On July 26, 2013, Roger posted that he was heading to mainland China for the weekend with family, warning that the Great Firewall would keep him off most social media (except Instagram) until he was back in Hong Kong. The meals he did manage to post from that weekend are some of the most personal in the whole archive.
One lunch that weekend was tagged Panyu: a wok of seafood and greens, roast poultry, sweet and sour pork, steamed buns and lettuce in broth. A lunch on July 28 was tagged Lingnan, the regional name for Guangdong cooking — steamed fish head, winter melon soup, braised meat with pumpkin and a clay-pot soup — and Roger added a single character of praise, 正.
The dinner that matters most is a different one. Grubbin’ on my people’s cuisine, Roger wrote, over a Teochew — Chiu Chow — table of braised goose, preserved greens, shellfish and fried puffs. No other travel caption ties a meal so directly to his own heritage.
The weekend closed in Shenzhen with Yunnan food: rice noodles in a stone pot, wild greens, fried pancakes and purple rice rolls. Days earlier, on a separate trip over the border, Roger had cooled off with a mango slushy in Luohu after bargaining hard with vendors — something he said he had been doing there for a couple of decades, still following the rule Always Be Closing.
These posts are dated family memories, not a guide to where to eat in Guangzhou or Shenzhen today; several do not even name the restaurant. They belong in the archive because they show where the food story started.
