There’s a corner. Bricked walled businesses abut a cobblestone laneway, Yes, a cobblestone laneway, right in the centre of Melbourne; Melbourne Australia.
I’d get y’all a pic, but with wuhan virus travel restraints, google’s gonna have to do.
The restaurant’s closed now. Its last incarnation the ‘Crane Restaurant.’
Kun Ming opened in 1928, on the corner of Celestial Avenue and Little Bourke St. the heart of Melbourne’s Chinatown.
Dad, David Cheong Sing, cooked at Kun Ming as a bachelor. His future wife Annie lodged in Celestial Avenue, working as a milliner in the rag trade ghetto bounded by Latrobe, Lonsdale and Russell Streets. All that’s left of those tumble down cottages is the roof and chimney outlines. Did Dad ever see Mum passing by in those days?
Ultimately they meet further up Little Bourke Street at the Chinese Presbyterian Church on the corner of Heffernan Lane, where signs encourage the public to Commit no Nuisance
Annie and David married. Two decades later their son, thehobartchinaman, married at the Chinese Presbyterian Church. Our wedding party walked down the street for the wedding banquet at Kun Ming. Dad didn’t cook, he was dead.
Dad had loved cooking, especially for the extended family. He was at its centre. One of nine siblings, he a lower middling child. In the skeptic’s kaddish #, about an aunt’s cancer, these words struck me :
‘…….as she, more than anybody else, has always been at its center, holding us together.”
“…at its centre, holding us together..”
Dad passed half a century ago and with him, his centering of the family. Family get togethers are now no longer. They ceased with his death. Bi-decade get togethers are Ancestry type genealogical affairs. There’s nothing particularly Chinese about them.
The Hobart Chinaman 