Ludu Daw Amar on tea salad (1)

This post contains page 192 of a short piece of writing by Ludu Daw Amar titled "Fried Onion Work" from her 2002 book ၁၂ ပွဲဈေးသည်နှင့် ကျွန်မအညာ [12 Market Sellers and My Upper Burma]. The cover of the book is shown in the image to the right. "Fried Onion Work" runs from page 192 to 199 of the book. A complete PDF of this piece can be downloaded from the non-fiction section of this blog's library here.

Vocabulary:

စွယ်စုံကျမ်း ။ encyclopedia
အဖန် ။ astringent taste (the taste of tannic acid)
ရေကလွဲ ။ ?
နို့ပေမယ့် ။ [however?]
စုံမက် ။ love, like, adore
တစ်မျိုးတစ်ဖုံ ။ [တစ်နည်းတစ်ဖုံ] in some other way
ပဲါင်း ။ to steam, cook
အလေ့ ။ habit, custom, way, practice
ခမ်းနား ။ magnificent, splendid

Translation:

Fried Onion Work

When encyclopedias write about tea, people say that if tea is mixed [လွဲ] with water it becomes many kinds of drinks. It is very true to say that if it is mixed with sweet tea, astringent or bitter tea, people [can drink] many kinds of drinks. There is also coffee and cocoa. However, there are not as many people who like [these drinks] as [there are who like] tea. We can see in Myanmar that in this era after the war there has come to be more people who drink sweet tea than [there are who drink] coffee. As for bitter or astringent tea, in the past we rural folk and city folk both drank it. And now do [we] not drink it with adoration?

More than other countries, our country consumes [tea] in another way. It is a custom to eat wet tea leaves that have been picked and roasted by fire and stored for a quite a while.

I do not think that there are many countries [in which] wet tea is eaten in this way. Our country is splendidly eating the most; after that Thailand eats a little bit; that's all that there is.