Sunday, June 8, 2008

A pointless rant about Soup.

Yesterday over lunch, my Dad said that he'd spent the night dreaming about soup. He didn't specify what flavour of soup, but with my dad the flavour of soup doesn't really matter, so long as it's soup. Of the Asian kind that is. None of your heavy, creamy Western concoctions with all the bones taken out and the rest processed to some sort of indistinguishable mush. No, Chinese soup always has lots of animal body parts, some of it still identifiable.

He went on to expound his new theory about soup: according to him, soup evolved in the warm countries. Cold countries don't have soup because it's too cold to go outside to pee after drinking all that hot yummy liquid. Which (I thought) kind of goes against the whole Western idea of soup being an ideal cold-weather treat, but then Western soup is quite thick, so maybe it doesn't count as 'real' soup.

I said that I thought soup addiction might be a pan-Asian thing, because in the Asian play series I'm involved in at least three of the seven plays talk about soup. And each play is only ten minutes long, so to make it in, love of soup would have to lurk just under the surface of the collective Asian subconscious.

This little bit of name-dropping about my pro-Asian artistic activities didn't stop my mum at all. She called my dad a soup weirdo. My mum has a theory that this craving for soup (let's call it soupophilia) is the result of mutant genes on the Liang side (ie, not her side of the family.) She reckons that demanding soup to drink every day is akin to a hardened drug addiction. As an intermediary step to getting him to quit she has restricted my Dad's soup intake. In desperation, my dad sneak-cooks soup on the sly, especially when my mum is away or before she gets home from work. Sometimes I find him hiding downstairs still slurping the last of it or hiding the rest in the freezer.

See, told you it was a pointless rant.....

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