Welcom to Candice's Sampan

What is Sampan Congee?

It is easy to tell that it is a kind of congees. But what is sampan? What does it have to do with congee? What are the ingredients for this typical Cantonese congee? How does it taste? Last but not least, what does it represent? Why am I naming my first English blog after it?

According to Wikipedia, “a sampan is a relatively flat bottomed Chinese wooden boat from 3.5 to 4.5 m (11.5 to 14.8 ft) long.” It is called shān bǎn in Chinese and written as舢舨. “The word comes from the original Cantonese term for boats, literally meaning “three planks”.” However, the characters have been changed as modern Chinese language evolved.

Sampans are generally used for fishing or transportation, in coastal areas or rivers. Some of them include a small shelter on board and can be used as a permanent habitation on inland waters.

Now you might be able to reason what Sampan Congee means. Yes, it is a kind of congee cook on a sampan. It is also known as its Cantonese pronunciation - Tang Zai Chuk. Fishermen who live in the sampan took advantage of the close-at-hand resource of food in the water, like fish, shrimp, scallop and squid as the main ingredients. To make it more tasteful, fried peanuts, chunked Chinese cruller, sliced egg roll wrapper, green onion and coriander were also added into the fragrant rice porridge.

What does Sampan Congee represent?

As a typical Cantonese food, Sampan Congee enjoys a history of more than 500 years. It inherited the humbleness and entrepreneurship of Cantonese people. During the most turbulent few hundred years, it witnessed the peace and war, prosperity and poverty, secular happiness and tragedy of the Cantonese people.

Sampan Congee is famous for neither its extravagant ingredients nor the exquisite cooking procedure. It is an ordinary food that most people can afford. Therefore, it represents a special culture of Canton; not only the city better known as Guangzhou now, but the neighborhood including Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan, and Shenzhen. People in this area share the same merits of hard working, adventure seeking, and risk taking. Meanwhile, they are wise in taking advantage of the natural resources they are endowed with.

The language of Cantonese

Food, together with language, music, dancing, custom, religion and morality, composes as one of the key elements in defining a folk culture. Distinct corps grows out of distinct soil. Different food caters to different climate and living habit.

In the same vein, languages diverge as the country divided into various localities. When people in Guangzhou speak Cantonese, residences in Sichuan have their own dialect. When Inner Mongolians speak Mongolian, nomadic tribes in Tibet distinguish themselves from the rest of the country with Tibetan language.

Recently, a member of Guangzhou Political Consultative Conference Committee proposed that the local government should reduce or abort broadcasting in the local dialect – Cantonese for the sake of popularizing local programs on a nation-wide scale.

This proposal rippled the entire society immediately. Within two weeks, people from all walks of lives shout out their opposition to the motion. Ordinary people utilized both the virtue and physical gathering to make protests. Broadcasting industry and printing media programed special reports and discussions on the controversy.

For most of Cantonese speakers, it is not only about the language. It is about the culture. It is a matter of maintaining their identity. This dialect crisis tremendously reinforced Guangzhou citizens’ sense of belonging to the unique culture they possessed. It has woken them up to treasure the legacy passed on by the ancestors. They realized that it is the high time to sustain their identity and to protect the freedom in choosing what media language they want.

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Words from the Blogger

This blog is dedicated in offering the readers some interesting but unofficial information about China, from the perspective of ordinary Chinese people. Various topics ranging from culture, education, networking to politics, economy and career will be discussed. If you are interested in learning more about China through a lance different from the mainstream camera, please stay in tune.

In the following three weeks, some deeper investigations on this dialect crisis will be carried out through the means of podcast and vidcast. I will set up some interviews with students and working professions. In order to obtain an unbiased view, interviewees will range from Cantonese speakers to non-Cantonese speakers, from Chinese to other nationalities. Meanwhile, researches through news reading and literature reviewing would also contribute to offer an explanation to the unexpectedly furious resist of the Cantonese people.

In order to achieve a comprehensive outcome, questions will be asked in three dimensions.

1. What is the cultural impact on reducing or aborting Cantonese broadcasting?

2. Why were people capable in opposing so strongly and widely?

3. What political agenda is possibly involved in this proposal?