At Hong Kong’s Bun Pageant, climbers race up a sticky tower

Simply down the road, the Yummy Fortress diner was slinging plate after plate of scrambled eggs with sliced ham to a packed home of locals preparing for a protracted day.

For first-time guests, the scene was a complicated begin to a competition that’s as straightforward to like as it may be arduous to grasp.

In the remainder of Hong Kong, the eighth day of the fourth lunar month is well known as an official vacation for Buddha’s Birthday, however on Cheung Chau, the day without work is spent memorializing an area story that normally revolves round interesting to gods to cease a plague however can alternatively contain dispelling pirates, appeasing ghosts or the entire above.

Cheung Chau is a village of simply over 20,000 individuals with a low-slung downtown pinched between a protracted sandy seashore and a harbor filled with fishing boats. The ferry from the middle of Hong Kong takes lower than an hour, which makes the island in style with weekend day-trippers, artistic varieties and metropolis commuters searching for cheaper lease and a slower tempo of life.

Over time, the bun competition spawned bun towers, and bun towers morphed into televised bun tower races, full with Hong Kong-wide choice heats and on-belay security trainings. Parades of gods and relics was parades of “floating” kids in conventional costumes, and conventional costumes gave strategy to political satire and celeb impersonations.

Someplace alongside the way in which, a global fast-food chain determined to face in vegetarian solidarity with the well-known native fish ball stands that shutter for the meat-free days of the competition, whereas a lot of the string of seafood eating places alongside the harbor continued to benefit from huge crowds hungry for steamed crab and fried shrimp.

Ask why any of that is the way in which it’s, and the reply from locals and guests comes all the way down to some model of: “I don’t know. It’s custom.”

Having breakfast on the Yummy Fortress this 12 months, Mandy Fong, born and raised on Cheung Chau, wore a vivid pink T-shirt. She and her 12-year-old son had been gearing as much as march with different affiliation members within the early afternoon Pik Siu Parade, during which youngsters round 5 or 6 stood on small floats and appeared to carry different youngsters aloft with one hand through sturdy steel rods and an phantasm of impossibly balanced trinkets.

The 2024 float from Fong’s group featured Hong Kong Olympic fencer Cheung Ka Lengthy held aloft by Hong Kong Olympic swimmer Siobhán Haughey.

Provided that political protest has been all however banned in Hong Kong over the previous few years, organizers went out of their strategy to remind journalists that there was no aggressive agenda behind the few extra satirical shows. One youngster was dressed as a housewife, holding up a mishmash of recycling paraphernalia in an obvious jab on the authorities’s new waste administration scheme. One other float even appeared to rejoice the lately expanded safety legislation often called Article 23 and one in all its chief proponents, Hong Kong safety chief Chris Tang.

“It’s enjoyable. It’s conventional. And everybody enjoys it.” Fong mentioned in regards to the competition. Requested if he was excited for the parade, her son glanced up from a recreation on his cellphone to say: “No. It’s too sizzling.”

To beat the warmth, parading adults drank chilly beer and handed juice packing containers as much as the floating youngsters. Except whistle-wielding path-clearers on the entrance of every group, nobody took issues too severely. Legendary lion heads jerked facet to facet and nipped at kids within the crowd, whereas mates kicked playingly on the white Nikes flitting beneath. An indication of martial arts was pushing and cajoling for others to enter the middle of the circle, till a person who appeared to have had just a few drinks flubbed his routine to raucous laughter.

On high of bun keychains, bun T-shirts, bun magnets, bun pillows and anything that would plausibly draw memento gross sales with bun imagery, edible buns had been on the market for a little bit over a greenback a chunk. The buns are made with one in all three candy paste flavors — lotus seed, pink bean or sesame — surrounded by about an inch of spongy, white rice-flour dough, which is itself coated by a type of skinny, steam-smoothed pores and skin stamped with the Chinese language character for “security” or “peace,” relying on whom you ask. Martin Kwok, proprietor of essentially the most well-known bun producer on the island, mentioned most individuals carry them residence and re-steam them earlier than consuming.

Because the final child was introduced down from their perch within the late afternoon, the road for the boat again to Hong Kong Island stretched close to a kilometer lengthy, filled with drained faces and baggage filled with packing containers and packing containers of Kwok’s buns. The marquis bun tower race — today the buns are faux — doesn’t occur till midnight. And with the 2024 competition falling on a Wednesday, there was faculty the following day.

What these early departures missed was the rowdy post-parade membership dinners packing the restaurant patios alongside the promenade, a Cantonese opera close to the principle competition temple, the burning of an enormous, paper King of the Ghosts determine on the far waterfront and, in fact, the tower race.

At midnight, fireworks popped, organizers banged a gong and chosen racers scrambled as much as seize as many buns as doable from the very best (and highest level worth) reaches of the conical tower about 40 ft tall.

The Solar Ferry firm mentioned a minimum of 25,000 made the crossing from Hong Kong Island to Cheung Chau earlier within the day, however crowds had dwindled to beneath 2,000 by the point Janet Kung and Yip Kin-man had been topped feminine and male champions. It appeared like almost 1 / 4 of that viewers was quick asleep on the final ferry again to Hong Kong Island.

Andrew Genung is a author based mostly in Hong Kong. Comply with him on X and Instagram @thisfamilymeal.