Thunk!

Mango season is in full swing, and it will only be a matter of time before you're as sick of reading about mangos as I will be of eating them. Here's something I wrote about mangoes a few weeks ago:

April 7: Mango season is starting, but I have yet to eat a proper mango. I’ve eaten under-ripe mangoes stewed with sugar, honey and cinnamon (thanks, Julia!) and mangoes so over-ripe that the peel contains nothing more than a pit floating in slushy juice. But I have not yet tasted a mango with the consistency and taste of a mango plucked from a branch, as opposed to the mushier taste and texture of one picked from the ground. I was also thinking this afternoon, as I gnawed on a mango pit (the flesh around it has a tangy flavor that the rest of the over-ripe mango doesn’t) and juice dripped from my hands and chin, about the different mango experiences of The Gambia and Hong Kong.

The Gambian mango experience is as I just described. An absolute mess. The mango drops—randomly, unexpectedly—from a tree, or maybe the sky, because you’re not actually aware of its falling until it hits the ground with a splunk. That’s a “splattering thunk.” A child will rush to pick it up before a goat or sheep or another child does, and after washing it off (because dirt has stuck to the crack in the peel where mango innards have started to ooze) he will take the largest bite he can manage, peel and all. And juice will ooze between fingers and onto toes and become smeared across the chin. And he will grab slippery hunks of orange sticky mango and pass a piece to everyone around so that they too may become a drippy sweet mango mess. And when it's all over we wash our hands off in a bucket.

Mangoes in Hong Kong, on the other hand, were always like Grace's dessert platter that night we went to the Tuen Mun lantern carnival. A sparkling white plate. Miniature scoops of mango ice cream. A pale-orange pastry-like concoction. A cup of mango juice with tiny rice balls and mango cubes floating inside. And a perfectly peeled, flawlessly sliced tidbit of real mango.

I cannot decide whether I prefer Gambian or Hong Kong mangoes--the experiences were wildly different, but equally enjoyable. Anyway, "you cannot compare an elephant with a cat."