Buying Rice the Old Fashion Way

My family hardly eats any rice, we only buy brown rice for the kids. But i know how the drill is about buying rice, whether brown or white. We go to Tesco, or whichever hypermarket having a sale, but most of the time it was Tesco. We’d go to the rice aisle, pick the brand on sale from the choice of the few we usually buy from. If it was white rice, it was most of the time Dragon Pearl. Nowadays with brown rice, it is usually ecoBrown.

Since our rate of consumption is slow, we go for the 5kg. Back in those days my kids were small and we didn’t have a bathroom scale, i’d estimate my children’s weight in comparison to the bag of 5kg rice (a few years ago, i redeemed a bathroom scale from Bonuslink).

But one day, stuck in the traffic jam, it occured to me that wasn’t how we bought rice when we were small.

Back then, my mom bought rice from the sundry shop near my house. Sundry shops sold, um, all and sundry in those days – stationery, snacks, toys, books, and even some hardware. Outside the shop, in a large gunny sack sitting on the floor was a mound of rice. It was usually next to other gunny sacks containing dried chillies, onions and other grains we never bought.

If you wanted to buy rice, the shopkeeper, usually an old thin guy wearing grey or khaki belted shorts and a white singlet (sometimes rolled up to his torso, depending on how old he was), would open up a paper bag. This paper bag was usually made out of brown paper or newspaper, glued at the bottom with starch made from rice. It’s a miracle how starch can hold such a heavy load.

The shopkeeper would ask u how much u wanted, you’d say the price, or the weight, like 2 katis. What a kati? Dunno, but its 16 tahils. If you were Cantonese you’d say ‘kun’, rhymes with ‘bun’. Then shopkeeper would used a metal scoop and dished the rice from the sack to the paper bag. There was no grade to the rice, no Super AA or Jasmine white rice or any of that. We only knew it came from Thailand.

Then you would pay the shopkeeper and he’d seal the bag of rice. Then you would carefully carry the bag of rice home, to eat for the next few weeks.

Writing this evokes a lot of memories about rice and its link to Chinese society the world over. Rice symbolises livelihood, rezeki. I remember old Hong Kong period dramas that show a poor boy tripping and spilling a bag of rice on the ground meant the greatest tragedy.