Chua Lam
'I wake up at 6am, drink some tea, do some tai chi and then I'll head down to the market to 'dig up' my own vegetables, meat and fruit, and cook myself a good breakfast. Some days I'll go to the office but a lot of the time I'm on the road.
I have my own travel company, which takes groups of gourmets to eat around the world, to wherever there's good food. Recently we've been to Perigord, in southwestern France, and Kanazawa in Japan. I only choose places I've been to; I have to have been at least once to know the restaurants are up to standard. I don't have to do much advertising. I've been doing this for 10 years, so I've built up a club with about 3,000 members. We just have to send out an e-mail and a bunch of travellers will get together - all of them only interested in eating.
If I'm in Hong Kong, I'll usually visit new restaurants to have lunch. I've been writing a restaurant column [for Apple Daily] for years. I usually have to eat at four or five restaurants to write a single review; because rents are so high, restaurants are not easy to manage these days, so if I eat at a small shop and the food is bad I usually won't write about it - that would make things even more difficult for them. If I go to a big restaurant with a lot of financial backing and the food isn't excellent, though, I'll really give them hell. And if a restaurant is very good, I strongly recommend my readers go. I always insist on paying for myself, that's my basic principle, and even if I'm eating by myself I'll order six dishes, so I really know what the chef's skills are like.
Broadcaster TVB has committed me to another show [after last year's Market Trotter]. The goal of the new show will be to help people appreciate real Hong Kong food culture again. I know the city well and some dishes are going to become extinct if we don't record them now. There are cooks who are growing old and once they retire, the dishes will be gone. I'm always saying that along with trying to save all these animal species we've got to protect our dishes.
Some are disappearing because they take a long time to prepare and don't sell for a high price. Another reason is that they're too simple and people tend to forget simple things. I don't believe in fusion food. You have to go back to your roots and get the basics right first. When I was a kid, when we were really hungry, there was nothing better than a bowl of white rice with some lard and soy sauce on top. When people hear about that now they start moaning about cholesterol, but to really appreciate taste you have to sacrifice a little bit of health sometimes. There's a great happiness in eating, and if you're afraid to eat this or that, there's something wrong with your mind; you're sick in the head. And when you're sick, whatever healthy food you have, it doesn't give you any pleasure or do your body any good.
In the afternoon, sometimes I'll visit the sauna, but I'm usually writing - that's my real passion. Besides my columns, I've written about 100 books, about my travels, food, lifestyle, everything. Writing comes naturally to some people but for me it's actually a tough job. I have to write an article once then read over it and correct it, and leave it until the next day to cool off. After I've read it again I'll send it to the newspaper and they'll send back what they want to print so I can have a final look.
Movies still give me a lot of pleasure but I don't really do any producing any more. When I was in the business [with Golden Harvest] it was the golden age of cinema; everything we touched made money. But these days, with all the pirating [of DVDs] going on in China, out of every 100 movies that are made only two or three will recover their costs. I was there in the days they were pirating on videotapes and wasn't too worried because it took two hours to copy a cassette. But I knew when DVDs were being printed like banknotes that it was time to quit.
I have lots of other things to keep me busy - a small shop [selling fung shui objects and art] in Central and I've taken up seal carving. To carve you have to learn calligraphy, and there are so many choices to make in terms of characters and composition. Every little thing you learn, you find a whole universe in it.
I don't go out often for dinner; I'll have something simple - a bowl of white rice, maybe some pickles or a little fish, and that's it. That's enough to fill my stomach and keep me going. The way I eat during the daytime, if I had big dinners I'd become very fat. Most of the time I'll spend a quiet evening at home watching movies, but I do have some good friends, mostly other writers, who I go out with now and then. You'd think all of these intellectuals would get together and talk about serious subjects, but
no, we just gather and gossip like a bunch of women. It's most enjoyable.
I'm usually in bed by about midnight, sometimes 1am or 2am. I'm not sure what the science is behind the belief that you've got to sleep eight hours a day but some people can sleep less. If you spend two hours less sleeping each night, you gain more than two days a month. When you're young you might not calculate every minute of your life like that, but at my age I do. Every minute is precious and should be well spent.
Spend your time comfortably ... more than comfortably, spend it ravishingly.'
