So, today I wanted to share a bit about my little adventure, my “practice” if you will, with something I called the “dim sum quote” project. Sounds fancy, maybe? Nah, it wasn’t.
I basically just needed a good quote about dim sum. For a little something I was putting together. Figured it’d be easy, you know? Hop online, type it in, pick the best one. Done in five minutes. That was the plan, anyway.
Well, let me tell you, I fired up the search engines. Typed in “dim sum quotes,” “famous sayings about dim sum,” all that jazz. And what came back? Mostly a pile of cheese. Seriously. Stuff like, “Dim sum: tiny packages of joy.” Or, “A balanced diet is a siu mai in each hand.” Cute, maybe, for a tea towel, but not what I was after. Then there were the ones clearly ripped off from other famous quotes, just with “dim sum” shoved in. You know, “Life is like a box of dim sum…” Come on.
I spent a good hour, maybe more, clicking through pages. Most of it was just bloggers re-hashing the same fluffy lines. Or some super obscure food critic quote from a magazine nobody’s read in twenty years. I even pulled out a couple of old Chinese cookbooks I’ve got, thinking maybe there’d be some traditional saying or something. Nope. Nothing. It was actually pretty frustrating. I started thinking, does a truly great, memorable quote about dim sum even exist out there? Like, one that everyone knows?
This whole thing, this hunt for the perfect words, it actually dragged up a memory. Funny how that happens. It wasn’t about finding a quote, but it was about dim sum, and well, words that stuck.
Years ago, I was trying to make a good impression on this person. Took them for dim sum. I’d heard about this place, supposed to be decent. Man, was I wrong. It was one of those experiences where everything is just a bit… off. The tea tasted like dishwater. The har gow wrappers were gummy and falling apart. The char siu bao was mostly just dough, hardly any filling. It was awkward. We were both trying to be polite, but you could feel the disappointment hanging in the air, thicker than the congee.
Later on, this person, they weren’t trying to be mean, just honest, they said, “You know, my grandad always used to say, ‘Bad dim sum is worse than no dim sum at all. It promises something good and then just lets you down.’” It wasn’t some fancy, poetic quote. Just something a grandad said. But it was so spot on for that moment, and honestly, it’s stuck with me way more than any of those “tiny packages of joy” lines I found online today.
So, after all that searching for my “dim sum quote” project, I kinda just threw my hands up. I figured, if the internet wasn’t going to give me anything good, maybe I just had to make something up myself. Or, better yet, maybe the real “quote” isn’t something written down. Maybe it’s the sound of the carts, or the chatter around the table, or just that satisfied sigh after a really good bite of something. This whole practice session really just taught me that sometimes the best stuff isn’t easily found. Sometimes it’s about the experience, or what you take away from it, not some perfectly crafted sentence from a stranger.
So yeah, my “dim sum quote” practice. Ended up being less about finding a quote and more about remembering that sometimes, the real wisdom isn’t in a Google search. It’s in the trying, the failing, and the unexpected things you remember along the way. Or from someone’s grandad talking about disappointing pork buns.