My last trip to Melbourne was in 2000, when I was cordially invited by a Hong Kong tycoon. We spent all of our time shuttling between the casino of the Crown hotel and the dining table—loaded with endless banquets of abalone and lobsters—in Chinatown. So my perception of Australia was like that of a mainland Chinese day-tourist to Hong Kong who spends eight hours in Disneyland and an evening shopping in Tung Chung before going home and boasting to his fellow villagers that he had been to the former colony of Hong Kong.
Going to Melbourne again, but this time on a trip organized by the tourism board of Australia, is like a frog—as the Chinese proverb says—hopping out of the well to see the fuller sky. And what a naturally clean, blue sky it was. At the same time, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was in Beijing to enjoy some fresh air under a somewhat artificially blue sky, miraculously instated at gunpoint. My Australian friend took me to the famous Block, a Victorian shopping arcade with fashion, cake and toy shops, where the interior colors bring back the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and Professor Higgins. As a Hongkonger, I was led into a trendily decorated, renovated Chinese fusion restaurant, Lee Ho Fook, to sample some deep-fried eggplant dipped in Worcester sauce. Waitresses were all young local pleasant Aussie girls who knew how to pronounce exotic Chinese food and drink terms like pu’er. It was the first time I felt the pride of being an ethnic Chinese when I heard local Aussie customers pronouncing the Chinese word “Fook” most seriously, without bursting into malicious giggles as those who first learned of the name on a sign in Chinatown 20 years ago. Yes. The Emperor from the Dragon Kingdom was about to come on a state visit and sign a few billion Aussie dollars in trade contracts with Abbott, a move that will bring in millions of Chinese tourists, which most Australians gratefully and avidly look forward to. With China’s overwhelming global economic power, the name Lee Ho Fook has ceased to sound comical to native English speakers.
I was invited to dine at Attica, one of the top 50 restaurants in the world. It is run by the New Zealand-born head chef Ben Shewry, who habitually takes his VIP guests to tour the garden next to the restaurant where he grows all the lentils, basils and other green vegetables that go straight to the kitchen and then the dining room. We were served organic dishes with earthly names such as baby corn in the husk, and walnut in its own shell. Kate Winslet was in the restaurant a few weeks ago, the waitress whispered to me, and was seated at the same table as I was today.
Asked to comment on the four-hour feast ending around midnight, I said: “A stunning first-hand experience of a galaxy of botanical characters, miraculously acted out and orchestrated on the stage of a dining table in a heart-melting production, on an almost Shakespearean scale.” A somewhat contrived (and as pretentious as I could muster) English expression, the likes of which would be seldom uttered by any Hongkonger, just to surprise the Aussies as much as the name Lee Ho Fook did the first time Western visitors to Chinatown heard it.
Chip Tsao is a best-selling author, columnist and a former producer for the BBC. His columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.