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.

Coming Home

Several years ago I attended a party on Bainbridge and got chatting to an elderly gentleman who was well-travelled and had lived for many years in the middle east.  He was a fascinating character and I was fixated by his tales (to the point of letting my wine glass run dry!) until he asked me a question that gave me pause for thought and engendered some consternation.  It was an obvious question, but one to which I’d never given any thought: ‘If I’d lived half my life in England and half in the USA and was planning a decade of world travel, where was ‘home’?’  When I spluttered into my wine glass (thankfully re-filled) and said I had no idea, he expressed genuine concern and commented that it was tragic and a real loss to me that I had nowhere I could call home.  I found myself thinking of Dorothy clicking her little red slippers together, but for the life of me I couldn’t understand the gentleman’s concern nor the need to have a place to call home.

I’m still not convinced that one needs to be anchored to a homeland but, since I’ve returned to the country of my birth and childhood, I have a greater appreciation of what makes a place ‘home’.  I’ve come to the conclusion that home is not necessarily where your family resides, nor is it the place where life-changing events took place (which is not to say that memories of ‘home’ are not important); instead, the experience of ‘coming home’ for me is a feeling, I think it’s a whole body version of umami.  Wikipedia describes the sixth taste as having the property of ‘a mild but lasting aftertaste difficult to describe’.   Others state that a food has umami when it has become all that it can be, when it is at its peak of quality and fulfillment.  Can life, like food, achieve the transcendent state of umami?  And is it this feeling that Samwise Gamgee is describing when he talks thus about home to Frodo:

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

Returning to England in May I can certainly attest to the umami feeling Sam describes when I could once again feast my eyes on flowering horse chestnuts, hawthorns and limes and observe, still, Clydesdales grazing in a field.  But even routine things can stimulate that feeling of familiarity and comfort.  It’s reassuring to bicycle past Martin’s newsagent every morning and see an old man in a flat cap with Yorkie in tow, and stick in hand, tapping his way along to collect the daily paper.  As a school girl I delivered newspapers for Martin’s for many years and in all weather!   And my grandfather would walk to the village store every morning for the paper - it was his big outing for the day when his health deteriorated.  Remarkably, there are still newspaper boys (and girls, although I’ve mainly seen boys) in England.  The job appears not to have changed, but now I occasionally see a lad shunning the bike for the more trendy scooter and sporting ear buds, the music no doubt helping him get through the chore.   I wish podcasts had been available when I was a papergirl and later when I delivered the Christmas post in Oxford.   Postmen (and women) haven’t changed much either, but they now sport a trendy red uniform and seem to take the job pretty seriously.  I remember sorting the Christmas post with some pretty randomly dressed, jovial fellows and I got the impression that it was all a bit of a lark, but maybe that was just because I was working with the Christmas temps! 

I don’t know if it’s a sense of fulfilment, or a giddy adrenaline-induced high I feel when I bicycle at breakneck speed down Headington Hill into the city of dreaming spires, but being on a bike again in England probably gives me the strongest feeling of ‘coming home’.  So much of my youth was spent on a bicycle!  If I wasn’t bicycling to school or doing my paper round, I was slogging uphill in the rain on my bike on a youth hostelling holiday in Wales, or zipping along the A31 to visit my boyfriend in Richmond, or doing the Oxford thing of pedalling like a mad thing down Cowley road trying to make a 9 o’clock lecture.  Reassuringly, a LOT of people still bike in Oxford and the infrastructure for cyclists has improved immensely.  Raleigh is still in operation and I was able to get a fabulous green 8-speed bike off Gumtree, a step up from my old blue 3-speed.  I sincerely hope that in my lifetime personal flying machines don’t supplant terrestrial forms of transport because I’ll feel about the disappearing bicycle the same way my predecessors felt about the loss of the horse drawn cart.

Ah, but it’s reassuring to see that England still values its waterways as a means of transport and, on a fine weekend, the canals are alive with activity.  The river Thames has not changed and, walking beside it with my rambling group, I am transported back to another river and another time.  While studying at Oxford I took many a weekend break to visit my grandmother in the little village of Eckington in Worcestershire and, while there, frequently went on therapeutic walks by the river Avon.  Rivers flood (especially this year!), they can transport a damp Queen on her triumphal Jubilee barge, or Ratty and Mole on a summer jaunt in a boat, but they remain essentially unchanged by these activities.  There is something stoic about English rivers and I think that is why a walk by the river was, and still is, a very grounding activity for me and an activity, like bicycling, that can induce the transcendent umami state and a sensation of ‘coming home’.

I don’t know how long I will stay in England or where fortune will take me next on our round the world adventure.  I don’t know if I will ever reach a place and say ‘Ah, now this feels like home and I will stay here forever’.  Maybe this makes me a tragic case, or maybe I am just responding to the very same genetic urge that gave our predecessors the initiative to leave Africa and colonize the world.  There are travellers and those that stay home;  in Oxford one’s thoughts turn often to Tolkien and I think he sums it all up in his astute observation that ‘Not all those who wander are lost’.

Those Slippery Days of Spring...

In most countries the first balmy days of the year are greeted, if not with rapture, with a satisfied sigh as one anticipates summer and all the good things that season brings.  This is not the case in China.  When the warm spring winds arrive, our normally fresh-air loving neighbours batten down the hatches, seal all leaky windows and doors as best they can, and withdraw glumly into their secured cocoons.  At first this behaviour seems very odd to the foreigner who watched entire families dine on their balcony clad in parkas and red long johns (I KNOW the underwear is red!) during some very chilly days in January. As I said, the Chinese love nothing if not fresh air.  Why the sudden change in attitude toward the elements?

Steve and I discerned the answer on our first balmy spring day a couple of weeks ago.  When descending from the 7^th floor of our apartment building down the polished granite stairs that are standard in all buildings in China, we noticed that our feet were getting steadily wetter and by the 1^st floor we were splashing through veritable puddles.  Had the building cleaner become negligent and failed to mop thoroughly after washing the stairs?  Or were we observing a natural phenomenon that makes the onset of spring in this part of the tropics a nightmare for Chinese and foreigners alike?  Unfortunately, the latter was the case.  Imagine an environment where all buildings are constructed of granite and tile with no insulation in the walls and leaky single pane windows.  Now take these granite and tile structures and cool them for a couple of months to a chilly 9^oC (cool enough to warrant dressing for bed in thermal underwear and a wool hat – remember, there’s no heat in this cold box, and no insulation); then overnight douse these buildings in moisture-laden air of a sultry  21^oC, and you can create a swimming pool of condensation!  You can’t defy the laws of physics!

Fortunately, Steve and I are still spry enough that we are able to remain upright (at least while sober!) as we daily negotiate the plethora of slippery surfaces we encounter nowadays – our apartment floor, the stairs, all the corridors at school (which are exposed to the elements and cleverly constructed of tile) and our very own classrooms.  Gone are the days when we could incorporate ‘run to the board’ activities in the daily teaching agenda.  Indeed, everyone moves in slow motion at this time of year but there are falls and broken limbs in spite of this.  Broken bones are associated with spring in China in the way we associate them with the ski season in the Pacific Northwest.  Indeed, on day one of the ‘slippery season’ we learnt that one teacher and one student in a neighbouring school had succumbed and were both now sporting plaster casts on their arms - and that was just the beginning!

Several weeks into the season, Steve and I have adapted in the manner of seasoned travellers.  We now keep our air conditioner set on ‘dehumidify’ at a comfortable 30^oC and this has reduced the layer of moisture on the apartment floor, although it hasn’t done much to dry the perennially damp bathroom towels and bedding.  Drying laundry has moved from an outdoor occupation to an indoor obsession.  My days are spent rotating washed items onto and off our 2ftX2ft electric radiator and fearing for the elastic in my underwear – surely direct heat can’t be increasing its lifespan?  And, like our Chinese neighbours, we’ve learnt to seal every crevice in our cold box to keep that nasty warm air out!

However, there are some that love this season and the humid climate it brings.  Our feathered friends are not disturbed by slippery surfaces and are in raptures over the newly hatched insect population.  Their joyful song is a balm for the ears.  And the newly planted trees on campus are wriggling their roots into moist soil and preparing to wow us with spring blossoms.  The Chinese are amazing gardeners and really know their soil and local growing conditions.  In early January holes were dug all over campus and allowed to soak up the winter rains prior to being filled just this past week with mature root ball trees trucked in from a local nursery.  These are big trees – probably 10-20 years old and they look extremely healthy.  March 12^th was China’s annual National Tree Planting Day and an entire afternoon was spent by workers and students alike ensuring that the 50-odd holes around campus were suitably filled with vegetation, from mature trees to good-sized bushes – what a fantastic tradition.

I will close with my conclusions on the weather of Guangdong province since weather seems to be an international obsession and my observations may be useful to any blog readers who are considering a trip down here. 

Seasons in Guangdong Province:

July to late October – the sweaty season

November – the perfect month

December – February – the ‘red long john’ season

March – the slippery season

April – June – yet to be experienced, but my guess is warm and damp and filled with tropical colour and butterflies. 

Steve will inform me, no doubt, if my weather guess for late spring is correct.  As many of you know, come May I will be flying north to inspect bluebells and hawthorn hedges in England and will possibly never return for any season in China, especially the ‘slippery season’!

Genuine Fakes, Anyone?

       A few months ago, as we were lazing in the U.S., a news story broke and achieved some international notoriety.  Apparently an American blogger had turned up a fake Apple Store in Kunming, China.  He publicized his discovery by writing of it and posting pictures of the store and its workers on his blog.  The BBC, NPR, and other international news organizations picked up on the story, and shortly the local authorities in Kunming were shocked, shocked to find more than a dozen other fake Apple Stores.  Reportedly, these were all closed down. I found the story fascinating, not because someone had found an ersatz Apple Store in China, but because the media considered it newsworthy.

        This is the land of the genuine fake, be it remembered.  I doubt there is a legitimate product (or an illegitimate one, come to that) available anywhere in the world that does not have a fake twin made in China.  As exhibit A I offer this photo of my neighbor’s flip-flops, parked outside his front door:

        For exhibits B through Z and beyond, I encourage you to enquire of Microsoft, Apple, Calvin Klein, Rolex, Gucci, KFC, or any music or film distributor you care to name.  Or really, just pick any company that has tried to sell anything in China and ask if they have had their products copied without their permission.

        This phenomenon really is the greatest hindrance to innovation and entrepreneurship in this country.  There is absolutely no incentive to tinker and toil in your workshop to produce a better mousetrap, because it is a given that if you do come up with something clever, unique, and useful, there will be a dozen competitors undercutting you with cheap knock-offs before you can say “Intellectual pr-”. And unless you have some serious “guanxi” (connections), good luck in getting the competitors shut down.  The legal system here offers no succor to the wronged entrepreneur without connections.

        So, as I say, the amazing thing to me about the saga of the fake Apple Stores was not that they existed; rather that anyone got excited about their existence.  I would have been far more interested if someone had made a tour of China and found no fake Apple Stores.

One for the Foodies

dedicated to my friend Chris, an unrepentant foodie

God bless you, you’ve finally looked us up!  Our first visitor, what a treat!  Have you eaten yet?  That’s the traditional greeting for a visitor around here, you know—the Cantonese are really proud of their cuisine.  You’re hungry, you say?  Splendid—let’s go get a bite!  Come on with me, we’ll walk on over—It won’t take ten minutes.  Mostly, we eat at the student canteens because it’s convenient, and also because the Fiance Minister decided it’s better for the treasury to do so.  But no sense in slumming it today—this is an occasion, having a guest!

Now we could go down that way to dumpling man.  No idea what his real name is, but we go there once or twice a week.  He’s a jolly guy—an owner and waiter all in one.  He usually wanders around shirtless in flip-flops and shorts, and I like him because he helps me correct my Chinese pronunciation.  He’s got good dumplings, too, but the flies can sometimes be a bit too cordial.  So unless you’re really fond of them, I think I know a better place.  Yes?  Good, let’s press on.  Be careful crossing the street here, and pay no attention to the signal light—purely for decorative purposes.  Just wait till there’s a break in the traffic and step lively.  That’s the ticket, and here we are at restaurant row.  What do you mean, “Where are they?” These are all restaurants along here.  Yes, I know they all look like a bunch of oil-change shops, but that’s just the way they build ‘em.  The insides have all the charm of oil-change shops, too, but the food’s pretty good.

Damned if I know what they serve in most of these places—Chinese food, I expect—but you’ll notice that it’s all written in Chinese, too, so we’re pretty clueless once we walk in.  Usually, we select restaurants that have pictures of their dishes on the walls.  I’ve had an idea for a restaurant chain here in China catering to ex-pats.  I could call it Point ‘n’ Eat, with pictures of everything, since that’s what we foreigners tend to do anyway.  Anyway, let’s go in here—they know us and they’re terribly patient.  “Ni hao, ladies!  A table for san, please!”  That means three.  Making great strides with the language, see?

So, you’ll see you’ve got a little bowl, a little plate, a tea cup, chopsticks and not much else.  Well, right, there’s a roll of toilet paper too, but we’ll get to that later.  Ah, and here’s the lady with our jug of tea.  Now, watch this.  It’s the custom here in Guangdong, and not really anywhere else in China, I’m told.  You half fill your bowl with the tea and put in your tea cup—that’s right, into the bowl.  Now roll it around a bit and take it out, slosh the tea around the bowl, then pour it out over your chopsticks into this plastic tub here in the middle of the table.  The Cantonese think everything’s dirty and dusty, see, so they wash all their utensils at the table—wash it in tea—to make sure it’s done right.  Wouldn’t think of eating without doing that first.  No, we don’t do the little plate—you’ll see why later.  Now, I’ll order, and I promise you a pretty tasty meal.

One of these days I’m going to learn to say “The usual, Gladys,” but since I haven’t got that down yet, I’ve had some friends write the names of a few dishes on this notecard—I just hand that to the waitress and we’re all set.  Now, everything is communal here, see?  They’ll bring out a big bowl of rice and more food than we can possibly eat, and put it all on the lazy-susan here.  Then we dig in and help ourselves.  Put some rice in the bowl and add in the other stuff, then repeat as you finish it off.  Not terribly hygenic, with everybody scooping stuff out with their chopsticks, but I’m afraid that’s how it’s done.  They’ll bring a spoon for the dishes if you ask, but I’m dipped if I can pronounce it right.  Last time I tried, they were gone a while and eventually brought me a spark plug.  So I hope you’re not catchy or anything.

Ah, here’s the first set of dishes, the rice and the chicken.  Now the first thing you’ll notice is—well, actually you’re right, the first thing you’ll notice is that the chicken’s head is right there on the dish with a pretty astonished look on his face.  A friend once told me they do that because Chinese diners like to see “the whole animal.” No, I don’t get it, either.  As if you might think you were being served a macaque or something unless you saw that chicken head.  Funny how the comb and wattles don’t stay red once he’s cooked—go a kind of sepia color, don’t they?  Ah, but I see you’re going kind of sepia yourself.  Here, I’ll take the head away. 

No, what I meant to say is that the chicken hasn’t been disassembled as we’re used to seeing in the west.  This poor fellow has been cut top to bottom into a bunch of quarter-inch slices, bones and all.  You should see the chicken we get at the canteen—some of it looks as if it’s been shoved through a wood-chipper.  But it’s got to be easy to pick up with chopsticks, you see, because we don’t have any knives and forks.  But it also means that you chew your food very carefully and slowly, just like mom always told you to do.   And here’s what you use that little plate for—you spit out the bone fragments onto it.  Yes, yes, you can take them out with your fingers if you wish, but really, even the well-mannered Chinese diners just spit them onto the plate.  Sometimes there isn’t a plate, so people will spit out the bones gristle right onto the table.  When I told a Chinese friend that westerners find that odd, she told me that they use the toilet paper to wipe stuff off their hands, rather than licking their fingers the way we do when we get a tasty sauce on them.  Well, fair enough.  I wonder how KFC got such a foothold here in Asia. 

Ah, but speaking of feet, yes, those are the chicken’s feet there on the platter, too.  I told you:  the whole animal.  No, please, help yourself—you’re the guest here.  I’ve had one, which is my lifetime’s quota of chicken feet.  Taste?  Well, I guess it tasted about like you’d expect a chicken’s foot to taste.

Oh, but now here’s something more like—mutton ribs.  Ironic, no?  We lived two years in Australia, spent a month in New Zealand, and had to come to China for mutton.  Here, just slip on these disposable gloves and tuck in.  You’ll love ‘em.  And now here’s a real treat.  I’m going to steal this recipe and use it next time I have to bring the yams for Thanksgiving.  It’s peeled and cooked sweet potatoes, but instead of butter and brown sugar on them, the cook has drizzled over some caramelized cane sugar.  Magnificent!  You pick up a few with your chopsticks, so, but then make sure you dip them in the bowl of water here to cool down the melted sugar first—give you a nasty burn otherwise.  And say, this is good—a cold salad with cilantro and no, not noodles—those are strips of cooked tofu, actually.  It’s got a delicious dressing of some sort with vinegar, and I’m not sure what else.  And the dumplings, of course.  These have a mutton filling, and on these here are filled with  some sort of chives.  Dip them in this sauce and enjoy.  Yeah, we eat pretty darned well here.

Now here’s the phrase I have to practice.  I asked my Chinese tutor why the waitress never understood when I asked to pay the bill, and it turns out I was actually saying, “I want to buy eggs.”  Who knew?  Ah but as I say, they‘re used to me here.  So here we go—no, no, it’s on me today.  You treat me when I get to your place.  The total for all three of us was just 100 RMB, or just about $15—nothing!  Let’s walk back this way, past my favorite little shop—another place where I’ve established a certain rapport with the inmates.  Did I tell you we went to Taiwan a few weeks ago?  The food was very good there—definitely lived up to its billing.  There was an especially nice beef noodle soup that we found everywhere, and I had a wonderful steak and a shrimp the size of a lobster one night.  But I have to say they haven’t quite figured out the tomato yet.  There was a quote I read a while back that fit pretty well:  “Intelligence is knowing the tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is knowing not to put them in a fruit salad.”  That’s where the Taiwanese fell down a bit—I bought a stick of what I thought were candied fruits only to find that in addition to the strawberries and plums there were two cherry tomatoes.  And Kathryn did actually get some tomatoes in a fruit salad with yogurt.  But apart from the tomato faux pas, top marks.

Ah, and here’s my shop!  Allow me to present you with a couple of these frosty green beauties.  This, my friend, is Tsingtao, the finest Chinese product I’ve yet come across.  This superb beer is just $0.70 for a 20-ounce bottle—nearly 2/3 of a liter.  And how gorgeous it is on a hot day!  Let’s get on home and have these on the balcony.  I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you stopped by!