Life.Culture.Discovery.

This week in PostMag: treats of the Tanka table and Asian comedians

The delights of indigenous Tanka cuisine that can still be found in Hong Kong, Asian comics blazing the stand-up trail, and a bike ride around South Korea’s Jeju Island

Reading Time:2 minutes

Lam Lau’s boat noodles, in Aberdeen, Hong Kong, feature on this week’s print magazine cover. Photo: Jocelyn Tam

Published: 12:45pm, 24 Aug 2025Updated: 5:42pm, 28 Aug 2025

Get ready to get hungry. That was my main takeaway from reading this week’s cover story. Rice noodles topped with roast meat. Pepper-fried squid. Steamed fish with dried mandarin peel. Vanessa Lee traces the history of Tanka cuisine, once cooked aboard sampans docked in the harbours of Aberdeen, Shau Kei Wan and Tai O, and the families keeping it alive.

The Tanka are one of Hong Kong’s original indigenous communities, and their cuisine grew out of life on the water: fresh catch, preserved ingredients, cooking built for tight spaces. These days, not many places are still doing it. But a few remain.

There’s Lam Lau in Aberdeen, still serving the boat noodles and broth he’s been making for decades, but now from a moored kitchen. On Lamma Island, Christina Keung Mee-yee runs the Genuine Lamma Hilton Fishing Village Restaurant, a Tanka eatery her parents accidentally started in the 1970s while trying to sell ice. She pours biodynamic wine while her brother handles the kitchen, turning out straightforward, unfussy but delightful food with locally sourced ingredients.

In Shau Kei Wan, Kam Tung Kitchen is midway through its own generational upgrade. Po Yau-fai, aka Chef Fai, and his wife, Ada Kwok Yin-lai, built it from debt and sleep deprivation in the 1990s. They are both very much still there managing the mayhem, but their son, Marco, is helping to steer it into the next chapter, complete with a new, private-kitchen-style spin-off called The Treasure. The mantis shrimp with fried rice rolls? Worth reading for those alone.

Remember the Jimmy O. Yang frenzy earlier this summer? Sarah Keenlyside places that moment, and the wider wave of Asian comedians breaking through, in context as she catches up with Joe Wong, the Chinese-born comic who’s spent two decades turning the awkwardness of cross-cultural life into punchlines. It’s a tricky thing doing stand-up in a second language, navigating stereotypes and trying not to get cancelled in the process. But Wong, along with comics such as Ronny Chieng and Jiaoying Summers, has been blazing the trail and breaking into the mainstream.

And if you’re looking to escape, Cameron Dueck takes a six-day loop around South Korea’s Jeju Island by bike, following a painted blue line that hugs the coast. There’s wind. There’s rain. And plenty of cafes if you need a reward or refuge. Along the way, he finds signs of Jeju’s matriarchal past in the haenyeo: women, most in their 60s and 70s, who still dive without scuba gear for sea urchins, abalone and whatever else the sea gives up. This is also an island known for tangerines and black pork. As good a trio as any.

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