Pig Meat

Hong Kong people seem to really like pigs. In the US, I really don't remember eating much pork at all. Maybe the occasional sausage, but other than that, my family was more of a chicken and elk family. After moving to Hong Kong, my pork consumption went through the roof.

In Cantonese, pork is another wonderfully intuitive word: 豬肉 (literally "pig meat"). There are all kinds of pork dishes. Sweet and sour pork is a thing here, actually. Before I had always thought that it was some kind of weird Americanized food, like General Tso's chicken (which possibly originated in Taiwan), but it turns out that sweet and sour pork is a thing here. I, being allergic to pineapple, avoid it like the plague it is, but the less adventurous travelers to Asia might welcome that taste of home.

Thankfully, since I don't have my epipen anymore, most pork dishes here don't include poisonous pineapple. My two favorite dishes, 燒肉 siu1 yuk6 and 叉燒 caa1 siu1. Both can be found at siu mei shops. If you're not sure what a siu mei shop is, just look for windows full of gleaming, brown ducks. That's a siu me shop. Siu yuk is crispy pork, basically Chinese bacon. A layer of meat, a layer of fat, and a layer of crispy, golden goodness. Dip that in yellow mustard and you've got yourself heaven in your mouth. I usually order half siu yuk and half cha siu, barbecue pork. I'm a little less gung ho about barbecue pork, but that still means that I love it. Some barbecue pork is too sweet, since they cover it with sugar, but if it's not too sweet then I really like it. 

Then there's soup dumplings 小籠包 (siu1 2ung4 baau1), Cantonese sausage 臘腸 (laap6 coeng4), pork chop buns 豬扒包 (zyu1 paa2 baau1), and the overrated barbecue pork buns 叉燒包 (caa1 siu1 baau1). And many, many more. 

Besides food, there are terms of endearment. 傻豬 So4 zyu1, or silly pig, is considered a cute thing for a parent to call their child. So sweet.... Then there's the golden pig jewelery. A lot of very fancy jewelery stores have these massive gold pig necklaces. Some of them even have gold piglets hanging from the mama pig's stomach (teats?). I'm kind of tempted to buy them, actually, just for the weirdness factor. I have not done enough research (aka asking friends or students) about it, though, so I'm still not really sure why anyone would want a large golden pig necklace. 

You can find pigs all around the city, whether statues in a mall or monogrammed on a kindergartener's pink backpack. When I used to live in Ap Lei Chau, I would walk down an alley that always had dead pigs hanging there. I assumed they were for the restaurant in the front, just waiting their turn to be chopped up and roasted. They were usually big pigs, but occasionally you'd get a batch of piglets, equally dead. 

Mom told me that one drizzly afternoon, she walked down the alley to find that someone had clothed the whole lot of piglets in tiny raincoats. See? It doesn't matter. Alive or dead, Hong Kong people just love their pigs.