Continuing our weekend-by-weekend pursuit of the BRICS...

This weekend we've well and truly focused on China, which is not so difficult to do round here, of course...

We had an awesome (and great value) dim sum lunch at Siang Seafood Restaurant in Sogo. Deep fried yam, scallop dumplings, prawn and spinach see-through dumplings, and a generous portion of carrot cake and beansprouts. All with puer tea. We topped it all off with "chilled cassia flower" dessert. This turns out to be not actually cassia flower, but our good old friend the osmanthus, set in jelly and shaped like luck-bringing goldfish:



After which we went to KLPAC for a performance entitled Tales of 4 Dialects. This was lovely. Four acts, each in a different "dialect": Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Teochew, and each comprising dances and songs (traditional and contemporary) woven around a simple family story.

There was a lot of sadness in the various offerings. Many partings. Migration, fatal accidents, invasion... Many of the traditional songs are redolent of suffering. Couples taking poison on their wedding night. The hard, hard daily lot of the "good wife", who never gets a second to herself, it seems, and is particularly required to be good with money... The sad fact that "the same rice raises all sorts of people", both rich and poor. And the sobering point that "one generation plants the trees, another gets the shade" -- and that shade-endowed generation might not be as appreciative as it should be...

But the songs were good and punchy; the choreography was sharp; the voices had power; and the little orchestra was awesome. I particularly liked the opening scene with the shadows behind the screen.

Another Chinese pursuit over the past few days has involved starting to read Death of a Red Heroine, the first of Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen series. It's a really enjoyable excursion to the China of the early 1990s, with a million little details that bring to life the ways China was changing -- and the ways it wasn't.

And watching the mystery unravel is nearly as entertaining as watching the audience fathom the origami-style 4 Dialects programme...