When I was a child, I watched a Japanese anime about a Chinese chef. In the anime, the chef is able to bring braingasm and tears to people simply through the dishes he cooks. I felt like such a plot was overly dramatic but I continued to watch it nonetheless as it was very entertaining. But when I make movies, I would remind myself to have authentic and relatable stories and characters. I didn’t want overly dramatic plots in my movies. But last summer, I had a dramatic dining experience that let me taste my own memory. I cried back at the moment just like the characters in the anime. It was a very authentic experience for me.

The story is about my grandmother. My grandparents were born in Chaozhou, a city from the nearby Guangdong province. They came to Macao for more opportunities when they were young. Then they gave birth to a bunch of kids and started to build a family here. Even though my mom was born and raised in Macao, she still often told me the interesting things she had experienced when visiting Chaozhou. She told me that back then the living conditions in Chaozhou were not very good and therefore they would put on a lot of clothes both in winter and summer when returning home so as to give out the clothes to other kids there. These stories could be very amazing scenes in movies. It is quite hard to find similar scenes in real life anymore.

But I hadn’t really visited my mother’s hometown in the past. My mom met some relatives two years ago at my grandmother’s funeral. And then she started to go back there again. This year I happened to have some spare time and I went back to Chaozhou with my mom. The hometown is no longer an underdeveloped small town in my mom’s memory. Chaozhou is not as prosperous as big cities. But it is nonetheless a modern town now. One interesting thing I have observed was that my mom’s cousin would always bump into relatives and friends when showing us around in the city. People in Chaozhou have a close connection to each other, which really reminds me of the Macao in the past.

It was my first time in Chaozhou so I found everything being interesting. But memorable moments would always hit you in an unexpected manner. Since I rarely visit Chaozhou, my relatives were extremely hospitable towards me. We had so many meals that I couldn’t recall exactly how many I had had before the night snack. I could only remember the relatives would always have something for us to try out every two hours since the morning. So when we were having night snack, I was already feeling bloated with all the food and didn’t want to try the hairtail fish in front of me. But I still felt obligated to at least give every dish a try to show courtesy. When I picked up some fish meat and started chewing, flashes of past memory hit me instead of the taste of the fish. I saw my grandmother feeding me meals. I saw her and myself riding a tricycle back home after shopping for some chicken at the local market. I also saw my grandmother ill in bed, looking pale in the hospital bed. All these flashes of memory flooded in my mind in an overwhelming way. I could even hear my grandmother calling my name in the end. I couldn’t hold up my tears and cried. I wasn’t crying because I felt sad. But somehow I just couldn’t hold it. My mom and my relatives thought I got choked or something. It was a feeling that’s very hard to explain. So I could only joke about it and let it go. To be honest, I had no recollection of that hairtail dish. I wouldn’t know about this kind of fish if my mom didn’t tell me that my grandmother liked to cook it. I didn’t expect the fish’s taste is even more reliable than my own memory. It was the first time that a certain sensation would bring memories to me.

I think if we put this scene in a movie, it would appear to be overly dramatic at first. After all, it looks a bit absurd that one certain fish dish would make people think of their childhood and cry. But it felt very real to me and made me realise that there are still many possible ways to keep movies relatable and authentic. The focus of the films might not necessarily be how realistic the plots are. It could be the methods that we use to let the audience feel the emotions we want to convey. This is the question that requires more discussions.