You Dim Sum, You Eat Some!

These dishes are all so YUMmy! CHAnese food is the best! (◠‿◠)

Answer:

TREASURE

肠粉 / 腸粉

cháng fěn

chéung fán

春卷 / 春捲

chūn juǎn

chēun gyún

蛋挞 / 蛋撻

dàn tǎ

daahn tāat

莲蓉包 / 蓮蓉包

lián róng bāo

lìhn yùhng bāau

牛肉丸 / 牛肉丸

niú ròu wán

ngàuh yuhk yún

烧卖 / 燒賣

shāo mài

sīu máai

虾饺 / 蝦餃

xiā jiǎo

hā gáau

小笼包 / 小籠包

xiǎo lóng bāo

síu lùhng bāau


Sentence Dim Sum Number Letter
Now that I’m dàn with this tǎsk, I can go play with my PS4! dàn tǎ 4 T
This niú game has 4 strange ròules, but we wán anyway! niú ròu wán 4 R
Chéunging butter for 3 hours is a lot more fán than I expected! chéung fán 3 E
Let’s xiǎo lóng it takes for us to read these 3 books abāot Chinese culture! xiǎo lóng bāo 3 A
I’ll be back at 1PM! Sīu you later, mài dear! sīu mài 1 S
I hāve to gáau out at 6 PM for dinner! Toodley-doo! hā gáau 6 U
I’ve studied the Chinese liánguage for 5 years, but I still pronounce some words róng! Oh, bāoloney! lián róng bāo 5 R
You’ve been munchēun on these snacks for 3 hours! Soon they’ll be all gyún! chēun gyún 3 E

Each statement’s blanks can be filled in with one of the 8 dim sum dishes to make a pun! For each dish, we give its Mandarin pinyin (line 2) and Cantonese jyutping (line 3) pronunciations, but only use the non-greyed out one in the puzzle.

For example, inserting dàn tǎ into the first statement’s blanks yields: “Now that I’m dàn (done) with this tǎsk (task), I can go play with my PS4!”

Each statement also has exactly 1 number in it. Use this number to index into the corresponding dim sum’s name. For example, you would take the 4th letter of dàn tǎ to get “T”, as clued by the “PS4”.

Doing this for each statement, you will get TREASURE, which is the answer to this puzzle.

Authors’ Notes

We both love "Bao" (the short), dim sum, and puns. We had a rough idea that we could do something punny with dim sum, but coming up with puns that used dim sum dish names as a single unit was very challenging.

Once we came up with the sīu máai pun (“sīu you later, máai dear”), we realized we could split up characters and find puns for each character separately.

We chose “TREASURE” to be our answer. We thought this was great because the Mandarin word for “treasure” is 宝/寶 (bǎo), which has the same pinyin as 包 (bāo), the short's name. The bao in the short was also the mother’s treasure in many ways, so this answer seemed really thematic.

We started with Cantonese puns (since dim sum is Cantonese), but realized there are no R’s in Cantonese, so we ended up doing a mix of Cantonese and Mandarin puns. We originally wanted to include a couple more dim sums we like, but couldn't fit them all! Maybe next time :)