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.