Sugar people

He liked word jokes

A joke a friend of mine made came back to me today. A couple of university friends, one on a break from studying in NZ, and I, were discussing what to do over the Chinese New Year break. We were considering taking a ferry to Pangkor Island, off the coast of Perak, to stay in a beach chalet. Talking about the holidays, the NZ friend invented the phrase sugar people.

We knew exactly what he was joking about. Chinese sometimes call themselves Tang people, 唐人, because that period of Chinese civilisation was a glorious era. However the character for Tang, with the radical for rice added to the left, becomes the character for sugar, 糖. The characters are homophones and context disambiguates. You'll usually hear the Cantonese phrase tong yan, and it doesn't mean sugar people.

The other incident I remember is on the return trip on the ferry, we observed one of the passengers conspicuously taking great pleasure smoking a cheroot. Annual Chinese New Year cigar, quipped my friend, the implication being that it was a once-per-year treat.

My friend's somewhere around, possibly in Singapore. I miss his quirky sense of humour.

While writing this I discovered that sugar people are in fact a thing. They are figurines made from melted sugar. I never saw them in Malaysia though. Sugar was for tea or coffee, and sugar objects would have attracted ants.

Sugar people dining out