The real zing: Why Chongqing's spicy noodles are good on a hot day
Chongqing's noodles are spicy, but are still popular with residents on hot days, writes Richard Macauley
"Liang mian! Liang fen! Suan la fen!" screams a 60-year-old woman in a residential community tucked away on a busy road in Chongqing.
It's the middle of the afternoon, lunch was a few hours ago, and the temperature is reaching its peak for the day, between 40 and 45 degrees Celsius. There's no wind to provide relief.
The residential community is a relic from an earlier period: steep stone steps must be scaled to reach it, lush green trees surround each building and the songs of the birds drown out any traffic noise. There is still more hill to climb, but this pit stop, halfway up, contains about 12 squat apartment blocks, and enough peckish residents to warrant a shout out.
The concrete walk-ups contain basic homes filled largely with elderly residents who remember when Chongqing was a different place. It is the elderly, still at home in the middle of the afternoon, who are first out on the street when they hear the calls of the bangbang woman.
A bangbang woman, or man, is someone who earns a living from the bamboo pole they wear over their shoulder. Men add rope to their bamboo pole and carry out day labour, sometimes helping on building sites and other times waiting outside department stores to offer assistance to shoppers carrying newly purchased washing machines and other white goods to their cars.
The woman shouting the names of her dishes has two buckets draped from her bamboo pole: one contains cold wheat noodles, rice noodles, and chunks made from rice starch; the other contains the various ingredients required to whip those ingredients into a delicious dish.