Ying Leong Look Funn Factory / Most Cantonese people–and others familiar with the gastronomic landscape of Canton/Guangdong, Hong Kong and Cantonese-populated regions such as San Francisco, Vancouver and London–are probably fond of dim sum. In particular, cheong fun–fresh, flat white rice noodles rolled around meats such as plump shrimp or beef and splashed with soy sauce–satisfies a craving for the savory, the soft and the chewy without the dryness of bread or plain rice. Imagine you’re a mainland dim sum lover arriving in Hawaii, a place heavily populated with generations of Cantonese, and ordering cheong fun. You’ll probably be met with a blank stare. If you see a plate of your favorite white stuff rolling by on a cart, you’ll point and exclaim that this is what you wanted, that this is cheong fun. With a laugh, your server and your party will tell you that the name of the dish is look funn. What the…is this Cantonese?

Conversely, imagine a local making a trip to San Francisco and ordering look funn in a famed multi-floored restaurant along Grant Avenue. Again, the blank stares.

While the English spelling of “fun” versus “funn” is irrelevant, as the Chinese character is the same–think of American immigration officers attempting to spell out the same last name as Djou, Chow and Chiu and other variations as far as the imagination can go–several Hawaii food favorites are referred to by names that sound foreign but are unknown to natives in the motherlands. While to liken multicultural societies to melting pots is no longer in vogue, li hing mui, gau gee, saimin and malasadas are the prominent examples of the melting pot of languages Hawaii has become. Upon asking both a Chinatown tour guide and Look Funn Factory owner about the vernacular difference, both were hard-pressed to find the point in time where the language difference came about, but offered an answer that “look” was supposed to mean steamed or boiled.

Enter the Ying Leong Look Funn Factory, a stalwart institution in Honolulu’s Chinatown that first opened on Hotel Street in the mid-20th century by Say Leung Young. An immigrant from the Jung San region of Canton, Foo Ying Chee was a dedicated factory worker employed by Young. The original name of the factory was Say Leung Look Funn Factory, but was passed on to Chee after Young passed away. Chee and his wife, Canton-and-Hong Kong-raised Alice, moved the factory to Kekaulike Street in the mid-’70s, sometimes even having their three children help out on the weekends.

Mr. Chee, at age 76, still works from dawn to closing everyday. With just a slight hunch in his back, his energy is contagious, as he waves his hands around with conviction, telling you to eat more, wait outside or just to say hi. Mrs. Chee, while knowledgeable in the ways of making proper look funn, does more of the factory management, sales and public relations.

Ying Leong, despite the heat from the giant steamers in the back, smells, of course, delicious. The fresh, clean rice scent has hints of the dried shrimp and char siu fillings. Unlike some restaurants, which roll the dough around large chunks of meat, Ying Leong instead embeds minced pieces of the meat and green onions into thinner layers of dough and rolls them around each other, forming what looks like one thick, long noodle. And while usually drenched in soy sauce, the Ying Leong look funn is so fresh that one almost doesn’t need any flavor enhancers. The recipe is secret, but Mrs. Chee doesn’t hesitate to say that the factory’s noodles are superior to most other local companies’ products because Ying Leong uses Texas long grain rice, as opposed to flour. If using actual rice flour for rice noodles isn’t reason enough to keep Ying Leong at the top of one’s look funn list, the noodle rolls are still made by hand. The advantage to keeping this age-old technique is not only knowing that one is eating look funn made with love and experience, but the smaller batches made at frequent intervals also ensure maximum freshness. Machines must turn out larger quantities of look funn at once.

The factory turns out soft, fresh batches of look funn every 15 minutes with impressive efficiency. The workers, like Mr. Chee, are senior citizens, and, also like Mr. Chee, move with a spritely grace. One person oils sheet pans with a wide brush, stacking the trays on top of each other like Lincoln Logs. One then ladles the liquid noodle rice mixture into the oiled pans while another worker does the Lincoln-Log stack on top of a giant steamer, making piles of 30. Within five minutes, the rice noodles sheets are done. Another worker then rolls the flat pieces into properly sized tubes. For restaurants, a loom-like device is used to slice mass quantities of look funn, sometimes slicing up to 100 pounds per order. Saturdays are the busiest production day.

Individual customers have the option of buying rolls whole or having them sliced by hand. Plain, char siu or dried shrimp rolls range from 70 cents to $1.10 per roll, with the option of slicing free of charge. While two rolls can suffice for a satisfying lunch, the plain look fun can be sliced to noodle-width and used in dishes such as beef chow fun or soups.

Open daily from 5am to 4pm, but closing when the day’s supply of look funn has run out, Mr. and Mrs. Chee are almost always there. However, Mr. Chee makes sure that none of his employees work more than eight hours per day. “They are happy here, they don’t want to leave,” says Mrs. Chee. To prove this point, the newest employee at Ying Leong has been there 10 years. Some employees have been working for the company for 30 years.

Tough times have affected the factory, with slower business sometimes determining an earlier closing time. But believe it or not, the low current prices of look funn rolls reflect several price increases. Part of the affordability stems from the fact that the Chees own the building that houses the factory, cutting down on operating costs. The Chees also lease out the butcher shop down the street, where Mr. Chee used to work (“He used to have four jobs!” said Mrs. Chee), and still use char siu from that shop.

“Mr. Chee said he is going to retire this year, he needs a break,” says Mrs. Chee. What will happen to the decades-old institution? There is a possibility of the Chees’ oldest son taking over the business, or Mr. Chee’s youngest brother. While uncertain of who will run the factory in the future, Ying Leong is still there everyday to provide a filling meal or a sure-fire potluck pupu.

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