Postcard from Vancouver
🇨🇦 Drunk cats and the best Chinese food in the world
Hello from British Columbia! This week I visited a Canadian c****bis shop, tried some famous BC bud, met up with a fellow AAPI woman in the w**d at a local boba shop, and OH MY GOD THE FOOD. 🤤
Be still my munchie-fueled heart.
Technically, I’m in Richmond, a city tucked between downtown and the Vancouver airport. Most people don’t know about this gem of a place, but if you’re a food lover you must add this onto your list of places to visit.
Here you’ll find the best Cantonese-style Chinese food in the world. Menus are written in Chinese, most people speak Cantonese, and the food is arguably better than the food in Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong, San Francisco, or the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles.
I’m told repeatedly that the Chinese food here is best for two reasons:
The water and fresh ingredients.
Famous chefs from Hong Kong immigrated here and opened restaurants to serve the 54% ethnically Chinese residents of Richmond.
I grew up visiting regularly to see family. We’d stuff our faces with decadent, familiar, comfort foods that, according to my dad, are impossible to find at this level of high quality and tastiness, which simply doesn’t exist anywhere but here. The parents, aunties, and uncles would loudly proclaim how delicious and exceptional the food is while smacking their lips loudly and pushing more food onto your plate despite how many times you protest.
When the check arrived, get out of the way, because grown-ass adults argued and fought over the bill like a rowdy game of keep-away. As kids we watched with embarrassment as family members chased each other around the restaurant in an attempt to snatch the bill out of each other's hands, fling opposing credit cards out of reach, and press their own card into the server’s hand. The winner triumphantly beamed that they bested the others by treating us all to the meal. 🙄
I hope they tipped well.
Being here 20 years later as an adult watching the same scene play out between our now elderly senior parents is less embarrassing but amusing at best. I recognize that this is part of their fun and done in jest, so it makes me smile. Today as adults who witnessed this appalling behavior, when the bill arrives us “kids” look at each other with a knowing smirk, and proceed without the bombastic game of chase.
Don’t be embarrassing.
In This Issue:
Review of everything I tried
What I learned about w**d in Canada
Best thing I ate while discreetly high af
Drunk cats
Inside a Canadian Dispensary
I visited one cannabis retail shop the first day I arrived. Inside La Canapa in Granville, a cute trendy neighborhood in Vancouver, I got to pepper the budtender and manager with questions about Vancouver’s famous BC bud.
One-sentence review of everything I tried:
XMG Tropical Cream Float 1:1 THC:CBG beverage – A tropical Dole Whip delight in a can that left me feeling like happy Jell-O. 10mg T*C total.
Grön Blue Razzleberry Pearls 3:1 CBG:THC - Love this brand but these gave me a lingering headache afterwards. Five (5) 2mg T*C each pearl.
1964 Strawberry Cough solventless rosin gummy - Tastes good, a little w**dy, but a most excellent high soaring through a field of strawberry clouds.
Soar Electric Grapefruit preroll - Tasty candied grapefruit flavor with a face-melting high, my favorite of the bunch.
Cereal Milk preroll - Was handed this unmarked j that’s “very very strong” which turned out to have a mouth-numbing quality, was harsh on the smoke, and not as strong as it was hyped up to be.
A couple days later I met up with Audrey Wong, founder and CEO of Zyre Wellness, at a local boba shop. I had a Roasted Milk Tea with grass jelly and I asked her about what it’s like running a c******s brand in a legal country.
What I learned about weed in Canada:
You must be 19 and older.
You can legally pay for c*nn*bis with a credit card.
Edible potency is capped at 10mg T*C per package.
15% sales tax.
Most of the flower is grown indoors due to the climate and weather.
You can smoke/vape at the Vancouver airport in the designated smoking areas.
There is hemp chocolate (not medicated) in the shape of a hedgehog at the airport gift shop.
Best Thing I Ate While Discreetly High AF
Pineapple Bun, bolo bao, with a thick, fat slice of salted butter from Mango Mama. This is where my heart skipped a beat. The Strawberry Cough solventless rosin gummy I had earlier peaked just as the plate of bolo bao was placed in front of me.
A still slightly warm, perfectly risen, fluffy milk round bread bun, covered in a meticulously thin layer of craquelin topping. I bite down on an impossibly soft bun that smooshes like a cloud in my mouth and melds with the salty hunk of butter sandwiched in the center. There’s no actual pineapple or pineapple flavor in bolo bao, it’s named that because the crackly, crunchy, sandy golden topping looks like the texture of a pineapple.
This was honestly exceptional. The flavors and textures were above and beyond. While you’re there, get a tub of silky smooth tofu pudding, tofu fa, with ginger sugar at Excellent Tofu & Snacks next door and thank me later.
I’m sorry I didn’t take a photo. I ate it too fast and forgot.
Gettin high and eating is one of my greatest joys in life. It’s also necessary to manage my mental and emotional wellness when traveling and spending an extended period of time with my family. Our relationship is complicated. I’m working on it, and the w**d certainly helps.
Drunk Cats
One of the most delightful things about being a first generation immigrant is my relationship with the Cantonese language. The 9 tones of the Cantonese dialect make it one of the most difficult languages to learn. I speak well but have a limited vocabulary and don’t understand complex words, phrases, and idioms. Add being high on top of that and my imagination will run wild.
“Do you know what a 醉貓 [pronounced jeui māau] is?” Auntie interrogates.
“I heard ‘fat drunk cats?’” I replied as I imagined Uncle picking up and tossing fat drunk cats into the back of a police paddy wagon confused about how the cats got drunk in the first place.
We all roar with laughter until they finally tell me it means drunk, a drunkard.
“Are you even Chinese?”
“You’re not even a Chinese person.”
“You’re a half bucket of water.”
Half a bucket of water, is a saying that means you only have half of your culture. A passive aggressive insult said to people of color who exist in an in-between immigrant culture who are criticized about not being enough.
We don’t know our cultural traditions.
We aren’t fluent in our mother tongues.
We speak Chi-nglish with off intonations and incorrect phrases.
We don’t cook Chinese food right.
Despite our language limitations, we do know how to order our favorite dishes. 🙄 The most important skill.
Unlike the generation before me who silently swallowed the weight of these insults, I refuse to view us as half a bucket of water and silently drink insults. We have multiple buckets of water, it’s not our problem that you can only see half a bucket with your limited view.
These kinds of reframing conversations are why I love what we do with Mogu Magu. We are not our parents' generation and we are not half empty and limited by what we are not. The AAPI immigrant diaspora is vast and varied. We are privileged to occupy a unique in-between space between multiple cultures where we can explore the old traditions and create new ones that are uniquely ours.
Flower bridge.
For my non-Cantonese speakers, “fa” means flower, and “kew” means bridge. Fa-Kew. Say it aloud with my dad.
Hope you enjoyed this unfurled travel edition!
I didn’t take many photos during this trip because I wasn’t planning to write about it. I wanted to be present and enjoy the trip without turning it into a content creation gig.
But as I sit here on my 3-hour flight back to Los Angeles, these thoughts and reflections tumbled out onto the page in front of me while mildly high on a 1964 solventless Strawberry Cough rosin gummy.
XOXO, Christina W.
