When I first moved here he would speak to me, ask me about eating, where I was eating, had I eaten, and my reply was always the same – I’m going to work and I eat there. His name is Jackie Chan, and he goes by the epiphyte Jackie Chan number two; lifting up two fingers.
I would see him around, mostly he chatted to tourists, and when he and I spoke it would be a contest over who had the shittiest apartment, and who’s paid the least rent. He assures me that not only is my apartment a hovel, and probably illegal, but that I’m also being robbed blind with the amount I’m paying. It’s because I’m a foreigner, he explained. He’s keen into the chinatown photographic society and we’d go there and look at the pictures stored in a brightly lit room with a couple computers and pictures of serious looking traditionally dressed people standing in various places around town.
When I asked him what he did for a living he looked at me like I was an idiot; clearly, obviously, he said: he was retired. It wasn’t until my mother came to visit that i figured out what he does for money. I was upstairs getting a shirt on and my mother waited downstairs by herself, and when I returned there Jackie was speaking to my mum. He was telling her about a restaurant he liked and wanted to take her to; and when he saw me approach decided we all had to go to this place. We walked and he talked to my mother about how her son was paying too much rent, but that he knew a great cheap place for food. We follow him up to Stockton and weave our way through the crowds to a busy, counter service lunch cafe that advertised Dim Sum under a layer of grime on the doorway. Whatever I ate that day I have forgotten about, so surreal was this experience, but as we left my mother offered to pay and after some argument he begrudgingly accepted her money and she told him to keep the change.
Now, I could be reading this entire thing wrong; Jackie could have genuinely wanted to take us to dinner, we were, after all, acquainted; and my mother is a very nice lady who would buy lunch anytime. So I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he just likes company and free lunch, which is fine.
Wing Sing Dim Sum is like most of the other dim sum – lunch service counter places on stockton. They make large amounts of food, store it at temperatures not entirely food safe and sell it for cheap.
The lunch plate is 3 types of food over rice, it’s $4 and that’s fine.
There are two different experiences one can have here. In one senario you walk in, point frantically at dumplings or pork buns, and walk out with a plastic bag containing some doughy dim sum, which you then happily eat, pleased with your ability to grab street food and eat like the locals. Never-mind that no one ever eats on the street unless they are homeless, and you paid fifty cents more than normal; it’s all part of the service.
The second experiance involves getting a tray with a plate of lunch food, which consists of typical cantonese stuff prepared using the least amount of effort – beef balls, pork balls, tofu with pork, eggplant with black beans, fried tofu skins stuffed with veggies, small bluefish fried in potato starch, and so on. It all tastes vaguely the same and is pretty boring. How Wing Sing differentiates itself from the other 8 or so cafes of a similar ilk within a 8 block radius is with their incredible disregard for any kind of food safety regulations or even reasonable sense.
As my friend and I sat eating, or rather picking at our plates moving shapeless pork products onto the tray, we marveled at the rawness of the beef balls; the box of frozen fish fillets sitting on the floor, the shoes stored in a potato box, and the pervading yellowness of the walls.
I’m not a stickler for decor, I don’t care if a place has yellow walls and, fine, sometimes you can’t throw the fish in the freezer right away; there are plenty of places in CT with just as flagrant a disregard for health code and I’d eat there any day, but this was a special kind of filth.
We left and vomited, then drank yakult to calm our gastrointestinal systems. It was a great experience and I would never do it again, but I reveled in the dirt, and have no permanent damage to my bowels as of yet, I’d even eat their ribs again if I had siracha.
John Hutt 