Brew-haha!

        Here is a piece of advice if you ever want to do something in China—go out to dinner, say, or buy an electronic gadget, or visit a park or a museum:  multiply the amount of time such an errand would take back home by five, and you should be fine—assuming that “back home” isn’t somewhere else in China.  I say this in light of visa issues that have beset me since September 1st, when the Chinese government changed their policies: I now have to get the more costly and time-consuming Z visa, instead of the one I had previously been told to get.  A Chinese friend once did a study contrasting learning styles and expectations of British and Chinese students.  I can’t remember all her results, but I recall that one of her findings was that Chinese students have a “much higher tolerance for uncertainty” than their British (and, I daresay, American) counterparts.  No argument here!  A Chinese worker, coming to the UK, wouldn’t bat an eye at similar visa tribulations, whereas, for the first time in my life a doctor has recently convinced me to start taking blood-pressure medication.  Coincidence?  Possibly, but it’s still good prophylactic medicine since I apparently will be facing more uncertainty as I head back to China soon—if not quite as soon as anticipated.  Still, the place has some compensations, one of which I wish to touch on now. 

        In an article published the same day as the infamous visa changes referred to above, the BBC world service ran an article calling the U.K. “Europe’s ‘Addictions Capital.’”  And it kind of hit home with me because, frankly, I am part of the problem—I’m an addict.  Moreover, I don’t know if it is an aggravating or extenuating fact to say that I didn’t even acquire my addiction here; I brought it with me from China, along with the means of satisfying it.  To cut it short, I’m hooked on Chinese tea; I adore the stuff.  And no, it isn’t just a myth or a stereotype that a lot of tea is drunk there—it really is true.  When I landed here last November, I was carrying about 2 kgs (4.4 lbs) of various kinds of tea, unsure of its availability here in the U.K.

        In China, shops selling all sorts of tea are still found everywhere, from upscale shopping malls to dusty back streets of every city and town.  In addition to tea proper, there are a number of herbal infusions, as they are sometimes known, made of the dried leaves, bark, and especially the dried flowers of many different plants.  Some of these are drunk merely for the pleasant taste, but most are reputed to have medicinal properties.  Rosebud tea is apparently a big seller, though I haven’t tried it.  My personal favorite among the herbals is chrysanthemum tea, which makes a splendid mug before bedtime.  The same friend who conducted the study above also introduced me to “exploding pod tea.”  That’s not it’s real name—I don’t know what that is—but it is a mixture of various dried flowers, seeds, sugar crystals and whatnot, plus one specimen of what looks like a pecan in the shell.  But when you pour a few pots of boiling water over this “pecan,” it bursts open like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and releases a gelatinous mass that resembles eel spawn.  But it’s delicious, and it’s also wonderfully soothing to a croaky throat, so we keep a few packets on hand for the winter months.

        There are many varieties and grades of regular tea (Camellia sinensis—the name gives away its Chinese origins, and China is still the world’s leading tea producer), of course, but I lack both the space and the expertise to go into that extensively—mostly I lack the expertise.  But I will just mention a couple of my favorites because, to quote the international credo of the ignorant, “I don’t know much, but I know what I like.”

        First there is green tea, which seems to be preposterously good for you.  According to Wikipedia,

Recent studies suggest that green tea may help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer, promote oral health, reduce blood pressure, help with weight control, improve antibacterial and antivirasic activity, provide protection from solar ultraviolet light, increase bone mineral density, and have "anti-fibrotic properties, and neuroprotective power."

Test results are still pending on claims that drinking green tea also increases your odds of winning the lottery and makes you irresistible to would-be lovers.  Me, I just like the mild nutty flavor, especially since I learned how to make it properly.  Apparently the reason my green tea was often bitter in my pre-China days was that the water was too hot.  I found out that the proper way to make it is to boil water and then let it cool to 75 to 80 °C (167 to 176 °F) before pouring it over the tea.

        But as much as I love the green teas, my heart, or at least my palate, belongs to pu’er (or pu-erh) tea, most of which comes from Yunnan province.  How to describe it?  Have you ever held a handful of dark, loamy earth that was so rich—and smelled so rich—that you could almost imagine a bean or a tomato plant sprouting before your eyes and starting to push out leaves?  What would a tea taste like, brewed out of earth such as that?  That’s easy:  it would be horrible, of course—full of muck, and grit, and pebbles, and decomposing cabbage leaves, and bits of earthworms.  But imagine if you could brew a tea that tasted as good and wholesome as that earth smelled.  Well, that’s pu’er.  And unlike green tea, it needs boiling water to bring out its best flavor.  Some people actually throw the tea into the pot and boil it together with the water.  It never goes bitter—at least, I have never tasted bitter pu’er.  Moreover, you can repeatedly pour boiling water into the pot, and pour out cup after cup of delicious tea.

        The pu’er I buy normally comes in disk form, as shown, wrapped in paper. 

Like good wine, it improves with age, or so I am told.  To make the tea you break off a piece from the disk and place it in a teapot of the size that children used to use when hosting play tea parties, and you pour boiling water over it. 

  

This first dousing is merely to “wash” the tea, however, and is instantly poured away.  You then add more boiling water, and this is what you pour into cups for drinking.  This is done immediately—there is no need for steeping the tea, although doing so does no harm; as I say, it does not go bitter.  The Chinese drink this tea in small cups—some the size of an egg cup—but I play the western philistine and have mine in a standard coffee mug.  But you can keep adding boiling water over and over, especially if you are using good-quality pu’er, and pour off mug after mug of splendid tea.

        But it’s not all deliciousness and reduced blood pressure when it comes to Chinese beverages, of course; there must be a dark side, a yin to the tea’s yang.  And this is baijiu—pronounced, with amazing appropriacy, “By Joe!”  It literally means “white liquor” or “white wine,” but really it is simply distilled malevolence, bottled evil.  The Chinese seem to regard it as the pinnacle of alcoholic spirits but in this, as in much else, they are mistaken.  I’ve tried it twice—the first time out of curiosity (I had heard so much about it), and I regretted the experiment for most of the next day. 

        The second time it was part of a special dinner, and I was assured that this was “good baijiu.”  Still, it tasted the same as it had during my first encounter, which is to say as if it had just been decanted from a Coleman fuel can.  My companions made sure my glass was never less than half full, so I got a fair dose.  I never became drunk; all I felt was a sort of increasing dullness or boredom stealing over me, a realization that I didn’t really have anything interesting to say, and was not much interested in the conversation of my dinner companions either.  But I do recall with perfect clarity everything we talked about.  Even so, my friends seemed a bit worried about how much I had taken on board, so they insisted on walking me home, actually taking my arm as we crossed the road.

        The real baijiu adventure was the next day, however, with the most singular hangover I’ve ever experienced.  Its main feature was an incapacitating mental torpidity, as if I had been somehow painlessly concussed.  Just as I hadn’t been drunk the previous night, so now I didn’t feel sick or have a headache.  Instead I just felt as if half of my brain had been removed, and the remaining portion wasn’t up to much.  It was impossible to concentrate on anything, or rather, my mind would just attach itself to one small subject and think three or four simple thoughts about it, refusing to move on to anything else.  And those three or four notions would chase each other around in my brain repetitively like a tedious carousel.  This went on all day; productive work was entirely out of the question.  It was a profoundly disturbing glimpse of what life as a member of congress must be like, and I have given baijiu a very wide berth since then.

        So that’s a brief taste of what’s brewing in China.  I still have a lot of tea left over because when I came away I didn’t know if I would ever be going back.  Now I need to find it an appreciative home, since I do not intend to carry it back with me, coals-to-Newcastle-fashion.

Five Years In – Coming Full Circle…

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." ...

Five years ago next month we left Bainbridge Island, WA our home of 20-years with a plan, or at least guidelines for our new semi-itinerant lifestyle.  Our goal was to live our retirement before retiring and without digging into any retirement savings, to live in interesting places rather than merely visiting as tourists, to work and pay our taxes but to not put down roots.  The latter, of course, meant travelling light and moving-on with reasonable periodicity: a reasonable minimum stay in each country would be one year with a maximum of two.  Five years in, how have we fared in adhering to these guidelines?

On the first two points I think we deserve top marks.  We’ve succeeded in  enjoying a premature retirement having visited some of the wonders of the world, lived for many months of the year under sunny skies, shared some fine cultural experiences, and enjoyed a pretty free and easy life-style, all while keeping our savings account in the black and on a slight upward trajectory.  But what about our third guideline which stipulates a  ‘minimum of one-year, maximum of two’ in each country?  Well here we have been less successful: we spent two years and three months in Australia, then five months in Vietnam followed by eight months in China (me), and fifteen months in China (Steve).   My plan on arriving in England last year was to increase our average by sojourning for two years here but, sadly, it is not to be – so much for plans…  While I was busy planning, others around me were reaching their own conclusions about life - Natasha came to the realisation that her  university supervisor was never going to secure funding for her to complete her PhD at Oxford, while Steve discovered that he doesn’t enjoy living in England.   Too bad because I’m thoroughly enjoying being back in my homeland and love my job at the Jenner Institute!

And so, five years into our adventure we are going to loop back and return to the beginning – to Australia!  (We will follow our daughter who will undertake a CSIRO-funded PhD at Monash University.)  However, we will return measurably altered by our experiences and, inevitably, our second sojourn in this amazing country will be different.  When we arrived in Melbourne in October 2008 it was with a sense of adventure but also anxiety - would we be able to find somewhere to stay?  How did banking work in a foreign country?   How would we file taxes and obtain visas?   How did the health system work?  How would we get around?  I laugh at these trivial concerns now.  Five years on we’ve negotiated a rental in Hanoi (albeit one with decidedly dubious plumbing); managed to get non-convertible currencies (Vietnamese Dong and Chinese Yuan) out of their mother countries; dealt with the tax systems in several countries (or, rather, our fabulous accountant has); managed to secure a series of rabies shots for Steve in Hanoi when he got  bitten by a dog, and ridden in, and on, a huge variety of vehicles from motorbikes to rickety buses to tuk tuks.  Returning to Australia will be easy from the practical perspective!  But how have we changed as people, and how will these changes become manifest on our return?  I’m concerned that we’ve lost the ability to commit to a place.  It’s too easy, once one gets into this peripatetic mindset, to just up sticks and move on when things get difficult eg. when Steve finds himself missing the exoticism of Asia.  We didn’t want to put down tap roots in a place, but it was not our goal to become incapable of establishing rootlets!

On the plus side, travelling has allowed us to establish what is really important to us as individuals.  I’ve learnt that I can’t live in an environment without external intellectual stimulus – I thrive in a city like Oxford where there is easy access to the arts, public lectures and an educated populace.  However, I’ve also learnt that I can’t handle long, grey British winters!  Surprisingly, food is more important to me than I had thought – endless meals of greasy, stringy chicken, rice, and fibrous greens in China got me really depressed.  I know now that food can affect one’s mental well-being and it makes me wonder how any child subsisting on rice alone can focus on their studies in school and be happy at home.  For his part, Steve has learnt that he thrives on the external stimulus of ‘exoticism’.  I’ll let him define in a later blog exactly what this means to him.  Will he be able to cope in staid Melbourne even though it’s an intensely cosmopolitan city?  Will constant interaction with his EFL students be enough to sate his desire for the exotic?  Or will he be forever mourning the absence of excitement and colour in the street and the sights and smells of street vendors?  I worry that he has been alienated from the Western world forever!

In my last blog, written over a year ago, I related my feelings about coming ‘home’ and ended with that timeless Tolkien quote: ‘Not all those who wander are lost.’  Now I’m forced to the realisation that we might be!  It is common knowledge that travel provides the traveller unrivalled insights into the world and, more importantly, into themselves.  (I am reminded again of Tolkien’s oeuvre and of the changes Sam and Frodo underwent during their journey.)  Knowing oneself and one’s personal priorities in life is a key first step, but finding a place where one can live once these personal discoveries have been made is an even bigger second step.  Let’s not forget that in the end Frodo never could settle in the Shire after returning from his adventures  but sailed away with the elves.  Maybe it’s not those who wander that we should worry about, for indeed, they aren’t lost; instead it’s the wanderers who return who need guidance!

What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Turned Into

The man who says, “I’ve got a wife and kids” is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan.  But he does not know—how could he?—that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself.  

        And so, back to China. 

        This is Steve once more; it’s extremely unlikely that Kathryn will ever write or utter those five words—she left with such strong dislike for the country.  But changes are afoot again, so it seems a good time to bring things up to date here. 

        I realize that as far as The Herald is concerned I never left China, though in fact I did, in November, 2012.  I have been living in England since then—mostly in Oxford, but with a two-month stint in London while doing the DELTA, a murderous, advanced teaching course from which I am still recovering three months after its conclusion.

        The epigraph above is from The Great Railway Bazaar, by Paul Theroux, my current read, and if you substitute Chinese references for the Japanese, you would have a good thumbnail sketch of my mindset at this point.  The nearly 10 months in the UK have not been a happy time for me:  England and I seem to rub each other the wrong way now.  But I don’t want to dwell on that because it might upset someone—several someones, in fact.

        Instead I’ll write about my best day in England, which was yesterday and began, unpromisingly, with a mild hangover.  But I was determined to get out and indulge in one of the real pleasures of living in Britain, which is the opportunity to go for a long ramble in storybook countryside.

        I don’t know if you could say that the footpaths and bridleways are the unsung glories of Britain, but I would argue that they are at least undersung.  According to beenthere-donethat.org.uk, England and Wales alone contain more than 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers) of these public rights of way, but if you asked people to identify an attractive feature of Britain I would guess that many more would name Keira Knightley, say, than would mention the footpaths.  I think that’s a shame.

        What splendid encounters these paths provide with the checkerboard English landscape, after all.  The hills are gentle (in Oxfordshire, at any rate), and so the views are generally modest, but what of that?  What you can see is so pleasing to the eye—the deep green of the oaks and beeches; the blazing red of the hawthorn and rowan berries; the dark burgundy of the ripening elderberries; and the tawny mown grass, lying in fragrant rows, waiting to be gathered into hay bales.  And because the vista is never too distant, ramblers are not intimidated by insurmountable miles to cover.  This keeps a spring in the step, and every few minutes one is rewarded with fresh prospects by passing through a gap in a hedge or rounding a stand of trees.  I cannot understand why these paths are not talked up more in the tourist books.

        Here is a network of trails, after all, that would stretch more than halfway to the moon; they give access to some of Britain’s loveliest scenery, and they provide pedestrian connections between remote settlements.  They are a legacy of the days when people went most places by foot or on horseback, and so most of these paths are actually over private land (I’ve been unable to find by what proportion).  But since they have been used for centuries by the tramping commoners, the right to continue doing so has been grandfathered in and codified, much to the credit of British law.

        And because these rights of way pass over private land, you are often walking among grazing cattle or sheep, or across cultivated fields—in fact, the law specifically gives walkers the right to pass through planted crops, provided they (the walkers) stick as closely as possible to the designated rights of way.  This I did yesterday at one point, then had a rest as I sat at the edge of the field and emptied my boots and socks of all the seeds and burrs they had accumulated during the crossing.  It took some time. 

        In other fields I encountered young cattle that were clearly unused to having a human being on their side of the hedge.  The stragglers bolted when they saw me approaching, only to collect some friends and return in my direction at a trot that would have been unsettling if it hadn’t been clear that they were just curious.  Playing the good hosts, they maintained a courteous distance and saw me safely to the stile at the far end of their pasture.  I’ve since had a suspicion confirmed, which is that bulls of a certain age (10 months, it turns out) are banned from fields crossed by these paths. 

        During my 13-mile (21-kilometer) walk yesterday from Thame to Oxford I encountered rabbits, pheasants, quail, kites, and swans, but only one other trekker—a solitary fellow who was some distance ahead of me and soon took a different path.  On the one hand this perplexed me, since the breezy, sunny weather was absolutely made for rambling, and I couldn’t imagine what better use everyone else had found for such a day.  But whatever it was I was glad they were at it, because it left me at large on my own in the countryside, free to astonish the livestock by singing some of my favorite tunes at them as I passed through.

        But I need to get my fill of such things while I can because, as mentioned above, I’m headed back to China—in just over three weeks, as a matter of fact.  This time it is on a two-month contract in Jinan, Shandong province.  Jinan is in the north of China, on the Yellow River and is closer to Beijing than Guangzhou, where I was before.  At 4.4 million people, it is among the top-20 cities in China by population, but only just. My contract ends in mid-December.  “What then?” you ask.  More change, of course:  watch this space.