#and after enough of using those regular chopsticks made sense - also little-kid sized chopsticks for little-kid hands were crucial

[cnfhumss12a-blog]

Back to Benavides

By Andrea Dee

When I properly returned to Binondo – to the world’s oldest Chinatown which happens to be in Manila  – after approximately ten years, the first place I walked by was a mami and siopao (although I always remembered it for the siomai) restaurant called Masuki, magnetically dragging me to its front step, as charming as always. It struck a familiar chord in me, with regular Sunday breakfast trips to Masuki in my childhood coming up to the front of my mind. Walking around in Binondo just looked different, but maybe that’s because I always used to go to Binondo with my family before. I’ve never really been there alone, so maybe, that’s why I saw the place that way. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown, as well.

Chinatown has grown a lot as well, since its foundation in 1594 and with the establishment of multiple schools and business and with the immigration of many Chinese-Filipinos. Despite the ways Chinatown has grown, though, I’ve heard that Masuki remains exactly the same since its establishment in the 1930s. And to me, it definitely felt like it didn’t change one bit.

See, Masuki and the taste of their chicken mami with its sweet asado sauce never changed over the years and the giant siomai that's as big as my fist reminds me so much of my childhood. The chicken mami, priced at PHP150 for a regular and a PHP160 for a large, had clear soup and plain-tasting noodles with chopped boiled chicken on top, a side of green onions, and a small cup of its signature sauce. You could either pour some sauce over every bite of noodles, or not make use of the sauce in any way - it depends on the person’s preference - but I always liked eating the noodles with the sauce. I think that the sauce is what gives the mami its flavor. However, despite how much I personally liked the mami, I’ve heard people say that they really hate it because the soup supposedly smells bad, but I’ve always had a terrible sense of smell, so it was always just amazing.

Masuki, in all its home-y hole in the wall glory, can be found on the quiet street of Benavides. Benavides is a smaller street one turn away from the busier streets of Ongpin and Salazar, with barely any cars or traffic passing through it, making the street much quieter and more peaceful. Unlike Ongpin street, it is very easy to just walk on Benavides without having to worry about getting hit by a car or running into a tricycle.

Just meters away from Masuki is a Chinese bakery called Wan Kee Bakery Inc. While Wan Kee Bakery isn’t necessarily as big a part of my childhood as Masuki was, it’s part of my life because of its giant siopao. Since I was young, I always liked eating siopao for some unknown reason, and my mom would sometimes bring home siopao – especially the giant siopao – from her trips to Binondo.

The giant siopao first entered my life a few years back when I was twelve or thirteen. My mom brought it home, put it on a plate and compared the size of it to my face for the laughs. I remember even measuring the siopao’s diameter once with a ruler, and if my memory serves me right, the siopao has an approximate eight inch diameter. When you lift the siopao, it feels as heavy as a rock, and it’s filled with pork filling, some veggies and a giant century egg in the middle. It was definitely big enough for four people to share, and even so, it was still extremely filling that it could pass for a whole meal with its thick fluffy bread and the meat inside that was just the right mix of salty and sweet.

So of course, before going back to Binondo, I asked my mom where that giant siopao came from. She told me about the location, what it was called, and that’s how exactly I ended up at Wan Kee Bakery.

It was my first time to ever actually step into Wan Kee Bakery, and some part of me expected it to be a bigger store. (It’s probably because of the size of the siopao.) The entrance didn’t look fancy and honestly, it looked sort of dingy from the outside. If you don’t look around while walking or if you’re not specifically looking for Wan Kee Bakery, you probably won’t be able to spot it. Lucky for me, I was both looking for it and looking around as I walked, so I was about to find it on my first try. But yeah, it didn’t look like how I expected it to look like. In my head I had this image of Wan Kee Bakery having bright yellow lights and even LED lights on top of the entrance, a bigger signage, and a larger space inside. So when I went in the bakery, I was internally surprised and maybe sort of disappointed to see how small and cluttered it was. But it did feel just as homey and smelled just as warm as your typical bakery. One of the workers there was still baking fresh goods in front of their dirty glass window, that anyone passing by could peek in and see the goods being baked in the morning.

The bakery had one corner cluttered with bread boxes and barely enough space for buyers to walk around in. But right when you enter the shop, just less than two meters from the entrance, the first thing you see are freezers where their siopaos are stored. In one freezer are the smaller siopao – bola-bola, monggo, asado, they'll have it. Beside it, in a bigger freezer, are the bigger siopaos. Heh, seeing the giant siopao made me laugh to myself. I even wanted to buy some, but I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish it.

Moving on from the siopao, the bakery also has different breads such as rolls of various flavors, cheese breads, donuts, pies, cake, and yes, hopia. And take note, they have five different types of hopia - baboy special, ube, yellow monggo, black monggo, and monggo with peanut. I've never been the biggest fan of hopia, but surely, this may be the store with one of the most varied options of hopia flavors to choose from. However as a fan of donuts and pies and siopao, the egg pies, donuts and smaller siopaos did look especially appetizing. The asado and bola-bola siopaos were fresh out of the steamer and smelled savory and flavorsome. The egg pies looked soft and sweet, and the sugar coating the donuts made it look extremely inviting to my childlike taste buds. Though I unfortunately left the store empty handed because it was a bit crowded when I went in, and I never really liked buying things when the store was still so full. Also, I hadn’t even eaten lunch, and I didn’t want to buy bread and pastries when I haven’t eaten yet.

When I left Wan Kee Bakery with empty hands and walked a little more, I was almost at the end of the road. It was a dead end where you would turn left and go on to the larger and busier streets of Ongpin and Salazar, and already being in Binondo, of course I had to check out Ongpin Street and Salazar Street as well.

But while there’s more life, more hotels, more drugstores, more Chinese restaurants, more merchandise stores and probably much more culture and history on the streets of Ongpin and Salazar, they don’t and didn’t trigger any warmth in me as I walked on those streets. I didn’t spend much time walking around in Ongpin. I only took in the busy crowds, the honking cars and the bad traffic, with my mind unintentionally comparing Ongpin’s hustle and bustle to the stillness and calmness of Benavides.

See, I like the tranquility and sentimental value in the places I go to - which may be why I’m always drawn to Masuki, and always drawn to that giant siopao in Wan Kee. And as far as I know, there is only one Masuki, and only one Wan Kee Bakery in Binondo. That, I feel, is the reason why no other street can really bring back the same warm and fuzzy childhood memories that Benavides Street does, in all its familiarity.

Until now, I can remember how on those Sunday mornings from my childhood, my mom used to give me and my older sister money. She would tell us to go to the small hair salon right across the street to get our hair cut before we would go to Divisoria. These days, my sister and I don't go there as often as before because of our schedules. My mom does occasionally go, though. Sometimes, I have to go with her because the dermatology clinic I go to is in Bambang, near Binondo, and afterwards, she would bring me with her to a Chinese restaurant so she could buy takeout for our lunch. More often than not, she would just leave the house while we're asleep and bring home the food herself.

When I returned to the Binondo area on my own, around ten years after our regular Sunday mornings in Binondo, it was my first time to actually go to Wan Kee Bakery, to Ongpin Street, to Salazar Street - it was the first time for me to actually experience and walk through Binondo alone, without my dad or my mom or my sister. I like to think that it’s different seeing it when you’re a little kid compared to when you’re seeing it now, when you’re old enough to think for yourself and not get lost on the streets all that easily anymore.

Ah, it’s time for lunch.

From Ongpin and Salazar, from the front of the big Chinese drugstore across the dead end where you turn left, I slowly returned to Benavides. Walking back, I took longer looks at the signs over the stores, walking and avoiding the few passing cars until I stopped where a large red-orange gate was open. I walked down the two tiny steps leading into the restaurant and sat at a corner table, smiling to myself upon spotting the exact same table where my family and I used to sit at for our Sunday breakfasts.

Even from a different view, Masuki still looked the same after so many years, with its wooden chairs and tables and checkerboard patterned flooring. The same cashier, the same kitchen, the same bathroom, the same menus. I don’t know if the workers were still the same people from before, but it sure felt so familiar. Staying close to familiarity, I ordered one regular mami, and I ate it the exact same way - picking up a bit of the noodles with my chopsticks and spooning up some sauce and slathering it all over the noodles before eating it. I can still recall how my mom and I would share one large bowl of mami because I was still small, and looking back on it now, it's really heartwarming. These days, I can finish a whole bowl of mami all on my own but the the warmth that comes from eating it is still there.

Despite how Masuki looked exactly the same, the area right outside it was different. Yeah, the bakeries, the trading stores, the other restaurants were still there, but the hair salon we used to go to when we were younger had closed down and was replaced with a garage that seemingly looks like one for a factory.

Ten years really do seem to bring a lot of change to a once-familiar place, huh? But at least, you know in yourself that the feelings that those once-familiar places, such as the warmth Benavides has me feel every time I go there, brought you will never change.

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#english #Andrea