All the Tea in China

If not for Starbucks, it would be impossible to find a good cup of coffee in China.  But though purgatory for coffee drinkers, China is heaven for tea lovers.  The Chinese passion and obsession for tea is identical in almost every way to the French for their wine.  The language of tea and wine lovers is also the same....it is all about the bouquet and the flavor profile and the terroir upon which the tea plants grow and the age of the tea plants and the timing of the harvest and the secret methods used by the different tea makers to elaborate their products.  Every person has their own personal favorite type and brand.

By the way, loose leaf tea is the real deal.  Tea bags are the equivalent of Boone's Farm strawberry wine in a screw cap bottle.

Everyone drinks tea all the time.  In the morning, you see businessmen and construction workers on their way to work carrying their thermoses of tea.  (What is the plural of thermos?  Is it thermi?)  Every taxi driver has a quart jar of steeping tea leaves on the floor between his feet.  The water dispensers in the office have two taps - one for hot water for making tea and the other for room temperature water to rinse the leaves out of your tea jug.  There are probably as many public hot water stations as there are public bathrooms.

While in Hangzhou, a few of us got the chance to do an afternoon tea break at a proper tea house .  For a set fee, you get tea and some light snacks and fruit.  You also get a person to prepare the tea for you.  At a proper tea house, the person you get should really know a lot about the tea and really really be a master of the exacting process for preparation of the tea - a mixture of sommelier and chef.  At a proper tea house, the preparer will most likely be young, female and attractive.   So it goes.

 The topmost photo shows our tea being prepared.  The process involved warming the tea bowl and warming the cups and rinsing the tea leaves and warming the water to the exact optimal brewing temperature (which is different for different types of tea) and then pouring the water around the tea rather than on them so as not to scorch the sensitive leaves.   When it came to the actual brewing part, I was surprised to learn that you're not supposed to just let the tea steep in the water for 20 minutes and then discard.  You brew, then decant the tea, and then use the same leaves over and over for multiple extractions.  For the first batch, she let the tea steep in the water for 2 minutes.  The tea would be served, fresh water added to the leaves, and then the batch would be allowed to steep for 45 seconds longer than the previous one.  The times are approximate, though, as the preparer ultimately relies on the color and smell to decide when a batch is done.

Our young lady got about 10 batches out of our tea leaves.  The whole process took about an hour and a half.  The second photo shows colleagues enjoying some of the snacks along with tea.

Since coming to Suzhou, we've accumulated an fairly impressive stash of tea. (see photo above.)  We have green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong tea, pu'er tea, jasmine tea, chrysanthemum tea, and i-have-no-idea-what-it-is tea.  About half of it was given to us as gifts. Tea is considered to be a very safe gift.  Much like bringing a bottle of wine to a dinner party.

One last bit of trivia.  The hills around Hangzhou's West Lake are covered with tea plants in whatever you call the tea-growing equivalent of a vineyard.   Hangzhou is famous for LongJingCha, or Dragon Well Tea.  The top shelf stuff - the equivalent to grand cru - is outrageously expensive if you could find it at all.  Of course, there's always a Starbucks in town if that's not your cup of tea.

Hangzhou

I went to the city of Hangzhou a couple of weeks ago on a business trip.

Hangzhou is a city about 100 miles to the Southwest of Suzhou.  With Shanghai to the South East, it forms a triangle of tourism in the Yangtze river delta.  Suzhou is about 2 hours from Shanghai.  Hangzhou is about 2 hours form Suzhou.  Shanghai is about two hours from Hanghzou. 

There is an old Chinese saying that "Heaven is above and Suzhou and Hangzhou are just below".  Or so I am told by the boards of tourism for Suzhou and Hangzhou.  These are the two most historic cities in East-South-Central China.  They both date back thousands of years.  They are both major ports-of-call on the Grand Canal from Beijing.  Shanghai, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively new upstart.  Suzhou and Hangzhou take the historical cheese.

Though, truth be told, in relation to Hangzhou, I think that Suzhou has an inferiority complex. Suzhou is like the younger brother that achieves great things, but never quite measures up to the older sibling.  Suzhou could claim to be a major city on the Grand Canal, but Hangzhou was the terminus - once a traveller from Beijing arrived there it was pointless to go further.  Suzhou was a seat of provincial government but Hangzou was, for a time, the capital of all China.  In the 12th and 13th centuries Suzhou was going great guns, but at the same time Hangzhou doing even better - and was arguably the largest city in the world for a while.

Marco Polo visited both Suzhou and Hangzhou during his travels to China.  He thought that "Soochow is a very great and noble city".  But then again he thought that Hangzhou was  "beyond dispute the finest and noblest in the world."

The city of Hangzhou is built around the West Lake, or XiHu.  The elegant parts of Suzhou tend to be hidden away behind walls and only to be seen after paying price of admission.  Hangzhou has the advantage that its jewels are built on and around the lake.  Anyone can walk around the lake.   The sights are open for view by even the poorest of travellers. 

For me, though, Hangzhou was a working trip and it was nearly dark when we went walking around the West Lake.  So I saw little of Hangzhou's famed beauty and, in the waning light, could photograph even less.

The photo at top shows the famous "lingering snow on broken bridge".  The bridge is way in the background...behind the acres of lotus flowers that were blooming on the lake.  It's not that the bridge is broken...but that after a snowfall it appears to be broken in it's center.   Or maybe not.  Maybe it's one of the other legends regarding how the bridge was named.   So it goes with China....there is so much history that two or three legends contend for the history of every landmark.

More Art: The Flamingos in the Park

There is a flock of flamingos that hangs around the Western entrance to the JinJi Hu lakefront park.  Strange that they never seem to move.

Summer Flowers

I'm not sure who it is in the Suzhou City government that is responsible for landscaping.  But they deserve a lot of credit.  And they must have a pretty healthy budget.

It seems like every two or three weeks there is something new that is blooming.  It has been that way since March.  It started with the plum blossoms.  About the time they died out the magnolias started to pop.  And so on and so on.  Every time the colors start to fade on one species, another seemingly innocent tree or bush  explodes into bloom to take its place.

 In addition to the perennial stuff - the trees and shrubs - the city also plants seasonal flowers in various flower beds and especially in the medians of the roads.  These get changed out about once a month also.

One of the more exotic things they do, at least exotic to me, is plant lotus flowers.  The park across the corner has some features which, back in February, looked like open running drainage ditches.  Really big ditches.  I figured this was due to neglect or lack of funding or some other benign incompetence that comes with city management.   Then back in May, during the rainy season, they let the ditches fill up with water.  Then they planted the lotus flowers.

The lotus is one of the "big" flowers in Chinese tradition.  It is the flower of summer.  Every lake, pond, or puddle of water is likely to have lotus planted in it.  The plants started blooming in mid-July and held their blooms right up to the end of August.  They are starting to fade now.  And the vegetable markets are full of the seed pods the form when the blossoms mature.  (You don't eat the seeds....you peel the pod and eat the celery-like flesh that surrounds the seeds.)

Now for me, the thought of flowers all through the summer seems a little exotic.  After all, in Indiana things will go dry about the middle of June and then stay brown until September.  Suzhou benefits from more frequent summer rains.  (Good for the flowers, though the humidity that comes with that can be brutal.).  And if the rains get scarce, they just round up some water tankers, fill them up at the nearest canal, and then use that for watering. 

Oooops

Sorry for the quiet stretch recently.   It has been a busy month.   We'll try to do better soon.....I promise.

More Art

 Here is another installment on public art in Suzhou.  It's a bronze statue (I think bronze) that is located on the walkway about a half-mile south on Xing Gang street.  This is one of my favorites, so it merits a post of it's very own.

 I'm not exactly sure why I like it so much.  Partly because it's bizzare....a trio of old men in a tug-o-war with a trio of young ladies.  Partly because it's a bit risqué....the ladies are falling out of their clothes and that seems to be more important to the old men than does winning.  Finally, because it's surreal...I've not seen three Chinese women in the last 6 months that have half as much of a bosom as these three women do.

 The faces of the men say it all.  Two of them are focused on the contest, but the third - the one on the left - looks at you knowingly as you pass by.  His sly glance and a hidden smile seem to aknowledge that victory comes not from ending the tug-o-war, but from making it last as long as possible.

People

A funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago when I was going to meet Darren Rowan at the Suzhou train station.   I flagged down a cab in front of the apartment and climbed in the front passenger side.  (It's much easier in the front to hold up a map and point if the driver doesn't understand my bad Chinese.)  After we were on our way, I got out my cell phone to check for messages. After a minute or so, I felt something weird crawling on my arm.  I danced a little to make it go away but it kept coming back.  So I looked to see what kind of insect might be there.

When I looked up, I saw that the taxi driver was stroking the hair on my arm with his index finger.  Luckily, we were stopped at a light.  His face had the rapt look of a 6 month-old baby who's caught the family cat for first time.  He didn't even flinch when I looked at him.  He just kept stroking and smiling.  Then the light turned green and he went back to driving.  Driving, of course, requires both hands - one for the wheel and the other for the horn.

After he got on the highway and was comfortably going 90 miles an hour, he held up his arm to show me.  Girls in my third grade class had more hair on their arms than he did.  And he was no freak in that department.  I've never seen a Chinese man with even a hint of fuzz on his arm.  When we got off the freeway and stopped at the first light, he gave me the gesture that I knew was coming.  So I pulled down the collar of my shirt to show him my chest.  His eyes became huge.

Now, I feel pretty safe to say that this cab driver was not motivated by some weird perversion.  The amazement on his face was too innocent to be faked.  I'm sure he'd seen Westerners before. You can't drive a cab in Suzhou and not get a Westerner from time to time.  But maybe this was the first time he got one up close in the front seat.  Maybe he'd heard from family or friends that Westerners are different in a hairy sort of way.   Maybe this was his first chance to find out if it was truth or urban legend.

I don't claim to know much about what culture is.  But in China, I've come to realize that a biggest part of the culture is what it's not.   China is NOT a nation of immigrants. 

All the countries in the Americas are mostly populated by people whose ancestors came from someplace else.  Not just the US, but Canada and Mexico and South America are all a hodgepodge of European and Asian and African and Latin peoples..all mixed in with the indigenous peoples.   Even the old countries of Europe have sizable populations of people from other places.  The history of these countries over the last 2000 years is mainly about the invasions and migrations and shifting of national boundaries.  The populations in these countries are painted with a pallet of many skin hues, heights, shapes, weights, and degrees of swarthiness.  We're used to seeing people who look different to us.

In China, on the other hand, the vast majority of people are swimming in the same gene pool.  These are people whose ancestors have been in these parts for a long long time.  Over 90 percent of the Chinese call themselves "Han" people.  They became called the Han people about 2000 years ago.  Not because they arrived 2000 years ago, but because it took them about 2000 years after they arrived to decide upon a name.  (For comparison, 2000 years ago the British Isles still had invasions to come from the Saxons, the Vikings, and the Normans.)

Only about 8% of the population is classified as a non-Han minority of one type or another.  Some of these are indigenous peoples - offspring of isolated tribes back in the mountains.   Others are descended from Arab immigrants who came hundreds of years ago - mostly in Western China on the old Silk Road and a few others that came to the port cities in the East with sea trade.  But even these people have assimilated to the point where I couldn't pick them out of a police line-up.  The locals can spot them in an instant, though, because "they don't have a Han face".

Now, at this point I was all ready to go down the road of deep, insightful, and clever observations about cultural differences.  But upon re-reading the draft it was obvious that I'm not that clever.   What I really want to do is tell you a couple of more stories.  Things that I didn't know about Chinese people that, quite frankly, surprised me.

The first has to do with the "third rail" polite discussion - skin color.  It starts back in April when the weather first started to become sunny.  I noticed then that, every time the sun came out, the women would open up their umbrellas.  I figured it was to avoid the heat.  Then I noticed people riding their scooters with long-sleeved shirts on backwards.  At first I figured that was to avoid getting bug splatter on the work clothes.  Again, I noticed it was always women.  Never the men.

Someone finally explained to me that it was to prevent from getting tanned.   You see, light skin is considered attractive - not just in China but all over Asia.  The paler and more ghostlike, the better.  So Chinese women avoid the sun like the plague....or like a vampire would.  Not all of them, but a lot of them.  Also, the stores are full of skin whitening products such as pearl powder or Pond's whitening cream.  If you don't want to go the chemical route, then you can also buy cover-ups for your arms (essentially long tubes of cloth) and hats with huge visors.

The second story has to do with social drinking and socializing in general.  You see, another thing I noticed early on is that there are not many bars in Suzhou.  The few bars there are are mainly hangouts for the expats.  In Hainan, I was invited to a poker game with some Chinese colleagues and figured I better show up with a six-pack.  When I did, they all looked at me like I was crazy.  You never seen anyone sipping on a beer while playing cards or Mah Jong.

The Chinese are NOT all members of the temperance society - they can put away more alcohol than a flunking fraternity brother on a Saturday night.  But it has to be the proper social situation.  And the two most proper social situations are at meals and at karaoke.

The Chinese are very sociable people and a meal is the most sociable of all social occasions.   At home and at restaurant, the typical meal is served family style.  Everyone sits around the same table and plates of food are piled up in the center.  Everyone shares.  While they share, everyone talks.  And if you're male and not driving then you drink with your meal.  Beer and rice wine are traditional.  Grape wine is becoming more fashionable these days.  If it's really sociable then (heaven help you) the baijiu, or white liquor, comes out and the toasting begins.  The traditional Chinese toast is GanBei, or empty cup.  It's not so much toast-making as it is stating an expectation.  (The women, by the way, don't drink alcohol.  At least not in the settings I've been in.  Maybe they would on a date or at home with family and close friends.  When I've been out, though, it's always tea or fresh squeezed fruit drinks.)

Getting a little tipsy is OK, expected even.  But if anyone gets drunk then they've made a mistake.  And when dinner is over, it's over.  Unless you go for Karaoke.

Karaoke is hugely popular here.  I'd always thought of it as a Japanese thing, but the Chinese are easily as crazy about their karaoke .  (Though Kalaok is the way it's been spelled.  It's pronounced ka-la-o-k.)  KTV is the most popular karaoke chain in China.  You see KTVs everywhere.  As in Japan, the karaoke joints in China are built like hotels - all private rooms where you go with a party of people to sing the night away.  You ring the waiters to bring you food and beverages.  Everyone is expected to sing.  And regardless of how badly you sing, you will always be told that you are very good.  The Chinese people are wonderful that way.

The photo at top was taken at a karaoke outing one night after dinner.  You can't see it, but the wall that the people are facing has a big TV screen on it where the lyrics are displayed.  Some of the folks are quite good.  The fellow shown singing in the photo was exceptional - he was belting out a Bon Jovi song and hitting all the high notes when this was taken.  The guy in the upper left corner was also really good.  He did some Chinese-pop-love-ballads that would melt the heart of any teen-age girl anywhere.  I asked how they became so good and they told me that university students spend many week-end nights...sometimes all night...hanging out with friends at the KTV.  (How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice!)

So there you go.  In the end, there are more similarities than differences between Chinese people and Westerners....or any people of the world for that matter.  All people love their families and want the best for their children and want to enjoy a peaceful life and like to complain about the government.  But there are a few differences, and learning more about them makes our time here an ongoing adventure.