Fishballs - a Cultural History and Personal Ode

I love fishballs. I was vegetarian for about 10 or so years and didn’t miss a single type of meat or seafood except for one— fishballs.

I loved the bounciness, the fishiness, and what the Taiwanese call the “Q 彈” (dan) -ness of it— that chewy bouncy texture that cooks have perfected over hundreds of years in towns on the Eastern shores of China.

In this post, I’ll dig deep into my cravings (both intellectual and gustatory) and uncover the history of the fishball, and the reason I keep going on and on about it. 

If William Blake said that we can “see a world in a grain of sand”, why can’t we do so in a humble fishball? 

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Mythical Origins

As with anything that has a long history, its origins are shrouded in myth; no one knows whether it’s true or not, but it’s a fun story anyway, so people go along with it.

Rumour has it that Emperor Qin Shi Huang of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), after uniting six separate states into a unified China, spent some time touring around the South of the Yangtze River in which he enjoyed tasting different varieties of fish very much. However, he found fish bones cumbersome and irritating to remove as he ate. Thus, he ordered his palace chef to debone the fish before it was served to him. If not, he would be beheaded.

The palace chef returned to the kitchen and hit the fresh fish on the countertop in frustration. To his surprise, when he cut open the fish after hitting it, he found that the bones were exposed and it was easier to separate meat from bone. He scraped out the fish meat and moulded it into a paste which he boiled, wrapped with meat, in soup.

Qin Shi Huang was delighted and the fishball became an instant hit in the palace and countrywide.¹

The Makings of the Modern Fishball - Groundbreaking Tubers 

Most early varieties were made with fish alone up until the 1400s. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zheng He (鄭和), an Islamic naval commander in the Ming Court, set sail on various voyages collectively known as the Ming Treasure Voyages (鄭和下西洋) from 1405-1433 (just as a comparison, Christopher Columbus’ voyages were from 1492-1504). Zheng He travelled to Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East as well as Eastern Africa.

Zheng He’s 7th Voyage (Source: Wikipedia)

His journeys opened up maritime trading routes in these places, and it was in the late Ming Dynasty in 1593 when sweet potatoes were brought to Fuzhou, a coastal town active in maritime trade, from Luzon (now the Philippines). After a period of experimentation, this led to the invention of sweet potato starch and its incorporation into fishballs for a less dense, springier texture, resulting in the perfect fishball that we have come to love today.²

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Regional Variations

The most well-known version is probably Teochew (潮州) fishballs, as popularised by Teochew people that have migrated along Southern China and Southeast Asia— to Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, etc. 

Usually made from a combination of eel (for its muscular texture) and mackerel (馬鮫魚) for its pungent fishy taste, the fish meat is combined with cold water, pork lard and sweet potato starch to make the paste fluffy, springy and durable. It is then moulded into shape and boiled until cooked. 

To me, fishballs are found in its most classic form in a bowl of fishball noodle soup, consisting of rice or egg noodles in a clear broth made of chicken and fish, topped with fried shallots, green onions and coriander, with chili sauce at the side. Perfection.  

Photo by Streets of Food on Unsplash

Though a bowl of Teochew fishball noodle soup will always remain close to my heart, the version of fishballs I missed the most during my meat-free days was Hong Kong-style curry fishballs. 

Found in Hong Kong roadside stalls and convenience stores— these balls are deep-fried to a golden brown colour and dipped in a Hong Kong-style curry sauce.

Hong Kong-style curry fish balls AKA. After-school memories

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Before doing the above mentioned research, I had no idea of the fishball’s far-reaching influence. 

I first had an inkling about how food connected us when I visited my husband’s hometown in Chaoshan (潮汕) in Southeastern China. He was craving a bowl of fishball noodles. 

“The best fishball noodles are from here,” he said. 

“No, the best fishball noodles are in Malaysia,” I retorted. 

“That’s because people from here migrated to Malaysia, bringing their fishball recipes with them. If not, there wouldn’t be any fishball noodles in Malaysia. This is the original version.” 

I was low-key mindblown. And there, to my surprise, a pristine bowl of perfection was served on the rickety table in front of me, with the same flat rice noodles as I would have in Malaysia. 

There has been documentation about Chinese migration to Southeast Asia over the centuries, mainly in the forms of academic texts or censuses with varying degrees of accuracy, but the numbers have never been as vivid as they were when I was in Malaysia over the Ching Ming Festival. 

Taking place usually shortly after Easter, Ching Ming Festival is a time when we pay our respects at the graves of our deceased relatives such as our grandparents. At 6 a.m. in the morning (early to avoid the heat of the tropical sun that would beat down on us in a couple of hours) we walked through the cemetery, with the rising sun behind us, carefully sidestepping the graves of deceased strangers, to find our grandmother. I had a look at each plaque as I walked past– black and white pictures of old and young people, with names and their original hometowns in China– Huiyang in Guangdong Province, Huiyang again, Xiamen in Fujian Province, Chaoshan…

Were their stories ever documented? Considering the low education levels and literacy rates amongst working-class Chinese born in the early 20th century, I doubt most of their stories were ever recorded down. What is left are a few humourous, bittersweet anecdotes that their sons and daughters share with their children when gathered around their gravestone memorial during Ching Ming, like what we did that morning after paying our respects and burning offerings. 

After tomb-sweeping, we joined the long traffic jam back to the city, as with the rest of the population who had gone to the cemeteries to pay their respects that morning.  

“It makes me sad. That– there’s so much joy and sorrow of these people that have gone untold,” I told my husband quietly. Everyone else had dozed off in the mini-van in the midday heat. 

He was silent for a while. “Not completely so,” he said after some thought. “Your ancestors are in you. Their legacy is still there. If not through their stories or certain facial characteristics they’ve passed down or values that they’ve taught their children, but in the things that they’ve left behind. The food that they brought over with them. That fishball noodle soup, for example. They’ve probably eaten it on their lunch breaks from tin mining or for breakfast before they started running their errands for the day, sweating into their bowls before air conditioning a hundred years ago. That’s a legacy they left behind that you still enjoy today.” 

Who knew the presence of fishballs dotted along the Malaysian peninsula and other Southeast Asian countries could be an inadvertent marker and documentation of Chinese migration and their lived experience in Southeast Asia? That a fishball itself could tell its own story. 

Now that’s some food for thought. 

Thanks for reading! 

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First post! Welcome to Slow Burn Living, where I hope to spark joy✨ in your inbox every two weeks with personal insights about culture, identity, spirituality, the things that keep us talking, the things that keep us awake at night, the things you think about but didn’t know who you could talk to… while living life mindfully through my own ups and downs. As Bernadine Evaristo writes, no matter where we are in life, “aging is nothing to be ashamed of / especially when the entire human race is in it together.”

A big thank you to Wes Melville and

Carey Lening

at Write of Passage for providing feedback, without which this piece would not be possible, and to

Becky Isjwara

for showing me this could be possible in the first place.

1. https://www.epochtimes.com/b5/10/8/15/n2996160.htm

2. http://fj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2022/0218/c181466-35140044.html