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> Editorial
> What's the Story?
> Mrs. Fixit
> Desperately Seeking Ingredients...
> Passionate about Mill Road
> Caribbean Masterchef
> Everything is Possible!
> A Sanctuary on Mill Road
> Boat People
> Going Green with Al-Amin
> The Akashi Project
> Open All Hours
> Mesmerised by Meze
> Come Together
> The Girl from Arapau
> Still Sweet and Spicy
> A Real Neighourhood
> Lei Si Fan Mei?
> Flight from Baghdad
> Streets of Revolution
> Stepping up the Ladder
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Lei Si Fan Mei?
Kym Lau was born in Hong Kong and came to Britain as an infant. She owns Kymmoy’s noodle bar with husband, Alan, the head chef. She tells Cambridge Untold about her rich Chinese heritage.
When I meet Kym at her noodle bar one afternoon, she is busy taking delivery of a batch of sea bass. In the open kitchens an assistant chef is ladling marinade over a whole duck in preparation for the evening, while another is chopping squid and bright red chilli peppers. Kym spots the last table of lunchtime diners signalling for their bill, and sends a waitress over. |
We sit at a table near the kitchens. ‘Kymmoy was my nickname as a baby’, she begins. ‘It means “little girl”.’ Her mobile rings and in Cantonese she tells the person to please call back later. When we return to the interview she gets a text message from her son: please pick him up from Letchworth tennis courts by four. I begin to see why it has taken weeks to get this interview with Kym. We go upstairs where there is less chance of the boss being interrupted.
‘I’ve been in Britain since I was two, so I have no memories of Hong Kong where I was born. My dad came to work for my aunty in Birmingham a good 55 years ago when she opened her first restaurant there. It was a few years before he could send for my mum, my older sister and me. I was brought up in Birmingham, Wales and London, all over, wherever my aunt had restaurants really.’
When Kym’s aunty opened The Pagoda (now Charlie Chan’s) in Regent Street, the family came to Cambridge. It was one of the city’s first Chinese restaurants and in those days a real novelty. ‘Now we’ve got a lot of competition.’
Kym’s entire family on her mother’s side is in the restaurant trade, but she never intended to go down that road. ‘I actually trained as a photographer’, Kym throws her head back and laughs as she remembers. ‘Seriously. I worked for Kodak in London, taking and developing pictures. I even did some work for Vogue.’
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| "When I opened this place, my Dad was in here to see if he could pick up any negative vibes! He’ll still drop in from time to time to see if he can frighten any ghosts off!" |
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It’s not every Chinese immigrant to this country in the 1950s who could open a string of restaurants and takeaways. Where had the money come from? ‘We were quite rich on my mum’s side’, says Kym. ‘It goes back to when my great-grandfather got a job with the Chinese Emperor as his servant. It was a very prestigious post to work for The Emperor, but I don’t suppose you could get rich on it. Then when my great grandfather got too old, his son, my grandfather, inherited the job.’
Kym’s grandfather actually became the servant to the last Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Pu Yi. When the Japanese invaded in 1937, the last Emperor was dethroned and died in 1967, demoted from God-like status in the Forbidden City to a simple gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens. The fate of Kym’s grandfather, however, took a turn for the better.
‘He became a very successful shipping merchant! Somehow, he had managed to acquire jewels while in the Emperor’s service. Inflation after the Japanese invasion meant paper money was useless, but jewellery kept its value. I’ve asked my mother how her father came by those jewels but she says he died the same year she was born, so she doesn’t have a clue. And my grandmother, who died in 2004, never really liked to talk about it; she was only an 18 year old girl, the last of five wives, when my grandfather married her so she wasn’t really in a position to ask! Wife Number One probably knew but my grandmother as Wife Number Five couldn’t ask her, and of course that first wife is long dead too. So, who knows?’
It’s tempting to think that the Emperor was behind Kym’s grandfather’s sudden wealth. Perhaps, one morning, foreseeing his imminent removal by the Japanese, the Emperor called his favourite servant to the Imperial bedroom to help him button down his starched collar, and slipped his astonished retainer a small velvet bag of sapphires, rubies and jade… It would mean that those takeaways and restaurants in Wimbledon, Birmingham, Chepstow and Kymmoy’s in Mill Road owed their existence to the gratefulness of the last Emperor and the demise of the last Chinese dynasty.
‘I dunno’, muses Kym. Her speech is pure Cambridge, with persistent Cantonese inflections. ‘It makes you wonder though, doesn’t it?’
In 2004, Kym flew back to Hong Kong with her husband and children. It was effectively her first visit as she had left when she was a baby of two.
Yet, she found it was very much what she expected: skyscrapers, teeming streets, familiar smells of soy sauce and duck marinade. And she spoke Cantonese and the Haka dialect as if she’d never been away. ‘It was what I expected,’ she shrugs. ‘I kind of felt at home.’
It’s a sentiment regularly expressed by emigrants returning to their country of origin, and one often shared by people of different heritages born in Britain and visiting ‘home’ for the first time.
‘I went across to mainland China to see my maternal grandmother who was 89, I wanted to meet her before she passed away. My grandfather had died right back in 1938 but Wife Number Five was still living on in this big eighteenth-century house in the village. The authorities hadn’t managed to buy it off her, but it wouldn’t be long. All around they were putting up new high rise flats. My grandmother’s was the last old house standing. You walk through these massive heavy doors into a huge quite tatty living room space with chairs which looked to me like they went back to the time of the Emperors. They’d be worth quite a bit, I reckon.
Her bedroom is up a ladder in a kind of mezzanine or balcony, and the kitchen is outside across a yard in the old Chinese style, everything has its block. The toilets are separate and there’s a barn where she kept chickens. Staying in that draughty old house for a few days really made me feel a sense of history. It’s where my mother was born and grew up, it’s kind of where I came from.’
If going ‘back’ connected Kym with her Chinese roots, what was the visit like for her children, Jamie, 17, and Jade, 14?
‘They hated it’, she laughs. ‘They didn’t like seeing the poverty in the villages. We saw this old woman begging in the street one day, she must have been as old as my grandmother. We asked her why she had to beg for food. She said her son had thrown her out! Her husband had died and the son had inherited all the money. It’s an old Chinese tradition, the sons come before the wife or daughters. The girls get married and lose everything with their surname.’
Kym, brought up in Britain, yet very Chinese, looks on the culture of her country of origin with what seems a mixture of fondness and irritation. ‘Those ancient chairs at my grandmother’s. Now she has passed on, my mother has no right to them or anything in the house. Girls don’t count. It’ll never change in China. It’s just the tradition.’
| If British traditions go back centuries, in China they go back millennia. Not surprisingly, the word tradition comes up at several points of our conversation. That and ‘in the old days’, with which Kym starts so many of her sentences as she tries to explain the reality of today’s Chinese living abroad. But tradition, ancient and time-honoured, seems a double edged sword; it confers respectability on the continuance of outmoded, outrageous practices. On the other hand, it enriches heritage, informs iden- tity, and provides a real sense of cultural continuity. ‘Food. That’s really important in Chinese culture all over the world’, laughs Kym. |
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The Chinese obsession with food was perhaps born of its extreme scarcity until relatively recently. China is a nation of 1.3 billion where only seven percent of the vast land area is cultivable. It goes some way to explaining why in southern China, when someone comes to your house, you open the door with ‘Have you eaten?’ (Lei si fan mei?) But it may account for the rich varied cuisine the Chinese excel at.
‘The other big thing is money. Getting it quick!’ Kym laughs. It does seem that the Chinese are very into the link between prosperity and luck. ‘There’s a lot of betting and gambling in Asian culture generally. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it but it’s true. They are all at it! A man will think he’s lucky, but then he ruins himself, goes bankrupt. I know people who’ve lost their restaurants at the betting shop. That’s traditional, too.’
What about women? I ask. ‘Older women love playing majong, it’s a home game. In the old days, the men didn’t let the women out, I’m sorry to say, so they stopped themselves getting bored by playing majong together. Only, they didn’t have any money so they played for stones and buttons. My mum still plays majong, and my dad goes to bet on the horses. Luck and money, it’s Chinese tradition again…’
Such deeply rooted cultural attitudes must surely have affected Kym’s attitudes. Is she superstitious? For example, did she open her noodle bar on a propitious date? ‘I’m too westernised for that’, she scoffs. ‘But when I opened this place, my dad was in here to see if he could pick up any negative vibes! He’ll still drop in from time to time to see if he can frighten any ghosts off! He’ll start smoking the place out with incense or whatever, like they did in the old days. He’s very superstitious. I let him do it. All it does is set off the fire alarms!’
In the open kitchen, Kym’s husband and his two kitchen assistants quicken the pace as lunch time approaches. Pans clang, bright orange flames leap dramatically around the woks and steam billows up into extractor hoods. The tantalising scent of ginger, soy and hoisin permeate the air of the bright little noodle bar.
"In southern China, when someone comes to your house, you open the door with ‘Have you eaten?’
(Lei si fan mei?)" |
‘Alan was older than me when he came from Hong Kong, about 13, so he’s more Chinese than I am. His family were very poor. They smuggled themselves from mainland China to Hong Kong which was British in those days. His parents came to Cambridge to work in a takeaway in 1982 and got naturalised. Alan was the head chef at the Phoenix Chinese restaurant in Histon for nine years, until I headhunted him to cook for me here. Our specialities are sea food: squid, scallops and prawns, monkfish and crab. We get it all in fresh three times a week. |
Netsuke figurine |
The chef hangs up two ducks, glistening with marinade. ‘We’ll do 3-6 of those ducks a day, more on a weekend. We cater a lot for allergies with nut-free, gluten-free dishes, and we’re popular with vegetarians and vegans. A lot of mums bring their toddlers here in the mornings.’
A van pulls up outside and two deliverymen come in with large cardboard boxes. Kym signs and directs them to the kitchen. ‘I’ve started using these brilliant little cardboard takeaway containers from the States. No more of those tin foil things. These you can put in the microwave, they are environment friendly, people love them for their packed lunches.’
Mill Road is Cambridge at its most alternative and bohemian. After eighteen years here, it’s what Kym loves about it. But she points out, bohemian need not mean run-down.
‘We business owners work really hard and try our best to improve our road, but I wish the council would get involved a bit more. For instance, there’s the issue of homeless people coming in the restaurant to beg, especially in summertime when it’s hot and the door’s open. It impacts on business. And I don’t really want to have to step over someone sleeping in my doorway to get to my restaurant. About four years ago, we all complained to the council, but all they did was put our rates up! Nothing had improved so we raised a petition. I still think the council has failed to address the problem.’
Two years back, Kym got involved in the Mill Road Winter Festival. ‘We had a big Chinese dragon dance which brought in a lot of people. We wanted to close Mill Road for the festival. All sorts o f people walk down Mill Road, all colours, all nationalities and classes. It’s unique in this city.’
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