Recovered from the Annals of Warren Wilson College

A Natural Tea Seminar
Location, Warren Wilson Campus

What great fortune has occurred when three such men of rarity should in this world meet and fall to that civil occupation of drinking tea! Behold their subtlety and their ease! Behold the strange beauty of language they employ to equal their subject’s qualities! Behold as they mark every twist and turn of the tea’s taste—chasing it to that other side of eternity where perception and beauty escape even our simplest thoughts! And Oh what thousand-fold blessing it is that their experiences have been recorded in the annals of history, their exact methods, procedures, and correspondence described thus:

Brewing Parameters:

Amount - 0.25 ounces of Nanqiao shan Pu-erh (Factory: Mengyang Guoyan, 2006)

Water – filtered tap water, Swannanoa, Hun’s house, 106 Cabin Hill.

Amount – 120m

Water Temp – Boiled then cooled for 2 breathes

Method - Gongfu

Brewing Vessel - Yixing Teapot 150ml

After passing around several cakes, we decided upon a cake that we all agreed smelled of a certain mustiness that yet contained in its darkness the scent of flowers. “Sauntering Breeze” did honors as tea server, while "La Tea Doe" provided us with refreshments. And I, "Felt-Leaf," humbly took it upon myself to observe and record everything that took place.

The first infusion (twelve seconds):

We lifted our sniff cups and this is what arose. La said, “sweet honey incense;” S.B. said, “fermenting honey;” and I added, “very hot plastic spatula.” “Yes,” we said. “It is all of these things.”

Then we took sips and the taste provided quite another dimension to our senses. I said, “A very tight flavor”—here I could not find words, and then I could—“slightly bitter like a steamed lotus root.” My friends concurred, La reminiscing, “a light-green taste, a little bit of sharp bitterness—just a little sweet to keep you interested,” while S.B. attempted summation in the true spirit of science saying only, “Slightly dry. Sweet at the end. Light-bodied.”

So much to be said in one brewing of one tea! What more can be said? Yet the rise and fall of the taste in a Pu-erh tea is like the rise and fall of tides of all the world’s oceans, containing in it all of God’s creations. As it was once said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Likewise, I say now, Tea is in love with its productions in the mind of man.

The second brewing is finished, fifteen seconds by S.B.’s count:

La began by saying, “The aroma has a stronger green smell, with a sweet smell, like” (here, he was confident and smiled) “like General Tsao’s Imitation Chicken.” No argument there. I added that I still thought it reminiscent of that strange warm plastic spatula smell as when it has rested too long on the skillet, but this brew was less intense.

While the scent remained intangible to our normal vocabulary, the taste we agreed was very distinct. La began again, “Blank dryness—‘free-of-taste’ dryness—filled in with bitterness.” “An all-coating bitter effect upon the tongue,” I said, “and still light and dry.” “Dry…drier—bittersweet,” said S.B.

It seems, upon memory, that we were descending into the depths of taste, unguided by any hand. Led only by our instinct and will, into that darkness of tea, without thoughts and concerns that we might not return, that in this bitterness there could be Lethian forgetfulness… Yet surely all that sinks below arises once again.

Third brew, 19 seconds:

Very adamant, “Honey molasses!” La then told me that he outright rejects the reality of it smelling like a very hot plastic spatula. I suspect—but I cannot prove—that La is simply being contrary, led astray by the amount of tannin in his tea. I respectfully maintained that it did, indeed, to me, “smell like hot plastic.” S.B., eyes closed, smiled from over his cup as it came to him. “Very hot spatula,” he said, “stirring honey.”

The taste: “A throbbing dryness; it will make your teeth ache with bitter,” F-L. “A mirage of wetness to start; a bitter dryness to finish,” said La. S.B. said, with a confused look on his face, after smacking his lips, “like…dry.”

The fourth brew was 21 seconds.

Was it the wastes of the day—the wastes of the tea talking? Were we men then—or like the flies drunk on an early spring day with the delight of resurrection in the sunshine? The smell: I said, “maybe like wet hair.” La contended: “dry enough to reach my nose!”

In the taste, the bitter lifted, I thought, “awake in its intentions—sweet and wet.” La concurred though troubled, “wet with an oceanic swell, but I still can’t shake the dryness.” S.B.: “smooth sailing ambrosia.”

The fifth brew was 30 seconds.

Yet again, change. While the aroma to S.B. and myself reminded us of shiitakes, to La he objected to say that it smelled, “the same ol’,” but also, “smells wet.”

Then there was nothing but poetry left in us. Or perhaps, all the poetry had left us. As the tea had washed itself of life, so had, in our expression, come and gone the soul of just formulation. I could simply write in my pages, “A residual innocence left from the complete dispersal of the bitterness; the sweet and wet of the earlier brew is all that’s left.” And then to say something so charming I could not deny, La went on to say, “like bathing my tongue in shallow, sun-baked water.” S.B. murmured, “faint and warm…sugarcane.”

Yunnan Junming Rulpinhao 38888

Well, out of the few passions that regularly send me to my blog (frustration, homesickness, and new discoveries being the only others that I can think of), the euphoria following a good session of drinking tea is perhaps the most consistent, which is the state I am in right now, a delicious coaxing puerh state, purchased for near twenty dollars in Malaysia.

In our conversations, Hun and I have talked about the need to categorize our puerh teas somehow. It is easy to forget a tea once you've put it on the shelf and it gets buried with a half dozen others. Besides, the pleasure of puerh tea is that it ages, and a history of a tea's flavor would be interesting as well as useful. Hun said that he had begun to insert a slip of paper next to each tea brick after revisiting it, and, on the slip of paper, he would write all the information that he knew about its manufacturing and year of cultivation. He also took the time to include brewing as well as tasting notes.

Taking his lead, tonight was my smashing of the champaign bottle and taking the first step of diligence in journaling, for the sake of my future edification, the brewing, tasting, and manufacturing notes of the first of my puerhs. Hun and I like to think of this process as scientific, due to the seriousness of precision, but, in truth, it is as an account as subjective as an oil, landscape painting, which, again, is not the most subjective thing either. Three painters will differ in tonations here and there, a winging bird that one of them captured, while the other was indifferent scratching his butt, and the other taking extra care to ennumerate the trees that flank one hillside, and so on. But hardly will anyone disagree that the three products are anything but the same vision. To re-describe, the difficulty of transcribing onto a page, with an inadequate langauge, what occurs on the tongue drives one to borrow both from science and art. One tries to borrow from the former objectivity, control, and a special attention to nuance. From the other, one hopes to lie upon beauty's wing, a plea to the muse that the indescribable may, this time, be described.

I've also included a photo. Though not beautiful, I hope it is helpful. I call what you see, "my command center;" it is here that I drink tea, write, work on my Chinese, eat, and push the little red buttons that send bombs hurtling to my classroom. One last note, the shorthand "js" means "Joe seconds," which means the amount of seconds of each brew that I counted in my head (scientific?--yes!). Without further ado:

Yunnan Kunming Rulpinhao 38888
Purchased in Malaysia July 2008, puerh from 2007. Seller said that it would be pleasing to the taste of beginner puerh drinkers so long as it was served in quick brews. Also a good tea let age.

10/20/08 Taiwan
2nd break of the cake: The cake, like before, is quite hard, and it is necessary to use a pick to loosen the brick and create fissures. Using my small teapot, and there is one good-sized chunk of tea in there, so anyway it looks like a third pot of dried leaves but it is hard to tell. I flushed it once with hot water to clean the leaves and immediately drained it.

1st brew (14js) - First sense is a shy sweetness, followed by puerh tea's milky flavor with an accompanying slime that coats the mouth; a bitterness hovers like the taste of coffee through milk, but does not get the chance to intrude. I would also add that though the combination of coffee milk may be an adequate analogy to this taste, it is not so blunt and rude as that particular mix actually is, but rather maintains a lightness that is hard to match.
2nd brew (17js) - Sparkling and alive this time, a physical feeling actually spreading right to above my eyes (and brain?), a stronger intensity of the bitterness--not more bitter--but definitely sharper, almost sour, a sour milk or a sour stout beer. Color near that of the teapot but, of course, very bright. (Personal note: the smell reminds me of a friend's--Josh's, for those who know--old house.)
3rd brew (15js) - Absolutely tangy, attacking specifically the top back part of the tongue. Flavor more vegetable, I would say, than anything else.
4th brew (19js) - Noticing a dryness in the aftertaste, especially on my lips.
5th brew (half a minute) - Quite different here. Was really pleasant to swig back. The flavor finally found expression and freedom from the tang, milk, and bitterness as they subside into supporting roles. Really pleasant.
6th brew (half a minute) - Yep, change noted above has fully taken place. As Lateef would say, "the clouds broke," and it's smooth sailing from here on out.
7th-11th brews (indefinite) - Over a coal and/or vegetable flavor. Same as the sixth brew.

Well, there's the last brew still waiting for me at my command center (I just poured the hot water in and left it--at this point it doesn't matter). However, please note that it is the eleventh brew. Try doing that to your earl grey and see if there is anything left. Bye-bye.

The Changhua Thirty

This Saturday afternoon, Sepetember the 27h, I found myself in Lukang, a town five dollars and 2 hrs north from Chiayi City, and its attraction is its resemblance to "old Taiwan." It has several important, or at least beautiful, temples and the town is pretty much maped out for the hundreds of visitors that come weekly, if not daily, to tour the streets. I saw a lot of young parents with their young children, retirees, and even high school kids just hanging out, eating the street fair, and wondering about the roads as if they were in one big mall. I can't say too much about my experience there though because soon after I arrived I found myself going home. A lady who I was having tea with (all my adventures seem to end this way) told me that a big typhoon was coming and that they wouldn't be open the next day or on Monday. This made me reconsider my plans to spend the night in Lukang for one night. What if, Sunday morning, I could not get back? What if the storm was such that school would begin Monday, but I wouldn't be able to get back? I had stupidly left my cell phone because at the time of leaving my progression of thought was this: "my bag is too heavy--I'll leave my cell phone." It didn't seem a problem at the time. I don't use the cell phone and if there was an emergency I could always use another phone. It didn't occur to me that any number that I would need to call was--you probably guessed it--programmed into my phone and not something I know off the top of my head. All this pushed me to turn home prematurely. I guess--and this is the really stupid part looking back--the typhoon wasn't such a big surprise even though it seemed like it at the time. I had originally intended to head up to Ali Shan but had been unable to get a train ticket because the train had closed due to the typhoon. Perhaps I exaggerated the reality of this: I considered that those who were in charge were overly sensitive to the rail's teeny tracks and the happenstance of mudslides. This, the clouds that morning setting out, and the considerable gusts of winds all should have reconciled me to staying in Chiayi, but I was irreconcilable. I needed to get out of Chiayi and spend some time elsewhere.

This brings me to the point of waiting at the trainstation at five o'clock with nothing to do. My train was to come in forty-five minutes and then I remembered something I've been meaning to do. As a casual observer of Taiwanese fashion, which I'm really quite interested in, I've been tempted to take photos of interesting clothing I see on the street, something like I saw in the NY Times where a photographer showed a series of photographs he took of self-designed and made clothing outfits that he saw "on the runways of the streets of New York." But I also have been wanting to attempt a series of shots of some portion of the city taken from the same position at exact intervals of one minute for the duration of thirty minutes to one hour. When completed it has a shocking character, throwing question upon the construction of time, narrative, and place. As you watch characters--nameless of course--who wander in and then out of the frame you begin to realize just how long a minute is. But what is more shocking is to see a character again and again, someone who disappears and returns. The constriction of time (only able to see captured shutters onto what is actually a constantly evolving setting) and space (the borders of the photo are predetermined--if a murder occurred to the side of the camera one would never know but would have to impute what is occurring from the reaction to the events) draw into question our knowledge of narrative. In a completely voyeuristic fashion, the seat of observation holds no privileged position but must feed on what is accidentally captured. On one hand, the observations one can make are nearly limitless and the speculations are a hundred times more tantalizing without having to devolve into romanticized sensations. Who is that person partially out of the frame? Who is standing just outside the frame that could give you that one additional clue? Who has just walked by the camera the second before the magic one minute has passed? I think the accumulation of the effect is the appreciation of how rich any one place at any one moment can be--how rich our own lives are without necessarily realizing that we are an actor to some unseen eye, a view which we can appreciate but not completely satisfy in this world of mirrors. When I look at the series, I am reminded of Hogarth or any traditional mural painting, but here is something that is even more fascinating to me because what you see here is real and unfabricated.

I can't take credit in anyway for this series, however. The idea really comes from my friend who has studied art at NYU and she once showed me a one hour series she had done, which was much more incredible than what I produce here. She called her series, if I remember right, A New York Hour; so in that tradition I call this one, the Changhua Thirty. Do enjoy. One warning, however: The pleasure of these images is to study them in detail so it would be best to view the images large, perhaps in a slide show and manually click through them. It is also part of the play to flip backwards and forwards to try and make connections, so I do say now that if your connection is slow and constantly have to wait for an image to appear, it might not be the most interesting thing. The link is to the side.

From "CHANGHUA THIRTY"

Moon

"I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude--save for a few black faces--have made it a rule to dress for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism." Eskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands

Tonight is not moon festival but people are nevertheless celebrating, perhaps compelled by the mildness of the typhoon so far. On the TV, it appears that a giant white dollop of whip-cream is consuming the entire island of Taiwan, but here an apprehensive wind has been rattling windows, searching up and down the streets, calling forth its warning, but with no follow through, and so the people all day have been going about their business with one eye to the sky and the other into their concerns of Saturday. Even I was willing to take my chances to ride out to the single English bookstore in town and brave the possibility of imminent rainfall.

When darkness fell I ventured across the road with a bundle of clothes wrapped in my bath towel and slipped through the unlocked green gate of my school. It is eerie to be there at night with such a dubious purpose as washing my clothes, but, forced by the habits of single life, I am sometimes only ready at unusual hours for this chore. But tonight it was also partially beautiful. The entire day of wind and bursts of light rainfall had left the evening cool and calm; crickets sang and the street light shone half-heartedly through the playground trees, setting a stage that would be perfect for the chance and mysterious encounter to a heinous crime or horrible secret, such as when the boy in Treasure Island innocently enough falls asleep in the apple barrel to then overhear deathly dealings.

But I quickly left these settings for the city streets. While am not particular fond of the rain or the fact that it is usually only at night that I have time to wander, I do believe that the city is so much more clearly a city at these times, as if the wet and night were elementary to the city's constitution, commanded from the beginning when those that had the power chose the build of everything from the tiger to the lamb.

But tonight the air was thicker than usual, for in every house there stood a group of people with something like enjoyment set on their faces, and they spent their time looking out onto the streets with skewers of meat in their hands and congregating about a crude, footstool-sized metal grill. The smells and mood were those that I had been apart of the night before and so I did not stop or loiter, fearing too the generosity that these families would perhaps bestow upon me as they quite naturally seem to do, but I wished to press on, stopping only at a small park, which was entirely empty but for a group of boys that quietly but persistently attended to their sport of setting off fireworks some of which violently shot horizontally across the earth. This seemed to bother nobody who wandered by and so I let myself to it and listen to the sound of the great city that across its face fireworks were being set off so that in orchestration it sounded something like a expansive pot of popcorn that slowly attended to its task.

Though it seemed like everyone was finding shelter near their grill or setting fireworks off in a park, it was something pleasurable and confusing to see the cars still speeding about the roads, each according to its own mission that no holiday can ever quail. It reminded me of that odd vision of people out on Christmas day and the surfacing realization of people's continuous needs and restlessness, never quailed by the sacred rites we ask it to attend.

I found myself then at my favorite sushi restaurant where I slipped inside, noticing it was crowded and feared immediately being an annoyance to taking up an entire table while dining alone (something that really isn't done here). But I was greeted by the mistress of the place, one of two women who with graceful attention control the operations of the restaurant, by a simple and quiet, "Hello Joe." There were several unoccupied tables in the back where I was led, asked my preference, and then, once seated, was helped through the now familiar menu. I gave my order and waited.

I could have chosen this as my favorite restaurant simply by the quality and price of its food. But I also come here because it is simply inviting; and I'm very often surprised. The staff frequently brings me a small dish I haven't yet tried and in this way I've been introduced to some of my favorite dishes. The first, that I had again tonight, is a simple onion salad. In fact, the only vegetable in this salad is the onion, sliced thinly and a thousand times, the pieces arabesque in a lovely, translucent sculpture. On top are green onion pieces and sesame seeds. However, the bite of the salad is not from the onions, and, if it weren't for the small green onions, the onion flavor would hardly be present at all, the onion serving primarily as a fresh tasting, crisp and cool base for the sesame dressing, seasoned with fresh black pepper, a vinegar, and a combination of sweetness (honey?) and lemon. Sometimes, this dish in other restaurants is seasoned by flaky brown pieces of garnish, something resembling in fact dried bits of onion skin. I'm told that this is actually certain fish scales that are used as seasoning, but despite this their taste is earthy, and in any case, I prefer the salad without. Other dishes I had tonight also were favorites, including something they call zhu pai. Zhu, I know, is pork, but I do not know what "pai" is. What is issued forth though is a thin piece of meat that has a crust and has been fried. It is universally served with a dollop of ketchup and a dollop of sweet mayonaise which inveritably become mixed together. Sometimes the meat is cooked with garlic flavoring and sometimes not, but it is always served with a very simple and fresh garnish (tonight sprouts) that play a complete opposite to its rich and oily nature.

When I left, it was now rainning well enough and I only had my hat. Also because of the way my shower is set up (really a hose extension from the tub) and because the cieling is somewhat dropped in my bathroom, I must kneel to wash myself thus making my soaps more excessible as well as avoiding the difficulty of bumping my head against the cieling. As a consequence, my knees are sometimes fitful with anything but a slow and ease stride. Because of this I walked slowly, finding the moments when the rain lifted, and pausing each time it renewed its force. At each awning under which I waited, it was impossible to say whether or not I was giving the storm the chance of becoming stronger or was allowing it to blow itself through. And when at moments I was inspired with a mad dash, I could not decide if it was better to do so at a moment of clarity or at sudden heavy rain.

Eventually, I made it home, much more wet, with 12 litres of bottled water that I had purchased at a happy-mart during one escape from the rain. But as soon as I put these down, I dashed out one more time, found myself pulling folds of clothing from that still womb in which they lay, protecting them as I crouched by the warm machine's side against the unclean rain of the sky, and acting in all manners like a furtive figure darting through the shadows of life.

Eureka!: Laws of Displacement

I got my sister's e-mail today at school about a front page someone did about her out west adventure (link here: http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2008/09/01/news/news01.txt). It struck me chiefly by the vivid and glorious photograph of April and Honeychild in relief by the direct American sun. I teared up and looked to find some child or teacher to grab to show it to but none were convenient. But also, as I read through the contents of the article, I began reflecting upon something I remember April writing, whether it was in her blog or in a letter I forget, about the moment when Dana decided to leave the expedition. April likened this feeling to the blind and scary feeling she felt when in an airplane descending into Delhi several years earlier, feeling entirely alone and overwhelmed. Since reading that, I felt, reordered, and wrapped that particular sensation up, and maybe several times I have thought about it since then when I wasn't looking. But today I wanted to think about it some more. I was also provoked by reading various articles on the hurricane that was threatening New Orleans, and reflecting on the feeling those people felt then and now, getting on a bus, without knowing where one was going or if one would ever get back. Surely this sensation is not the point of travel or these types of things, but in fact a painful reoccurring theme of life which is to be avoided. No--the reasons must be many to remove oneself from others or so cryptic one is compelled without any sense at all (or otherwise dictated as in war or in hurricanes).

All of this threw good fodder on a fire that always has coals to me now, the abiding awareness of my separation. Since I've left, many startling things of lesser and greater sorts have happened to make me reconsider my stupidity or brashness for coming out leaving behind my commitments to people at home, which are made automatically through the order of living. With my eyes continually riveted back home by such incidents, it paints a potentially whimsically reality of my decision to live in Taiwan, and I borrow it from one of my favorite authors in his absolutely best book, Invisible Cities. He describes a particularly strange city, one where all the buildings have been built upon tall poles so that nothing ever touches the earth (people sleep in hammocks below their houses). The chief occupation of the residents, besides getting by in this precarious set-up, is a continuous and absorbing examination through telescopes of the earth below; muses the author: "fascinated by their own absence?" If fascinated is not particularly the right word, the oddity for me is equal to look back at a world, through the small hints I receive (nevertheless highly scrutinized) of photos and letters, web-address of front page stories, and all the pleasant and disturbing confetti that makes its way across the sea, and find that they all pertain the same irregular fact that I am not there. Now I may as well quote A. E. Housman,
“Is my team plowing,
That I was used to drive
And hear the harness jingle
When I was man alive?”
But I do not own to have these affectations so great to be much concerned with my absence. Obviously, my absence considers into my image of home now. But the angles and shades of this disposition are many; it also says that the image of myself in Taiwan is one without the healthy presence of my friends and family, and it is their absence which is so conspicuous and not mine. Have the poets written about this? Oh, they have endlessly moaned about their hearts lost in the highlands or wherever their native resort. They have also clamored to proclaim the essential sameness of all diverse nations and seasons. After clamoring about the world, William Saroyan once wrote how shocked he was to find music unchanged, stepping into a music store in some city in eastern Europe and catching a wisp of Mozart and, by God, there it was again. The realities seem many from this side. We do not know why the residents who lived up those long poles were doing what they were doing, looking at the ground, but maybe one day they find out.

A Hair Cut

To celebrate my seventh Saturday on the island and as a natural result of the rate at which hair grows, I decided to get my hair cut. I have been sick (am still sick) which involves an obnoxiously thick and sore head, uneven and inconsistent perceptual ability, and an intermittent but consistent dripping nose. Though I haven't pinpointed the cause of this sickness (I always find myself trying to pinpoint the cause of my sickness, as if every sickness is unnatural and therefore must have a specific cause), I think it has to do with the physiological/psychological response with being here, having finally established myself here in an apartment and job enough so the the initial adrenaline spent upon surviving here has fled, the stress that was always there is finally able to take its toll. This and a few lousy nights of sleep have angered my body and mind for disrupting the balance of a healthy life and making me now sleep fifteen hours a day and wander about like a zombie.

Originally, getting my hair cut was going to be one of those perfect days. I had picked the place specifically because it was right next door to my favorite milk tea shop, and so after a haircut I would march down to the park with a bubble tea mix in my hand and have a good old, relaxed way with it. (Bubble tea for those who don't know is a novelty drink that I haven't yet grown tired of. Mixed into a sweetened cup of milk tea, the "bubbles" are actually small balls between the size of pebbles and marbles made out of tapioca. Many people do not like bubble tea and it strikes me as very much like bubble gum, which I don't like. The tapioca is pleasantly indistinct in its taste. The real pleasure is afforded by their springy soft texture in the mouth and also the extra thick straw that is provided to suck them up with the tea. The first time I tried bubble tea I did not know that there were "bubbles" inside and somehow delighted by the absurdly thick straw took a big swig and the pressure induced by a ball in the pipe shot into my mouth like a bullet and sent me into fits of coughing. After that, I learned to befriend this relationship and have enjoyed the drink now and then ever since. However, an ever better mixture that is sold at such ubiquitous said tea shops is a sweet red tea with vanilla ice cream in it---oo-la-la, it's good.) But a planned day is just a good recipe for a bad day as it is for a good day, and, already a bit sick and definitely more than averagely woozy from all the sleep, I walked into the hair shop not really sure about anything--not really even sure if I needed a haircut or not. But I made some rather detached observations about the time I had been here and how long I had been without a hair cut and also recalling some comments my boss made about looking better with short hair, and so I was somewhat armed with certainty when I put my nose to the glass doors, somewhat bewildered and annoyed when I had to push closer and closer, standing there like an idiot, before they slid sideways by their automatic motion. No one was in that cool place except for the three ladies there sitting in the chairs, and they quickly got up and seemed to circle me and somehow I was in a chair and was being massaged and was being asked, "this is okay ma?" If I was somewhat armed with a certainty that I needed a hair cut, I was absolutely ill-prepared to speak any Chinese, which was really okay, I mean, what is there to say that you can't motion for with your hands? All I managed was to respond to one lady who, I finally gathered, was asking me if I knew how to speak Chinese. Again, no problem there, my look of complete bewilderment told her volumes more than I can yet articulate in her native tongue. It is indeed an experience to know all that can be done and more without a necessary understanding of anything.

As I sat there, being massaged, I couldn't help various thoughts and doubts flicker through my mind. I thought, where are the scissors? where are the gels? When I told Jeff that I was going to get a hair cut earlier that week and if he had any suggestions, he said only that basically every place was a modeling salon and that the only risk was that sometimes they were fronts for more lucrative employments that occurred in back rooms for more money and less clothing. But I let this pass because there was certainly no danger here. But I should say that there is something in the culture here of such services as salons that somewhat excuses me for thinking this, even in such an obviously innocent place as this. My exhibition through the salon was something of a series of being passed around by young, cooing women who were constantly touching my head, rubbing my shoulders, and saying the few endearments they knew in English: "so beautiful," as they ran their fingers through my hair. It's something akin to the beetlenut mamas, who wear small clothing and sit behind their desks wrapping the disgusting nut-chew mixtures, and for an extra few dollars they will allow costumers to touch their hands as they wrap the nut in spices and leaves. Are they prostitutes? Or is it innocent, suggestive pleasure? And where does the line fall?

I couldn't help comparing this to the last haircut I received in Malaysia. For five ringgit (that's less than two dollars) I had an Indian man cut my hair with nothing but hair-clippers and a comb, and it only took something like a minute and a half. It was a worthy haircut too, I might add, and these women where taking just milimeters with tentative snips, and using feathering scissors, too, and I knew the longer a haircut lasts the more money one is able to demand. First the massage, then the hair cut, then they took me to the back of the room and laid me down in a large leather chair and I couldn't help smiling as they laid my head back into a washing basin--a sensation that never fails to please. The original of such sensation is the one we learn from childhood where we are still able to stretch completely out in the tube and are able to dip our head back until the warm water encompasses our brow. Then after this I was taken again to another chair, with pink towels in a loose turban about my head, and again I was massaged and my hair was combed and blown dry, and all the time I was thinking how much it would be. My general philosophy succumbed to thinking 'whatever will come will come;' this line of thought was somewhat aided by the subduing nature massage has I think. But I was pleased when I finally left, a US ten dollars less the richer, but so much more happier and clean and healthy. A massage was probably exactly what I needed, anyway. As for my haircut, it really isn't so good. The Taiwan aesthetic considering hair cuts or anything else is an appreciation and striving toward softness. I recently had a photo taken for my work visa at a professional photo-taking place (persuaded to do so by my boss) and what arrived was a series of head shots so photoshop-ed that I found myself ridiculously new looking, with toy-soldier red cheeks, an utter and complete softness to my eyes and lips, and the entire photo glowing from the presence of the use of a soft lense. So, today my hair is so feathered it disappears seamlessly into the phenomena about it, as if charged by the electricity inherent in everything. But in several days my hair, as well as my sickness, is sure to subside and return anew to that balance and efficiency of life that continuously shapes the naked shingles of this world.

Thunder and Operatic Pottery

Written in my apartment as if began to rain, Sunday August 10th, transfered to school computer the next day
It began to thunder as I rode home, even though the sky to one side was only partially cloudy, but the thunder was so great and present I trembled to wait for the red light in what seemed like the middle of the intersection, and I found myself looking at the buildings taller than I was. But were they tall enough? Lightning flashed making me jump and again it thundered, and it was very impressive. It made my spine tingle with a divinizing energy that made me involuntarily afraid. I peddled home quickly on my bike newly worked on, much improved by the addition of air to my tires, oil to my chains, and alignment to my front tire. While waiting, I had the boy put a touch of oil to my bike lock that I had to jiggle and jerk to get loose and now I happily only turn the key and the thing swings magically open all by itself. Outside the elevator in the hall to my apartment, it thundered again, and it was like thunder in a movie theatre. I wonder if you know the story they tell of two rival theatre houses in England, each trying to out do the other with their fantastic stage effects. For a particular storm scene in one of its shows, one house would use these large sheets of metal that stage hands shook for the effect of thunder, and this was so well contrived and anticipated that one night the rival theatre company stole these sheets, thus depriving the night’s performance of its success and effectively creating the expression we are all now familiar with: “stealing one’s thunder.”

I discovered new excitement around the city today, which is good for my spirit, as I look toward the next week of school starting tomorrow morning. School isn’t a burden to me—I wouldn’t say that. Much of it is joyful work—but there are moments of great doubt and feelings of inadequacy which I think are probably very natural feelings in this situation, given the task and responsibility of not only teaching small students but also instilling in these students the love and happiness of learning. In such cases, it is very easy to be angry with one’s self for not being greater, quicker, more creative, and so on. And so, nights like tonight, where the shadow of tomorrow already looms or stands in the corner like a man with folded hands—it is quite something to know that there are other things to depend and rely on if school turn out completely successful. With this peace of mind, one is able to accept that tomorrow will come and with it new trouble. One turns their mind to it, and once the acceptance is clean—the sails are made bold, the map consulted—the work becomes something beyond one’s self and turns a better shade of thought.

I biked to the north end of the city to the Chiayi cultural center, which is basically a compound of some museums, music halls, parks with very absurd pieces of art scattered about, and so on. I wandered through some very impressive galleries (and others not so impressive). I was particularly taken with their collection of Kofi (Kopi?) pottery. I’m not very versed on Kofi pottery, but it uses a certain style of glazing that makes everything very bright and glassy—to western sensibilities perhaps too gaudy. But in the right context it is very rich, expressive medium, and more often than not, beautiful shapes are created with it, whether derived from mythology, nature, or traditional Chinese tales. The story scenes depicted with the Kofi style pottery were what startled me. The complexity, intricacy, and business of the scenes matched those same qualities of a Hogarth print, but the gaudiness, the three-dimensionality, and the frequency of mythological creatures and characters was evocative of Grecian friezes in the way they might of looked. Yet on top of this, they held the attention and fascination of the miniature and still-life, like puppetry or a doll’s house. Some scenes were inspired and based upon traditional tales of filiality, emphasizing the balance and harmony between various relationships (father to son, father to wife, son to mother, friend to friend, and so on, the only relationship of equanimity being the latter, and all others relying upon a dynamic of appropriate deference). I am endlessly intrigued by stories told visually in practically all forms in which this occurs (and they occur everywhere whether it is a comic book, eighteenth century English prints, and monastic and traditional murals of any tradition). The richness of narrative and perspective is fascinating to me. (To be honest, it’s sometimes why I think I enjoy the medium of cinema and theatre so well because of how entirely they have consumed this aspect of artifice. It begins with Charlie Chaplin and leads on the whole way out in acting and mise en scene to this day. Hitchcock is another truly great example of purely visual entertainment.)

However, these clay vignettes added to what is usually done in two dimensions such a new intrigue of three dimensionality that you could spent a good long time looking at them from every angle, not wishing to move them a centimeter, designed perfectly to fit the space. Like the Chinese painting, the empty space, the white paper that shines through as part of the painting, is the most defining aspect. Although several were large complex scenes of figures, there were several Kofi scenes that were very simple and yet very evocative. They reminded me of the Dutch painters, Vermeer in particular—a woman rising out of bed caught in the light. Some, slightly between the large scene and the portraits, were scenes that reminded me of the set and action of a Chinese, or western, opera, as if all that noise and confusion were hushed and framed and boxed into these brilliantly colored and imagined scenes. As I said, they also had the fascination a doll’s house has, and so I found myself as much taken with the relationships between the actors in the scene as I was with the growing, flowering plants in equal miniature or the well executed horse’s saddle, and so on.

Along a walk outside, they had various other amusements. Kids were making their own Kofi on a long table. Teenagers were practicing some dance moves to some electronic music. I walked down further to the long line of booths selling orchids and ferns and cactus. The orchids were orchids, and the cacti were cacti, but the ferns were not ferns. They were great, strange, terrible things; some were mounted aloft on square pieces of blackened earth, and they grew, as if on tree bark, and let flow down great antlers of green, or else they curled and toiled themselves outward and inward in odd, yet simple, shapes like pale, oddly colored ears. Some ferns were growing out of pots, some in full spread, others in long searching tendrils, their tongues, like those of butterflies, still tightly curled, pondering their nearing execution of perfection. And yet others hadn’t pushed forth their green stems at all, and what sat in the black soil was a hairy stump, something ugly and soft that would eventually sprout the great spindly fern when conditions were hopeful.

In the last stall I was pleased to smell something familiar. A woman was serving some oolong in a very neat stall with various shelves with tea sets (as well as random tea cups and pictures and pots). Her name was Carol and she spoke English very well, although she denied this when I told her. We talked about the pottery (she collected it and didn’t make it) and the different glazes, the Kofi pottery that I had just seen; but more we talked about the cups in her shop and tea. She was impressed that I liked “Chinese tea,” that all her other western friends didn’t like it. We finished drinking the Ali Shan and she brewed me some organic tea (I didn’t quite understand this, but the “organic” part of it had to do with some worm that ate some part of the leaf) from a place I think she said was Shi Tou, an hour north of Chiayi. She very innocently asked if I liked this tea better or Ali Shan better, but it was something like a test with a very obvious answer. I told her I liked the latter (Shi Tou) better, and it was true. It was better, and much more fragrant, and she smiled and we went on talking. She again—innocently—asked me if I liked tea or coffee. I said I liked them both quite well. Again, here she was in agreement with me and told me that every morning she had to have some black coffee. After every subsequent meal she always made tea—this kind of tea, in this fashion, not just a bottle of tea you buy at the store, she told me. She told me that a true delight on a very hot day was a liter bottle filled with cool water let sit in the fridge with a scoop of rolled oolong for about 8 hours, until the tea completely unraveled. After that—she had no English word to describe it—but it was obviously a very fine thing to drink. It was a very pleasant conversation, and all the while the wind would blow, or I would wander about her shop again, looking at the pieces, and then sit back down again. Another lady sat down to drink with us and we had something of a Chinese lesson; indeed, I have my best lessons over tea, it seems. And at some point, much later, I excused myself. Rain looked very imminent and, as I wheeled home, I found that at least thunder and lightening was imminent, and also that I had a flat tire. But this was happiness I tell you, and somehow or other, I am here again typing, with thoughts of school, thoughts of dinner, thoughts of an hour train ride north to Shi Tou when I next can fix it and so on

If at first you don't succeed...

Written at home on computer Wednesday August 6th, transfered next day in the evening to Imagine Children's School's office computer in the evening time.

Three days of teaching under the belt, as we say. An odd expression, but it feels like to me that I have indeed experienced and kept these days—strapped them—very close to me. They have not been fond for me, rather, difficult. But the emotional experience has been of immediacy and importance. It is very important to me that I make something of teaching small children, not simply for the unselfish reasons that the kids may learn something or that I may delight in their success. There are mundane reasons plenty that keep me at my task. Would I do this if I could walk away tomorrow, I wonder? I don’t know. But there are reasons I do not walk away, and I think it is also good to stick with it. The first adjustment is always the hardest. But that’s maybe a lie. If you’ve ever read the children’s book Holes, perhaps you remember when the protagonist lies down, dusty and worn from his first day digging a hole. Another child tries to cheer him up and says, “the first hole is always the hardest.” But the boy finds out, the next day, when he is again assigned to dig a hole, that it is even more difficult than before. He is still tired from the first day and his hands are covered with blisters that easily break. Again, the third day the trial is worse, and so on until, at some point, though digging the hole each day remains difficult, he finds an ease to it. He finds his body turned lithe and strong, his hands rough and thick, and his method better calculated.

My three morning classes are for kindergarten classes with kids ranging from 2.5 years old to seven years old. The kids in my afternoon class are seven and eight and this is where all my energy is directed. They seem to have abilities below the morning class of six and seven year olds, yet class material and expectations are a lot more advanced. Some are very quick and some are not. I spend a good part of the time splashing about, trying to find firm ground to place stones of knowledge that I let gently into the water only to watch them vanish into he depths of un-understanding. As a result, their attention wanes, they speak Chinese (which in this class is not allowed), they fidget and fight, and so on. My classes often devolve into exercises of classroom management, which I am not happy with. The children spend their time testing my edges, and I spend time myself learning the power I have and do not have over them.

The most important aspect of these past few days have been my attempts between 5 o’clock when I leave the school and eleven at night when I go to sleep (not counting the time that I spend lesson-planning or worrying about my classes) to remove myself emotional, intellectually, and physically from school and find things to do in the city or by myself that are interesting and rejuvenating in their own merits. Although I have not found many people to talk to (the only westerners I have met outside my school were two boys, one from Utah and one from Las Vegas, named Elder Jack and Elder Johnson who sported matching dress-shirts and ties and mandarin translated books of mormon—unfortunately, and as expected, our chance meeting and conversation was singularly directed), I have found things to do.

I have enjoyed wandering about my part of the city, which is a little quieter and quainter than Chiayi central. There is nothing big like shopping malls or movie theatres, but there is a park where old men smoke cigarettes and play checkers or where young mothers go to exercise. I’m recognized everywhere I go but more particularly at several specific restaurants and shops, and at several restaurants I am occasionally pampered with an odd unexpected, free dish, most recently being a red bean popsicle at one place and an Japanese-style onion salad at another (delicious!). There is one teashop quite near by but I find it slightly uninviting and moody, the only time I went, I felt like I was coming into a living room and soon left. I sometimes walk about the residential areas and have even visited some garden stores for plants and flowers to grow. I have not made any friends yet with the local people in my rambles but there is certainly a friendliness, an expectation of certain smiles and nods in my usual haunts. There is not enough language yet to have friends, and so this pushes me on to learn more.

I continue to learn Chinese. This endeavor is supported whenever I go outside, listening to the many conversations that I hear, finding some people who can speak a little English and the attempt to clear up the empty spaces between. I also have a Rosetta Stone program that I work on every night. I have made a chart where I check off certain exercises and though I’m persistent, I am not in the habit yet of rewarding myself with stickers! I also have some flash cards and a very small phrase book. Other than this, it is live and learn.

Of course, there is tea to enjoy and escape to, and though I have not bought any local tea since I did some Ali Shan, I have plenty of puerh tea from Malaysia that I drink often enough in the evenings. I compliment this by listening to opera, and occasionally I also have little snacks I have purchased at local bakeries. One bakery near by has this delicious buttery sesame coated crust cookie that is so flakey. And inside is a red bean paste, some fiber, and a bit of yellow saltiness in the center (a bit of a duck egg, I don’t know). The first bite is wonderful because the middle collapses together and all the sweet and salty flavor is released.

It has been very nice to receive post and I am surprised every day when I get a letter from my sister so far away. I think I have gotten three letters from her, and it is magical to hear her words and dreams and thoughts. Today she even slipped into the envelope some mule braid and snake skin, emblems of another world they seemed! Reading letters is such sustenance to me. It is so tangible that you can lift it in your hands, a preciousness that you can see and count.

There is yet more to do here. I sometimes think that it is loneliness that affects me. Indeed, there is not a lot of conventional friendship or support. But I have my family. I do have my friends still. I have many people that I interact with everyday, too. But I think it is true that it is hard to feel like I am sharing in an experience with somebody; in such cases it is much easier to find meaning and wisdom and support in the things that you do. But it also feels nice to do it alone, like swimming out far into the waves. There is meaning and wisdom and support all around or, as we say, in your self! So it’s something of a process, blistered hands but a gradual unlayering, an eye toward tomorrow when not confounded by the day, a charge to engage, persist, and let go.

National Identi-tea or The First Whiff

First photo is a homebrew of some oo-long (Ali Shan). Note the particularly large leaf. The second photo is the puerh shop in Malaysia.

July 31st, Imagine Children's School Office; a particularly bright and sunny day

Today I decided to explore the Taiwan rails leading out of Chiayi city. I was tired of futzing about my apartment, and, since I was rained in the last couple of days, and because the sky surrounding the mountains since the rain left have been so clear, I decided it was time to see the countryside. First, I walked down to the school and picked up some books to prepare before classes begin. Then I rode my bike into the center of town, packing in my satchel some fine dried Italian sausage that I finally decided was time to eat (purchased all the way back in London Borough market some five or six weeks ago, it made it’s way through the various and rough climates of Ladakh, Delhi, and Malaysia all without cultivating any rogue strands of mold as far as I can tell) some morning pastry stuff that is purple and that tastes like purple, some water, and a mandarin language phrase book that I take with me everywhere. My plan was to go to Ali Shan today. Shan, in mandarin, means mountain; it is one of the few words I knew before coming here. When I was in Taiwan two years ago, it was on the occasion of attending an academic program at a Taiwanese Buddhist monastery in Khaosiung in the southern part of the island. The campus of the monastery there is called Fo Guang Shan, which means, in English, Buddha Light Mountain.

(Actually, the program that I participated in two years ago was occurring again all this last month and in their last week, in their cultural tour, they actually stopped by in Chiayi City last Friday to visit the main producing plant of Ten In faux meat products just outside of the city. I got in touch with the venerable who co-ordinates the program and took a taxi to meet them for lunch at the plant, which I knew would be extravagant. Yifa, the venerable, was always making the point to the American, Canadian, and British students participating that vegetarian and fake meat foods could be just as good if not better than meat foods. She takes each group of skeptical western, steak-loving students to all the best vegetarian buffet restaurants in Taiwan. Some of these restaurants I consider taking the ninety minute train to Khaosiung just on the hope of finding again. As I expected, half-way through the meal the students were saying, “oh I can’t eat another bite,” and, “more?—really?” And the enthusiastic factory workers were still bringing platter after platter of bizarre Taiwan food, complete with ice sculptures, dry-ice burning away into steam for affect, watermelon rind cut to resemble bird-of-paradise flower, and so on. The meal was incredible. All the while, we were served in a large factory room at large round tables, in junky chairs, that were completely tied up and dress up in pink ribbons and brocade for the special occasion.)

As I don’t have anything like a guidebook to tell me the interesting things to do in this area, I’ve relied only what other people have told me, and so far Ali Shan is the only place I really know about. The poster at the train station clearly noted the times that it left the station, the next one being in thirty minutes at one something o’clock. But it also clearly described the trains coming back from Ali Shan, and the latest one described was at one something, too, so I thought I would not be able to make the three hour mountainous ride there and back simultaneously today, so I settled for a random stop Douliou (actually on the way to Ali Shan) to try my blind luck. I was hoping Douliou would be a quaint no-where place at the foot of the mountains where I could walk around and sit under the shade of some tree, listen to the insects hissing and crackling and enjoy my packed lunch. Unfortunately, after the thirty minute train ride or so, I was dropped off at a metropolitan square something like the one I had just left and so exasperated and slightly trapped I went looking for the next best thing: if I could not have wilderness and mountain landscapes, then I could at least have tea.

Tea shops are everywhere in Taiwan—but they are more aptly named, tea stands, and they sell chilled milk tea, bubble tea, jelly teas, and various other tea gimmicks that are sometimes quite good, but what I was looking for was a real tea shop, like the one I had been to in Malaysia, where I could sit with the owner and drink tea for thirty or sixty minutes before pretending to buy something. It was my luck that I did find such a shop. The man said he was a teacher who taught Chinese, and I told him I taught English and some how it came out that we both liked tea too and so soon he was doing the inevitable, serving me tea. These friendships you have to be careful with because they occasionally involve money and after enjoying yourself, and feeling completely wealthy, you have no qualms about buying this or that, but, nor, on the other hand, is the proprietor so strict with the prices and so knocks off decimal points or numbers, by howeversomuch he is feeling generous. We talked about family, we drank tea, we laughed at my pronunciation of Chinese and at his failed attempts to communicate something, but we got on all right. He had a very limited vocabulary but it was surprising when he spoke because it was with a perfect accent—except when he said black. Black with the students at our school, I already have noticed, is a particularly dreadful word to say. It comes out like they’re chewing marbles. But we made it through the different names for tea, and I innocently enough asked him if he liked Puerh tea (see blog, “Drinking Golden Dust”) but thankfully I didn’t say it. It took him a couple times to understand me. “Puerh?” he said. “Ah puerh,” he said. He shook his head and his hands in front of him at the same time. “I don’t like puerh,” he said. “Puerh is from China.” Ah, I thought, of course. The distinction that some Taiwanese make between themselves and China is sometimes very strict. There is a further contention with the appellation of “Taiwanese,” disputed by the various peoples who are not ethnically Chinese, or who are the Hakka who came and populated the area before Chiang Keishek and his government. This man even noted that my guidebook unfortunately was “Chinese” which is true enough but it’s nothing I felt like I could or should apologize for.

But as puerh is “China’s tea,” oo-long is Taiwan’s. Taiwan, or earlier named by the Portuguese, That Beautiful Island, is composed in the interior by mountains, which since I don’t know when have been devoted to growing some of the finest and freshest tasting oo-long teas. Oo-long tea derives its potency by its freshness and is usually categorized as having a flowery taste, which is usually in contrast to the chlorophyll taste of green tea. So, although I didn’t make it to Ali Shan, I at least could drink the tea grown and produced there in Douliou. Like wines, depending on the mountain and the method of manufacturing, they are of a better quality or lesser quality. For example, the leaves of most oo-long are rolled tightly into small balls that unfurl when you brew them. Sometimes these leaves are machine rolled, but the better ones are hand rolled.
We also drank a tea from Lee Mountain. He kept pointing to the Ali Shan tea and saying, “good,” and then pointing to the Lee Shan tea and saying, “great!” I got the idea and indeed his scaling was accurate. Ali Shan oo-long was indeed very good. It had a fullness of flavor and freshness that was all a breath of life to me. The qualities of oo-long are of health and radiance; its effects are cosmetic in the sense that what was at default is now perfected and what was ailing has now been brought back into the whole. Just like flower or vegetable essence, the first scent of a good oo-long immediately soothes and clears your many distractions and worries fall away like rain. Like the phrase, “stop and smell the roses,” the smell of the oo-long instead stops you. And then of course you can taste it.

Recently more carried away with puerh tea, I had forgotten the certain manner and distinction of brewing oo-long. For both teas, you can brew in water just boiling and both teas have enough measure and potency to them that they can last 6 or 8 brews easily. But here the similarities seize including in terms of the items in which you use to brew them.

All teas in this style are brewed over a table that in some measure has a drain so that the water that is inevitably splashed or spilled is taken into account (in my apartment I can get by simply with a bowl with a large lip to place the brewing pot and strainer in). Instead of the miniature brown clay teapot used for puerhs, oo-long is brewed in a gaiwan, a container the size and shape of a hotel issue western tea-cup without a handle, which proves a difficulty.

The gaiwan has a lid that sits on top that helps contain the heat. One places the tightly rolled oo-long tea into the gaiwan (only to 1/5 the measure of the container, otherwise, when they come unrolled, like popped popcorn, the tea will overflow the container) and blanches it quickly with boiling water. This is very literally and judiciously splashed over the teacups. I had forgotten how long you may steep the tea. The old puerhs I have been drinking seem like they brew instantly and anything too long turns dangerous. But this tea just gets good when it’s left in there for a good 30 seconds. The leaves are potent but they are more rubbery and take a little longer to release their flavor. It is difficult to pour using the gaiwan. There is no handle and so with thumb and middle finger one holds the 100 degree Celsius container on its outermost and coolest extremity which is the rim, and with one’s index finger one pulls back the lid so that one may drain the tea and keep back the tea (much like how one holds the lid of a pot to drain the water left from boiling potatoes). This procedure is difficult, especially for one beginning to brew tea. The urge to dash the gaiwan to the floor is kept in check by the knowledge of the delicacy of the china you are using, so even when you feel the tips of your fingers burning you must still return the gaiwan carefully and slowly to its saucer. This process is further complicated and the finger tips are further scorched because sometimes the lid is held back too far and tea leaves begin to slide out along with excess water that further burns your fingers or else the lid is held too tightly and the tea drains away painfully slowly. Even more—unlike puerh where a little water left over in the pot is a good idea (it gentle brews while you prepare for the next round and makes the flavor even stronger)—any water left over in the fresher teas is not so good. It brews further while it sits and can become quite bitter and unpleasant.

Once you’ve poured your tea from the gaiwan (hopefully with seeming ease) you pick up the first cup, the sniffer which is tall and thin. Sometimes at this point the normal shaped teacup is placed on top upside down of the sniffer so that it looks like a mushroom. Then one takes the two cups, holding top and bottom securely together, and flips it upside down. One lifts the tall cup from the normal cup and, if the two are a set, the tea is now perfectly in the normal cup. Why do you do this? Well, the tall cup, the “sniffer,” is designed with its extended amount of surface area so the drinker may immediately place the rim to his or her nose to catch that first, intimate whiff, indicative of the caliber and personality of the tea. The whiff of oo-long tea is perhaps the most pleasant and important part of the journey. Of course, the taste is there, thick with tannin, and the color of the tea is often crystal clear and either a shocking green or yellow, but it is really the first contact with the tea, the whiff, that seems to be the very spirit of oo-long. At this tea shop, the proprietor merely lined three of these tall cups up between us (even though there were only two of us) and every time he brewed more tea, instead of having to wait, he simply refilled these shots and every time you needed more tea you simply took one of these and poured it into your own, the first time doing so, of course, also taking that first whiff of oo-long.

The quality of puerh that is so revered is its ability to age and grow better with time. How could teas that lose their freshness after a season compete? But now, on this side of the water, surrounded by this land and tea, I wonder if it is not the ephemeral quality of tea that is still more rare and sweet? When I return to America I will still have puerh that will continue to age and perfect. But it will be impossible to obtain the freshness of oo-long so far away.

Coffee and Sympathy

Begun in a note book July 23rd, Wednesday, 8 something o’clock, at Good Afternoon Cafe

I’m in a very nice coffee house that I’m in for the first time. I wasn’t interested in going here until tonight when I realized how close it was to my apartment and how nice it would be to have a calm place to do some of my work and to shed my thoughts, something I’ve been unable to do lately in my all too familiar apartment so close to the school and not on the hot night streets or crowded dusky parks, but I needed the sensation distance and coolness. And then, when I arrived, I almost turned around again. I was met at the door with a waiter with a red bow tie and a menu and a head of hair that was so excessive it should not have been allowed in this country or any country, and I looked down the long line of various glass contraptions that occupied the bar, no doubt for some exotic way of boiling water, and I thought, I hate excessive coffee places. And I saw all the tables filled with families and couples and all this told me that it was not somewhere for a long traveler to simply come and rest, certainly not one who would make the point of nursing one’s coffee for several hours simply for the excuse of a place to sit and think. In that kind of situation, it is such a bother to have someone wait on you. You feel rushed, and then before you know it you’re back out on the streets with your thoughts again and no relief. But I couldn’t turn around now and so I acquiesced to get one coffee and leave. That I was a foreigner that apparently didn’t know how to order coffee in such a strange place, the manager was beckoned who could speak English, and immediately it came out that I was a teacher (for the second time tonight someone had asked me, “what job do you have?” and it occurs to me now that the only foreigners that I’ve seen have been at work and probably most white people that are here have a job, like me, teaching English. And for the second time that night the person knew about Imagine Children’s School, this latter instance being less surprising as the school is right down the road.

They worked it out that I just wanted a coffee (perhaps you couldn’t just order a coffee) and I requested it to be with ice, which is what I’m so used to ordering in second and third rate joints where they basically load the coffee up with sweet and condensed milk and it transforms into a real cooling treat. But, as soon as I saw him grinding the coffee right in front of me, I thought what nonsense that was. I decided that to ice the coffee (and thus diminish the taste and delicacy of freshness) would be a travesty and that no matter how hot I was, I would drink my coffee hot anyway. And so we had another exchange, first with the waiter, and then with the manager to make sure that indeed I did want hot coffee, and then we talked a little bit of how to say, hot and cold, in Chinese. I put my stuff at the bar so that they wouldn’t have to worry about finding a table for me, and so I sat down my shoulder bag and a 5800 ml jug of water that I had just bought for drinking purposes in my apartment. With shorts and socks and slippers I felt just a little bit silly and out of place, sitting on the high stool at the bar, especially when he began brewing the coffee in the beautiful glass instruments that employed sophisticated and balanced laws of heat and pressure to produce a truly fascinating show of coffee being infused with and then strained of coffee—all this with his excessive hair and bar suit I felt a little bit awkward and hung out to dry for everyone to see. The coffee was then placed in a truly delicate set of china with a mixing instrument of a sort of gold and silver that I have never seen before and when he sat it by me he also said, “and here is some cake.” Something in the way he said it made me not refuse it, as if one always got cake with coffee. Perhaps, the order of coffee (I saw on the menu it looked like all orders were around 150 NT—which is 5 dollars) always came with cake, but it also seems like they could have simply given me my coffee and taken off part of the price of the thing. Surely they did not think I expected cake? But, anyway, I was in mood for cake too, and so I accepted it.

Something that I still don’t understand are the ebbs and flows of the after work hours of Taiwan. Restaurants fill and empty very quickly, as if everyone were going to the same event, so eating in a crowded restaurant, you’ll look around to suddenly find you’re alone. And walking passed an empty restaurant on the way in to town, on the out of town, will be way packed. This penchant for fluctuation of moons and pulls invisible to me occurred while I was drinking that coffee, and before I had finished my cake and coffee (I was very nearly done, actually) and having not bothered to even pull out my lesson planning, I was suddenly ushered to a small comfortable table and chair where no body was sitting. In fact, nobody was sitting anywhere in the vicinity and half the place was now empty. And then everything suddenly seemed to get twice as good. By some secret—are they being nice to teachers? are they trying to win over a foreigner?—a waitress after sometime brought me another cake, this one a Taiwanese pudding, with milk and bean on it and she explained, in broken English, what it was and that it was very good and then she asked me more questions about how long I had been here, if I knew Chinese, and so on. And then after more time had passed and I thought (gosh, it better look like I’m working) they brought me another coffee, and when I had finished that, they brought me some water, and I sat in the chair for, oh, I don’t know how long. And I kept thinking how free that had all been. What would happen when I returned to the restaurant? When do I become a customer and not an object of interest and generosity? And I sat there and thought up ridiculous lesson plans for me six year olds, mostly involving various doodles of frowning stick figures about to be swallowed by monsters or sliced in two by pirates or another stick figure representing “the boy who cried wolf” (we had read the book the day before) who I put surrounded by savage forest beasts and I gave him a little voice shouting, “help, help, help, please help me!” And I wandered in that abstract sense wherein it is impossible to ascertain the truth whether my six year olds would help the boy with the game I had thought up or if these plans were nothing but wasted paper, broken wind, and one more progressive mistake.

Chaiyi

July 20th Sunday, Imagine Chilren's School Office

I came into Taipei in a cloud of white that I could not penetrate, then ocean, then a coast. The ocean looked like it was five feet below me but it most have been hundreds or thousands. After the twelve hour, overnight bus ride from Penang Malaysia to Singapore, and after wandering about that city with my eight pounds of traveling stuff looking for the MRT station, and after finally arriving at the Changi airport, and after the flight which had taken an hour longer than usual (due to typoon, I learned later), I was finally arriving in Taipei. Of course, after arriving at Taipei at six o'clock, I was found and pushed into a van that took me one and a half hours away ot Taichung where I was put into a yellow taxi and taken to my hotel for that night. Much had lost power in Taichung so I could neither call or e-mail to confirm my arrival. It was still pouring here, where the typhoon had struck hardest (something like 600mm of rain, the news said) but the peculiar thing was that there hadn't been any wind at all as is usual with typhoon. That next morning, Adrian Wu picked me up (the man who had been my coorespondant and had lined me up with the job I finally took in Chaiyi). He lives in Taichung but drove me the next two hours to Chaiyi. Already, three and some hours south of Taipei, that sits upon the northern nose of Taiwan, I am in the south of the island, an hour or two away from Khaosiung, the southern most end of the island.

At the airport in Singapore, at a bookstore, I looked at the lonely planet entry for Chaiyi, and it basically said that Chaiyi wasn't the worst waste of time, that it could be seen in one day or two. It also said something like, "you can walk across the city in thirty minutes, but it's not something you would want to do because of all the smog." But the qualities that attract the tourist are not necessarily the same qualities that attrance a potential resident. This is what I hoped. More to come later.

Drinking Golden Dust

July Tenth, Starbucks, Queensbay Mall, Penang, Malaysia

I’ve deduced that I’m “over” my Delhi belly because here I am in Starsbucks and have just finished drinking hot chocolate and eating a coconut-flaked, green tea treat and I’m not squirting, to put it crudely. It was raining all this morning , making a racket in my room, and so, as it is with rain, I slept with it until noon. I’m staying on the 12th floor of an apartment complex with Hun’s family—his parents live on the 12th floor, his brother’s family on the 10th--and so I heard the rain against the aluminum awning or perhaps an a/c unit.

For those few people who have not wandered through Malaysia, it is actually quite an interesting place. I don’t know too much about it, so I’ll butcher this. Basically, it’s a Muslim country but very diverse. Beside the native population of ethnic Malaysians, there are a good number of Chinese and Indian citizens who have a long culture here. Malaysia was one of the British territories and gained independence in 1957 and from then on has been doing alright by the looks of it. Probably as a result of these cultures, and that the country is situated around water (Penang where I'm staying is an island), food is very important here. As they say here, “some people eat to live, but we live to eat!”

As a result of the British imperialism, English is a common accessory on television, radio, and basically every counter involving cash exchanges. If you're living here to learn another language, you won't. You don't ever need anything else but English. However, English isn't the preferred language and it is by far not the easiest way to express yourself here day to day . For that, people seem to use a mixture of the languages available. Hun's family, for example, speaks fairly interchangeably, English, Hokkien, and Cantonese. Malay itself has inherited and bastardized English words, making it nearly comprehensible at times in certain contexts. The signs for example in a grocery store exhibiting both Malay and English translations for products show the similarity. “Sos” is “sauce” “telefone” is “telephone” “kek” is “cake” “mesin” is “machine;” the list goes on. Walking around the market and downtown here, is like taking a stroll down a chapter of George Orwell's 1984 with the Malay language's eerie resemblance to new speak.

Tea Shop:
Yesterday, we went over bridge to the mainland to a fairly interesting tea shop . Even though most Puerh (black, compressed and aged, tea) is grown and made in Yunnan, China, the climate suitable for aging Puerh is found in Southeast Asian areas like Malaysia and not in Yunnan. For this reason, and others, Puerh is found in its greatest, rarest, and oldest forms here. As the interest in Puerh has spiked in recent years, connoisseurs in Taiwan and mainland China have turned their eyes and taste buds to places like Malaysia.

Once Puerh is an exceptional tea among teas. Out of the various teas and producing methods, Puerh tea, grown and prepared specifically in the Yunnan region, has the lovely and unique quality of maturing and aging, much like wine. Unlike oolong, green, and white teas that lose their freshness in a season after packaging, in the compressed and packaged puerh tea a bacteria persists and continues to ferment the leaves, creating a smoother, a clearer, and over all more potent tea as time goes on. As a result, Puerh can also make a investment. At the tea shop that we went to, the owner kept giving examples of how he had sold a certain block of tea for 30,000 RM (10,000 USD) and which was immediately turned over to be should for 125,000 RM. So, very quickly, certain rare and desirable teas can become very expensive.

Luckily, this man was more interesting in brewing and serving us tea than trying to sell it to us. Even before I could start looking at the different cakes upon the back wall, he had sat us down to start brewing us tea. It is customary, even in the tea shops in the malls, for a brewer to always be on duty to entice costumers with their tea. The whole shop smelled like that delicate flavor when you unfurl the light-weight paper that conceals the tea brick. It was different here in the case that he owned the store and was brewing his tea and that he had an assistant and she too was serving tea and that the four or five other people besides us who wandered through did not buy tea either but only seemed interested in drinking the tea that the owner brewed. He used a teak serving tray that was slightly excessive and several washed out tea pourers sat on it useless and used. Another eight or so very tiny tea pots sat on the counter having at one point, perhaps all that day, served their purpose. By his side was a large water dispenser with which he occasionally refilled his glass kettle that he sat on a blue flame to keep continually boiling.

At twenty, he told us he came down with severe liver problems from drinking alcohol from since he was fifteen. As part of his medication, the doctor suggested Puerh tea, which wasn’t at all a “thing” back then . This was in the eighties and so he began buying lots of old Puerh tea. He told us growths had been growing all over his face and neck but went away when he began drinking tea. He told us that his piss, as dark has the tea he was serving us (like coffee), turned soon to the color of the water that we could see boiling in his crystal clear kettle.

As a consequence, he seems now happy and eager to drink tea with costumers all day. He showed us a two 3 kg cakes that he recently purchased (about as large as lazy suzannes). Since he was only able to acquire two bricks, he told us that he promptly broke into both cakes diminishing greatly their desirability and therefore value because he didn't want to be tempted to sell them. He has many old and rare cakes in his collection that he will not sell (as we found out), but which he would also share with anyone who wanted to drink them (as we found out). Even so, one cake he bought for 1,000 RM, he sold again, a quarter it’s original size, for 5,000 RM.

Brewing Methods:
If you are familiar with the Chinese method of brewing tea (old man style), you know that it involves a little teapot that in itself fills a little more or a little less than one western restaurant-issue tea cup. The corresponding teacups, consequently, are tiny, too, giving the drinker a sniff and a swig at the very most. The great pleasure of this type of tea is the various rounds that are brewed, each varying in taste, and each participating to create a dramatic and sequential experience. The chemicals in the tea relax one, as do the chemicals in wine, but unlike alcohol, the tea's euphoria does not seem to impair one's judgment, rather making it clearer and more alert. The "caffeine high" of excessive coffee is not experienced here.

However, as we found out, the more expensive and rare teas (the teas we were drinker were all older than myself, one from the eighties, another from 1971, and a third approximately a hundred years old) are served with even smaller teapots and even smaller tea cups. The teapot, without handle or spout, would be able to sit under a turned-over western teacup easily. And the tea cups themselves would need to be filled twenty times for the volume of one western teacup. As a result of their smallness, both the cups and pot lose heat quickly and so are dashed with hot water between each tasting. And, because the old teas are more potent, one can drink them for up to 20 brews.

Delhi

World Buddhist Center Hotel, July the 6th, H.H. the Dalai Lama's Birthday

I guess I should write a note sort of off the cuff because it seems right. Sometimes what I come up with on my journal or on my laptop doesn't seem so direct or personal once I move it to whatever computer is hooked up to internet. I left Delhi I guess two days ago after being a little sick all day. This had to do with diarrhea let's say and involved (actually) going to a Tibetan doctor (amchi). All of us are a little fascinated with Tibetan medicine and so most of us have had check-ups at some point in our trip, but this seemed real because I actually had some sort of immediate symptoms, which actually, in the end, turned out for worse because I think I sort of got the short term treatment whereas other people got a general diagnoses of, say, a "wind" imbalance and then were given pills and instructions like, "don't eat rice and potatoes or drink tea," which is a fairly common instruction because EVERYONE in Ladakh and Tibet eats tons of rice, potatoes, and tea. Anyway, I took one set of pills one time and haven't had them since. It's sort of like chewing incense and anyway I can't really stomach it still. And I think I'm mostly just sick of the heat and Delhi now.

So now I look forward to Malaysia and Taiwan. Hopefully, Taiwan is really good. It was really hard saying goodbye to my mom today and the people who were leaving to go home. Ryan--boy--if you're reading this, and you probably aren't, even though you have nothing better to do, I wish I was there to look at Duncan with you, watch great/bad movies, or whatever it is that you occupy yourself with these days.

And Pennsylvania!--what I wouldn't do for some cool, cool creeks. I feel like those roaming Irishmen, always singing of the highlands and the valleys that they never again will know. Well, I think I will pack now. We leave tomorrow morning.

Lamayuru Dances

World Buddhist Center Hotel, Somewhere in Delhi, July 6th


Again, I’m in Delhi. It must have been nice weather when I stayed here for a day and a half a night when I arrived or perhaps the summer has just progressed two weeks further, but the weather, as they say, is unbearable. I sit here in my room, which is air-conditioned, typing on my computer to later take a file to a computer with internet to send. Last night my mother woke me up because the air-conditioning in her room had shut off, making it impossible to sleep. I had been in very deep sleep, dreaming I had been in some dark green ocean, talking to strange creatures. And so I wandered about dog-breath halls, searching for empty rooms with a/c, moving mattresses, and so on.


As it stands, our accommodations are very nice, and, yesterday, when we went to the main market and Tibetan refugee town, we were taken by a large air-conditioned bus that Peter, someone who is taking care of us, got for us. It is a luxury in this way to travel with a group that, collectively, can afford such a venture. And as we have two days here, it is possible to fight the natural state of Delhi that a longer stay would make inevitable. And so we flit from air-conditioned room, to American chain restaurants, or anywhere else that will provide momentary refuge of the hot and expending atmosphere. In this way, we are travelers passing through Delhi with no keen interest to know it better in its—what I said before—natural state. Every time you walk out of your room it’s really like stepping into a very hot bathroom where someone just took a shower. And every time you walk into a nicely air-conditioned room, it’s like stepping into a cool forest stream in the very heat of the day, where you could wander and float for hours.


We are no longer exhausted by walking up a set of stairs because of high altitude—yet sweat will come to your body simply by walking to the bathroom. One is fatigued sitting down to dinner.


Many Tibetan things you can find in Delhi for a lot cheaper than Tibet or Ladakh. There are also many Tibetan bookstores selling texts or religious works in Tibetan and so it seems directed more toward Tibetans and their practical religious needs. On the Indian streets, we went shopping as well, developing our bargaining skills slowly or quickly, as each is to his or her own. I bought some little things my self, some offering bowls, some incense, some Amar Chitra Katha comic books, and I also helped my mom bargain for some shawls and other odds and ends for meager prices. It was my first experience where some venders would beg to see to you for lower and lower prices. My mother was considering buying some fancy designed Indian pillowcases that the lady initially priced at 80 rupees (2 USD). The role of thumb is to re-offering something the third of that price and then come to the conclusion at half price. I offered 25 rupees (63? US cents), and then she counter-offered 50 rupees. I think maybe at that point I suggested 30, or perhaps we decided to look elsewhere. There is no polite way to do this except to simply leave the vender with all his or her attempt to entice you with pillowcases spread out before them. But we were followed with hysterical shouts, first with 40 rupees, then “30!,” then “25!” 25 rupees and I guess they are still making some kind of a deal, but to drop this low to a foreigner who could easily afford a good compromise at 30 or 40 felt pretty low, especially when you can walk several yards to the next vender who is selling the exact same thing (sometimes, three blocks is not far enough away to shake a persistent shop keeper as one of us experienced). I don’t know how different the economic situation has to be to make something so desperate here when at other places I’ve been, the local business has been secure enough to reliably get very consistent and reasonable prices from tourists.


The last thing in Ladakh that we did was go to Lamayuru to see the lama dances, a two day festival that happens every year, where many of the wrathful-enlightened deities on the temple walls are brought to life by dancers wearing particular masks and garments and holding characteristic implements in their hands. The accumulation of the affair is the very simple and stylized destruction of an effigy made out of barley flour and butter by a ring of dancers. The fight doesn’t seem quite fair, the effigy being prostrate on the ground, and the dancers with great faces in a large ring with weapons, each taking their turn to impel the effigy with a sword or an arrow. However—who said it needs to be fair? These are, after all, enlightened beings who easily clear the mundane obstructions of this world. For the local population, the dance is an exorcism of all the demons that haunt whatever turbulence is in their lives. For the monks, it is also a ritual enactment of what they do must of the rest of the year within their minds. These cross-purposes make an interesting spectacle. The locals don’t really feel like they need to see the spectacle (must of the time they are circumambulating the space or, if they are too old for this, sitting in a pack of peers and spinning prayer-wheels), and the dancers don’t necessarily need to know someone is watching, either. Oftentimes, they are dancing in a corner where nobody is sitting, and the temper of the dance is too slow to make very much dramatic sense to anyone very intent upon the entire affair.


The dances are haunted by two “clowns” (“goons” I would say, rather) who bother people asking for money. They get young monks to dress up and wear faces of old whispy-haired old men with long leather faces barely stitched together. They bring about a kata with them and throw it over unsuspecting spectators who for a moment are embarrassed as the two clowns beat a wooden penis against a hollow metal tube in your direction. One is only released by this embarrassment by the trifling embarrassment of having to pay them to make them leave, which is part of the whole game I guess. The Ladakhis seemed to authentically enjoy these antics but I think a lot of westerners were simply confused or displeased by it.


Lamayuru, the monastery, is not somewhere you would want to wander about on a late night drun, because with so many dead ends and drop offs, melting away into the night, it would be your last amble. The situation would not occur, fortunately, of wandering around drunk at Lamayuru because it is a monastery and respectfully kept so, but it is tragic situation that I kept on thinking about when I, one night, was trying to make my way back. Lamayuru is built upon many pre-existing monasteries that themselves are crumbling away just like the rock is that it is built on. The rock, a sort of layered sediment, flakes away with a brush of the hand. Walking about Lamayuru plainly tells and story of unforeseen conclusions. Buildings built with doors can now no longer be opened, half buried with sand and rubble, or perhaps the doors lead nowhere. A door I saw could no longer be opened for another building had been built too close to it. As you make your way up to the monastery, you either have to make your hunched way in passageways under buildings or ascend stairs with no sides. Birds live here and in abundance, securing their brood in the crevices of the tower-like rock structures that have been made by time and making continual gyre about the highest rooms of the monastery, where the head lama lives.

Here is a history of Ladakh related to us by some monks we had the good fortune to meet:


Directly after the time of the Buddha, an Arhat came to Lamayuru which was then nothing but a lake. He flew to one side of the lake to sat on a mountain, and he saw from that vantage in the middle of the lake a peak of sandstone, and he foresaw that a monastery would be built there one day. He gave offerings to the Nagas—elemental water spirits—which involved throwing barely seeds into the water because then with his staff he drained the entire lake. Now they call this place “the moon” because of the unearthly pale color of the sand that rings the valley, making a clear indication where the water used to stand. The peak of the sandstone that the Arhat saw now sits right below the highest building of the monastery where the head lama lives. The barely seeds that the Arhat threw grew into fields in the valleys about the destined spot for the monastery swirled in the shape of a swastika (an auspicious sign in this part of the world). Accordingly, the place was called “turquoise swastika.” Tuquoise, in Tibetan, because of the lake and pronounced “yuru” (“lama” being a later addition). In the eleventh century, the famous Indian scholar Naropa meditated in the caves at Lamayuru. His cave particularly can still be seen in one spot of the main shrine that is built just below the lama’s residence. Naropa and the also famous Lotsawa (translator) Rinchen Zangpo were probably in the Lamayuru caves at the same time and when Naropa moved on, Zangpo built five monasteries in the shape of a Mandala about Lamayuru, 5 of the 108 monasteries that he is said to have built in the Ladakh region. For those just a bit shaky on their Ladakh history, Zangpo was very important in the second diffusion of Buddhism into the Tibet and Ladakh region after the three hundred years or so of “darkness.” After the assassination of Long-dar-ma by a hermit, Tibet suffered a setback in its advance toward civilization and Buddhism, which had not quite taken hold, was lost for those years. Therefore at this time, when texts were not to be found, translators were highly revered, thus “lotsawa” is used as an honorific title and thus, Zanpo, who was highly influential at this time, held a very important position of spreading the Dharma in Tibet. The second diffusion, it is interesting to note, came from the prompting of one Ladakh king who sent Atisa to spread the esoteric teachings back into central Tibet, where the center has been ever since. Shortly after the second diffusion, the Buddhism that came from India, through Ladakh, mostly dried up as Buddhism was expiring in India. From that point on, Ladakh, the trading center, relied upon central Tibet for its revered colleges and monasteries to train their monks, never building any of their own. The tradition of sending monks to be educated in the higher practices to Tibet continued until the middle of this last century.


However, the monasteries that Zangpo built at this spot never did so well so that in the seventeenth century the Ladakh king Jamyang Namgyal was building a type water system there and inadvertently offended the Nagas. As an immediate consequence, the king became ill with leprosy and no doctor could cure him. Finally, he went to an oracle who told him to send for a certain monk in the Mt. Kailash region from the Drigung Kagyu sect. The monk was sent for and he healed the king’s sickness in gratitude for this service. He told the monk that he would be the royal family’s guru from then on.


The monk said no, that their connection was not of this kind, that the kind would have a son Sengge, who in his life, would meet the family’s guru. So the king gave the monk Phiyang and Lamayuru, both of which are now Drigung-kagyu monasteries.