Excerpt from a Cantonese recipe blog

Written by Shu Nga Keziah Cho

This soup is good enough for company thanks to the boiled pork. Count yourself lucky: in the old days they slaughtered pigs for special occasions only. The base of it all is the lotus. The leaves are for blanketing rice, the seeds for crushing, but here we use the root, perforated and stringy. Cleaver in hand you’ll do nothing about the fibres. You could bite down and still they would be there between your teeth and the chopsticks. Spider silk thin. Why fight?

Dormant underwater the root dreams of its children, feeding bitterness into their hearts. You don’t dream but stay waist deep in the soil, clawing. By now the sun is dropping beneath the crane, a rich bleeding lavender. Time to set the table, sprinkle basil over ripe tomatoes, round rice into domes. The soup seethes on the hob. No seat will be left unfilled by nightfall. You gather around the table as the clouds darken and feast on lotus root. Bite into its tenderness. Try to pull the threads apart.