SUNDAY AFTERNOON. I catch a Mong Kok-bound bus from the Star Ferry Pier in Tsim Sha Tsui, jumping off at the first stop after Jordan Road. Turn left into Ning Po Street and head for a locality evocative of the Kowloon streets seen in Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung, the movie that best captures the 1997 fin-de-siècle atmosphere of Hong Kong’s return to the mainland.

     Walk straight, across Shanghai Street, then take another left, into Reclamation Street, to its market. Old men happily sit outside restaurants drinking beer, consulting the racing papers; lip-dangling cigarettes defy gravity and the overhead government-placed no-smoking signs. The market of fresh vegetables, fruit, flowers, herbal plants, sugar-cane juice, a tofu seller, hair accessories and cheap T-shirts; the bloody shop-corner butchers and fishmongers thump, slicing and dicing alongside Nepalese grocery stores and local bakeries with excellent cakes adjacent to the high-ceilinged Chinese medicine shop, with its idle doctor smoking as nonchalantly as all the rest.

     At 38 Reclamation Street the market vendors melt on this sweltering August day around Lai Heung Yuen, the cha chan teng. Joyously crowded with parents, grandparents, grandchildren, all fussed over by the staff. At communal corner tables, taking a break from computer and other games, shifty teenagers sip iced coffee.

     The Silver Cafe in Wah Fu; the atmospheric Mido Cafe of Yau Ma Tei; the Ben Hur Fast Food Shop in Tuen Mun and the China Cafe in Canton Road, Mong Kok. Every Hong Kong neighbourhood has its cha chan teng. Designed to incorporate practical diner-style tables and benches and serving hot and iced milk or lemon tea, coffee, sausages, Horlicks, Ovaltine; sandwiches; French toast; a variety of quickly cooked, served and eaten rice dishes; pineapple buns; egg tarts; coconut tarts; walnut cake; and instant noodles topped with luncheon meat and a fried egg. Individually served or as part of a breakfast, lunch or afternoon set meal.

    Hong Kong’s cha chan teng and their style of preparing and serving food evolved in the 1950s, when crowded tenements and precarious squatter housing made cooking, eating and privacy difficult. A neighbourhood cha chan teng provided cheap and fast food in a flexible cafe-style atmosphere catering to single customers and large groups. The combination West-East menu reflects Hong Kong as a former British colonial outpost and as an international crossing point for the Chinese diaspora, which may have emigrated but which also frequently returns.

     A decade ago, photographer Rick Martin and I visited numerous old cha chan teng, many of which continue to operate. The evocative pictures throughout this issue of the Asia Literary Review express their unassuming success: often family-run, with original decor intact, these cash businesses occupy self-owned premises immune to Hong Kong’s high rents.

     Just up the road from Lai Heung Yuen is the 1960s, clean-lined modernist indoor Yau Ma Tei Market. Inside the main entrance is a booth with neatly stacked stools and boxes of instant mie goreng waiting for the early Indonesian helpers who, after dropping off the children at school, have a chat and noodles before Monday’s shopping. A new week begins.

John Batten