Monsignor John Romaniello, a Maryknoll missionary from New Rochelle, N.Y., used his noodle to produce millions of meals for hungry refugees. A roundish man with nothing on his mind but the Lord’s work and noodles, he revels in his title as “noodle king of Hong Kong.” He sings about noodles, writes about noodles, puns about noodles and buttonholes every American tourist he meets for contributions to buy more noodles.
It is showmanship with a purpose. Behind the kidding lies an idea so obvious that no one ever thought of it until Monsignor Romaniello came to Hong Kong in 1957 as director of Catholic Relief Services. He noticed that millions of dollars’ worth of American surplus foods like milk powder, corn meal, and wheat flour being sent to the colony to feed refugees were winding up on the black market. Having lived among the Chinese for thirty years, he decided to keep a close eye on the surplus-food traffic.
One day he observed a young girl taking a sack of surplus flour into a bakery, then paying the baker to convert it into noodles. The simple incident stayed in his mind, nagging at him. Later, while riding across the harbor on the Star Ferry, the answer to a gigantic riddle came to him in one reflective flash; the little girl was paying to have the flour made into noodles because her mother, like most refugee mothers, had no way of turning the flour into an edible meal. The same was true of com meal; there was neither space nor cooking facilities for it in the average refugee cubicle. In their raw state, the surplus foods were alien to a Chinese palate.
Why not convert these foods into noodles? No colony baker was equipped to handle the job on the scale Monsignor Romaniello envisioned. On any scale, the cost was too high for the refugee feeding program. Monsignor Romaniello, helped by other Maryknoll fathers, constructed a noodle-making machine out of scrap parts and an old engine. It looked like nothing ever designed by engineers, but it rolled out the noodles.
The Maryknoll noodles caught on at once with the Chinese, who found them easy to prepare and agreeable to eat. With funds provided by Catholic Relief Services and the Hong Kong Junior Chamber of Commerce, the first noodle-making contraption was replaced by a production-line model. Within four years, Hong Kong noodles were pouring out of the machines at the rate of 5,000,000 pounds a year, and welfare organizations like the Church World Service had adopted them. Noodle machines were exported to the Philippines, Macao, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam as the noodle mania grew.