My mom brought home some preserved, candied plums. Securely wrapped in three layers of crinkled paper and plastic. They’ve got this brilliant sweet-sour tang that is just the right amount of sugar and acidity to make my teeth tremble.
They remind me of the flying olives, she said.
What
(I said)
My mom grew up in Hong Kong in the 1960s. She lived with her parents and six siblings in an apartment on the eighth floor of a concrete building. Their mom (my grandma) was a housewife. Based on the stories, it seems she spent a good ninety percent of her day cooking and feeding everyone.
But food also came from other sources. And entertainment too.
Enter the flying olives.
In the 1960s, vendors of homemade preserved olives would come around these apartment blocks like clockwork touting their wares. Unlike ice cream trucks, they didn’t have a catchy jingle, but they did have trumpets.
[toot toot]
飛機欖 FEI GEI LAM
[toot]
飛機欖 FEI GEI LAM
[end scene]
“Airplane olives”. They came individually wrapped, as all planes do.
From their eighth floor apartment, my mom and her siblings would open the window and throw money down to the olive vendor. Then, the vendor would fling the olive(s) up, in through that same window. If he missed, he would take aim again. And again. And again.
Is it a bird, is it a plane, well no, actually, it’s a preserved olive.
I had questions, of course. Namely: how did they throw so well?
But also: why isn’t food this fun anymore?
The truth is, I can get food delivered to me in Vancouver 2023 too. It’s just that I have to order it through an app first and content myself to a cordial hand-off instead of seeing the UberEats driver try and throw a bucket of fried chicken up to my balcony. (In my eighth floor apartment in Vancouver, the balcony door is the only window I can open wide enough to fit my head through.) Efficiency is nice, but it sure does eliminate room for fun.
Nowadays, there are things like fall prevention and food safety regulations. These are good and important.
(But they make it really hard for an olive to fly through my window, dagnabbit.)
But Deanna, you say, we do have fun with food. You can get ice cream with an unwieldy amount of cotton candy on top or a supersized bowl of ramen that you have to eat in thirty minutes so you can win a ballpoint pen.
I’m not sure if that’s really fun though. That’s spectacle. Spectacle is a marketing technique. Spectacle makes you go ‘oooh’.
Fun is more of an internal tickle. A ‘hehe’, if you will.
If the preserved plums reminded my mom of the flying olives, then the flying olives reminded me of the floating noodle vendor in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. It’s the kind of concept that makes an introverted, shy child dream. Imagine being able to get a freshly cooked meal delivered to your window, without having to leave your house at all. (Again, I know this sounds a lot like UberEats, but it’s different, ok?)
It’s different, because there’s something very appealing about receiving your food directly from the person who grew or prepared it. It’s why omakase bars are so popular, why people love going to farmer’s markets and street food stalls, why I’d take a meal at a family-run French guesthouse over a four-star Michelin restaurant any day. I nurtured this olive, and now I present it to you. It hasn’t been deconstructed, turned into foam, or delicately placed on a ridiculously large plate. Instead, I’ve thrown it through your window. Now when you eat it, you will think of how tickled you were to see that airplane olive flying in.
Sometimes joy comes in the shape of a little stone fruit, wrapped in crinkled paper, slightly dented from where it landed on the kitchen tiles.
Postscript:
Thanks mom, for sharing your memory of these airplane olives with me and making sure my flight of fancy was based on facts. If you want to see an airplane olive man in action, check out the video below:
