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my partner can’t have caffeine when he’s had his adhd medication that day (side effects), so the days we remember to and we want coffee, we’ll have a decaf.
sometimes i’ll still want some caffeine, and it’s too much work in the morning to make two separate cups of coffee instead of one double batch. what a conundrum!
then i remembered hong kong 鴛鴦 (yeun-yeung). it’s a combination of coffee and milk tea, and it’s called that after mandarin ducks that symbolise love[1]. it tasted very nostalgic even though i made it with oat milk and sugar instead of condensed milk
it’s great fun to get a british person to try certain kinds of hong kong food and drink so that they, too, can experience what it’s like for their cuisine to get shaped by the tastes of the local people. it’s kind of fun to realise that like, macaroni is just a noodle and you can put it in a savoury noodle soup
it still feels strange to be reconnecting with these nostalgic, cultural things when i’m currently no-contact with most of my family. it feels wrong to be doing it without them, even though i know that if i were with them, they’d react badly to my interest. their loss — i’ve got the internet now, baby!
footnotes
through childhood misunderstanding i thought it was translated “yin-yang” because it was similar enough in sound and concept ↩︎ ↩︎