Sonya Thomas

The Bad Boys of Dim Sum

The Location: Whampoa Gourmet Center
The Weapon: Vegetable Dumplings
The Fight Song: ZZ Top’s “Legs”

The bad boys of the Hong Kong competitive eating circuit showed up for an epic eating contest. I had heard inklings of this event and it had taken me a few phone calls to track it down as the event was sparsely advertised. The contestants had 12 minutes to consume as many vegetable dumplings as they could with me and a room full of uninitiated locals cheering them on.

The first round saw two combatants go toe to toe before both reaching a total of 53 dumplings with both eaters ending with an eye watering sprint. The crowd was starting to get into it and murmurs were going throughout the room.

The next round saw the first true competitive eater. He ate standing up and barely swallowed, dropping the dumplings into his gullet like a drug mule. He pounded through them and ended up with a grand total of 74.

The Rocky Balboa moment of the tournament came through in the third round with an unknown sprinting his way to 73 before bogging down in the final minutes. His 8 year old son broke out of the crowd to stand in front of his father to cheer him on. With gargantuan effort, he made it to 75 in the dying seconds of the countdown. Then he threw up and got disqualified.

The next round saw Hong Kong’s eating champion Johnny Wu show up with all the fanfare of a professional wrestler. Despite his confident gait and stylish sunglasses, all he could muster was 74.

The final round was what I had waited 3 hours for. There is one competitive eater who I honestly thought I would never get to see in my lifetime, Sonya Thomas, aka The Black Widow. Weighing in at just 100 lbs, she is a champion of the highest order. She broke into the competitive eating circuit 3 years ago, demolishing competitors more than twice her size. The announcer went through her list of championships yet people only seemed to perk up when they heard how much prize money she’d earned. The announcer tried to play up a competitive eater from Shanghai as her main competition this round but looking around, I realized that no one knew just what Sonya could do. When she said that she had planned on breaking her dumpling record that day, I knew I was in for something special. I yelled “Take’em down Black Widow!” but people just looked at me like I had Tourettes. From the starting bell to the final countdown, Sonya double-fisted dumplings at an alarming rate, never slowing until she reached her final tally of 176. At the very end, she stacked all the empty bamboo steaming trays and posed with them, all smiles and with zero discomfort and hands pumping in the air in victory. The bad boys of dim sum just stared dumbfounded, like Ceausescu's orphans.