My epiphany comes while ensconced in the steamy Hong Kong kitchen of Yan Toh Heen, a world-acclaimed Cantonese restaurant in the InterContinental Hotel.
Surrounded by a bevy of toque-wearing chefs who pause from chopping, steaming and sitr-frying to watch my awkward attempts at forming little pillow of dough into a semblance of edible dim sum.
I struggle with my lesson. They’re teaching me to make various types of the restaurant’s specialty, even as they turn out lunch for a packed house. I muse over the multitude of edible items they plate, each a work of art, a culinary adventure in itself, and think: life is a dim sum platter. I think I’ll eat it all up.
This moon-shaped dumpling, har gau, filled with prawns and winter bamboo, looks easy when the chefs form it. Their nimble fingers put my ten thumping thumbs to shame. In choreographed moves their fingers glide over the dough. Mine, on the other hand, flap like grounded bird wings.
Still, I persevere – and the chefs, so driven by perfection, think nothing of making me restart every try. At last, I finish a plate of malformed structures. On my teachers’ urging, I place my deformed dumplings next to their elegant moons and pray they don’t serve mine to paying customers.
My three days in this city of islands have passed in typical Hong Kong warp speed fashion. It’s been one dim sum dumpling after another — metaphorically speaking.
photos courtesy of InterContinental Hotel Hong Kong
Because I have only a short time, I’m grateful for the help of my concerige. When I want to learn tai chi, he connects me with Master William Ng, a sage octogenarian who instructs me in the art of awareness, showing me how tai chi philosophy explains everything in the universe.
Alone, at dawn each day during my stay, we move in dancelike motions on the pool deck overlooking Victoria Harbor.
Afterwards, lingering in my hotel lobby before dinner, I find myself ruminating about yet another Chinese philosophy: feng shui. Like my dim sum platter and my tai chi exercises, the hotel itself seems to symbolize the profundity of the Hong Kong experience.
Though modern, the hotel’s glass doors and windows, the fountain at the entrance, and the lobby were erected according to the advice of a feng shui master. The builders brought him in to appease the nine dragons, powerful spirits who occupied the hotel’s original site on the water.
According to legend, they still pass through the lobby each morning to bathe in the harbor. But I wonder. Do they stop for a meal as well? Maybe they’d be interested in sampling a Texas girl’s attempts at dim sum?
It could happen.
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