this kitchen-lounge fusion idea for my dream home.

Grandma Gemachu showed us how to make ash-toasted Tibetan momo - basically unleavened wheat bread baked by burying it in the ashes of the wood fire. Just a quick dust off and it's ready to eat. She dipped it in Sichuan-style chilli oil (kind of like lao gan ma). Another great idea I'll steal. It went down a treat with the classic yak butter tea.

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Yuhu Village - Yunnan Province

In a vast empty valley between the touristy town of Lijiang and the 6000-metre-high Mt. Yulong, the horse-riding Naxi people make their home in Yuhu village. I remember being in a very foul mood when I arrived. It was after a string of infuriating logistical challenges combined with lack of sleep. I could draw no pleasure from the fairytale-like world as my heart was weighed down with work. Until I met Laiya.

I decided to go on a walk around the village by myself. A while later, I realised that I wasn't alone. The old mutt living at the guesthouse seemed to sense my negative aura and decided to escort me around the village. I had no food on me, nothing to offer him in exchange,  yet Laiya would step when I stepped and stop when I stopped. By the end of my walk I could see the magic in the world again.

For some reason, Laiya would stick close to me for the rest of our stay (and not any of the other crew). We trusted each other so much that I thought it would be fun to have him cameo in our show. The crew thought I was nuts but hey, he made the cut in the end!

[VIDEO::https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDOqy3q5Yk0]

Zhao-nainai ( 赵有执 ) lives with her talented daughter, Lushan (not pictured—the one in the photos is an imposter), who started a cafe and restaurant in front of their house. We all fell in love with nainai at first sight. Especially our producer who seemed to have adopted herself into their family. Zhao-nainai helps out at the cafe once in a while but most of her time is spent hanging out at the village square with her neighbour and bestie, Li-nainai ( 李近花 ). They showed us how to make Naxi hotpot in a classic copper pot and beautiful Naxi mooncakes but I was too busy working to take any photos.

We lucked out as one of the villagers happened to be having a wedding celebration and invited us over. It was a lively night, dancing and singing with the locals around a bonfire. Zhao-nainai even took the effort to dress up her involuntarily-adopted daughter.

In an interview, Lushan burst into tears while telling us that her father passed away. She reminisced about the way he used to make Zhao-nainai laugh and how the old couple prepared breakfast together as a team. Behind the camera, my eyes were welling up too. These women shared not only their smiles and laughter, but also their sincere sorrows. It was an honour to be embraced by the warmth of their family.

Li-nainai rides a bus nearly every day to Lijiang to help look after her grandchildren while her own children are at work. She told us that she wishes her children and grandchildren would move back to live with her. I wondered if I would move back if I were her son. Wouldn't it be worth giving up a stressful city job to live with family in such an idyllic home?

On our last day in Yuhu, while having lunch at Zhao-nainai's cafe, I spied on the two grandmas as they chatted quietly and laughed with each other. First Laiya, then the nainais, then a festive wedding, and an episode successfully in the can – simple, serendipitous encounters piled on from moment I entered this village as if to tell me, "Don't force it! Life doesn't have to be so hard." I think that's also what this sneakily snapped photo of two old friends is trying to say.

It was the halfway point. We'd filmed in four of China's provinces and speed-dated eight amazing grandmothers in our month-long shooting block. I flew back to New Zealand for a week and spent Christmas with my own family. I found it really hard to express to them my extremes of joy and suffering (especially with no pictures to show for it... until now) so I just glossed over the fun parts.

But the first half of shooting would prove to be much easier than the second...