Simply down the road, the Yummy Fort diner was slinging plate after plate of scrambled eggs with sliced ham to a packed home of locals preparing for an extended day.
For first-time guests, the scene was a complicated begin to a competition that’s as straightforward to like as it may be exhausting to grasp.
In the remainder of Hong Kong, the eighth day of the fourth lunar month is well known as an official vacation for Buddha’s Birthday, however on Cheung Chau, the day without work is spent memorializing a neighborhood story that often revolves round interesting to gods to cease a plague however can alternatively contain dispelling pirates, appeasing ghosts or the entire above.
Cheung Chau is a village of simply over 20,000 folks with a low-slung downtown pinched between an extended sandy seaside and a harbor filled with fishing boats. The ferry from the middle of Hong Kong takes lower than an hour, which makes the island common with weekend day-trippers, artistic varieties and metropolis commuters looking for cheaper lease and a slower tempo of life.
Through the years, the bun competition spawned bun towers, and bun towers morphed into televised bun tower races, full with Hong Kong-wide choice heats and on-belay security trainings. Parades of gods and relics become parades of “floating” kids in conventional costumes, and conventional costumes gave option to political satire and superstar impersonations.
Someplace alongside the best way, a global fast-food chain determined to face in vegetarian solidarity with the well-known native fish ball stands that shutter for the meat-free days of the competition, whereas a lot of the string of seafood eating places alongside the harbor continued to benefit from huge crowds hungry for steamed crab and fried shrimp.
Ask why any of that is the best way it’s, and the reply from locals and guests comes all the way down to some model of: “I don’t know. It’s custom.”
Having breakfast on the Yummy Fort this yr, Mandy Fong, born and raised on Cheung Chau, wore a shiny pink T-shirt. She and her 12-year-old son had been gearing as much as march with different affiliation members within the early afternoon Pik Siu Parade, through which children round 5 or 6 stood on small floats and appeared to carry different children aloft with one hand by way of robust metallic rods and an phantasm of impossibly balanced trinkets.
The 2024 float from Fong’s staff featured Hong Kong Olympic fencer Cheung Ka Lengthy held aloft by Hong Kong Olympic swimmer Siobhán Haughey.
On condition that political protest has been all however banned in Hong Kong over the previous few years, organizers went out of their option to remind journalists that there was no aggressive agenda behind the few extra satirical shows. One baby was dressed as a housewife, holding up a mishmash of recycling paraphernalia in an obvious jab on the authorities’s new waste administration scheme. One other float even appeared to rejoice the lately expanded safety legislation often known as Article 23 and one among its chief proponents, Hong Kong safety chief Chris Tang.
“It’s enjoyable. It’s conventional. And everybody enjoys it.” Fong stated concerning the competition. Requested if he was excited for the parade, her son glanced up from a sport on his cellphone to say: “No. It’s too scorching.”
To beat the warmth, parading adults drank chilly beer and handed juice packing containers as much as the floating children. Apart from whistle-wielding path-clearers on the entrance of every group, nobody took issues too severely. Legendary lion heads jerked aspect to aspect and nipped at kids within the crowd, whereas associates kicked playingly on the white Nikes flitting beneath. An indication of martial arts become pushing and cajoling for others to enter the middle of the circle, till a person who appeared to have had a number of drinks flubbed his routine to raucous laughter.
On high of bun keychains, bun T-shirts, bun magnets, bun pillows and anything that would plausibly draw memento gross sales with bun imagery, edible buns had been on the market for somewhat over a greenback a chunk. The buns are made with one among three candy paste flavors — lotus seed, pink bean or sesame — surrounded by about an inch of spongy, white rice-flour dough, which is itself coated by a form of skinny, steam-smoothed pores and skin stamped with the Chinese language character for “security” or “peace,” relying on whom you ask. Martin Kwok, proprietor of probably the most well-known bun producer on the island, stated most individuals deliver them dwelling and re-steam them earlier than consuming.
Because the final child was introduced down from their perch within the late afternoon, the road for the boat again to Hong Kong Island stretched close to a kilometer lengthy, filled with drained faces and baggage full of packing containers and packing containers of Kwok’s buns. The marquis bun tower race occasion doesn’t occur till midnight, and with the 2024 competition falling on a Wednesday, there was faculty the subsequent day.
What these early departures missed was the rowdy post-parade membership dinners packing the restaurant patios alongside the promenade, a Cantonese opera close to the principle competition temple, the burning of a large, paper King of the Ghosts determine on the far waterfront and, in fact, the tower race.
At midnight, fireworks popped, organizers banged a gong and chosen racers scrambled as much as seize as many buns as attainable from the best (and highest level worth) reaches of the conical tower about 40 ft tall.
The Solar Ferry firm stated at the least 25,000 made the crossing from Hong Kong Island to Cheung Chau earlier within the day, however crowds had dwindled to underneath 2,000 by the point Janet Kung and Yip Kin-man had been topped feminine and male champions. It regarded like almost 1 / 4 of that viewers was quick asleep on the final ferry again to Hong Kong Island.
