Roasting tea in Ruili

Although my house is a wreck (so many things in boxes intended for America, Baihe, or the trash) and all our schedules have been thrown by the holiday season, I have found some sanity in the carefulness of brewing tea. Now it is impossible, for the reasons I have just mentioned to do a full, deliberate tea brewing at home--what with a baby who can now with one swipe clear most of whats on the coffee table onto the floor--so it is no wonder that my most recent experience with tea took place away from home in the mountains of the Alishan region in a small tea farming town called Ruili, where I went to find a particular homestead after getting their name card at an event the weekend before. Luckily when I arrived not only was the family there but also they were in the midst of a day-long roasting and taste-testing of their oolong, which was to be entered into a national competition.

   

Many farms participate in national competitions, sending tea selections in quantities of 22 kilos. One of those kilos is a gift gratis to the organization that runs the testing, while another kilo is used for the actual taste testing. The remaining 20 kilos, if they make the cut, will receive a special grading and will be given a fixed price. A tea master will taste hundreds of teas every day, while at each pass the number of teas dwindle until there is just a handful left. The single top tea from an entry pool of over a thousand will received the highest honor and will be able to be sold at a premium price.

The tea rankings for Oolong look something like this:

特等將 - the top honor - only one tea selected

頭等將 - second highest grade - only the top 4% make this cut (only 30 teas)

頭等將二 - third highest grade - only about 50 teas make this cut
頭等將三 - ...

There are more grading levels but why worry about them (besides, I can't say this list is too accurate!). The teas in the top four percent can be sold for about 230 US dollars per kilo while the one entry that wins top slot is sold for multiple times that rate. Most tea roasters will say that there's a lot of luck involved, not only that you get a good crop of tea, but also that the judge specifically enjoys your tea. That said, everything about the brewing method contrives to make the process as precise as possible, trying as it were to counteract so much uncertainty.

Following is a video of Mr. Lin and his father as they compare two oolongs they are roasting side by side in different machines with their entry from last year, a tea that took the 頭等將 grade.  As you can tell every slight aspect of the tea soup's color, initial scent, and taste is important.  The brewing method is rigid: three grams of tea in 150ml of boiling water brewed for six minutes in a competition "cup" made of porcelain.  Six minutes after the tea has been poured, when the leaves have cooled off, they also smell the leaves as well.  Everything counts.  The most of what I noticed under discussion (half was in Taiwanese) concerned the tea soup's, it's clarity and color.  One looked greener and one looked more yellow they told me, but I could not for the life of me discern such slight differences.  When they asked me which one I liked the best, I chose (unwittingly) the tea they had submitted from the previous year! 

Around their rather large living room, that opened up onto a rather plain and concrete porch (surrounded though by flowers, and looking out over the gray and misty mountains) they had huge recognition placques from previous entries.  15 or 20 were hung showing that they had earned the 頭等將 status, and only one, placed prominently over the cheif brewing table, showed 特等將, which means one year at least they grew the golden egg! 

I asked them how this competition tea was different than what I ended up buying--their common oolong.  As far as I could tell, for the competition they sorted the tea to get the rolled leaves more uniform, and also plucked extraneous stems which apparently confuse the taste during roasting and then brewing, but I don't imagine that it's grown in a seperate field or under different conditions.  I was also surprised that there was no initial "wash" for the tea leaves during the taste-testing.  When you use a tea pot in the Chinese tradition of brewing, for those who don't know, one always washes the tea and dispenses with the water almost immediate.  People usually emphasis the fact that it washes dirt or impurities from the leaves or that it wakes up the tea leaves and heats the tea ware to make the initial brew more pure.
So I might be under a false assumption that you can apply the "tea-tasting method" to any tea, that is brew 3 grams in a competition "cup" made of porcelain with 150ml of boiling water, but I've had a lot of fun doing that with all of my teas--what a delight!  The usual method that I use, which requires you to brew the tea for breifer periods 6-7 times is like a fine dissection of the taste, a pagent of the teas flavor that evolves and is lived and is relished.  Using the 6 minute method, however, really gives you a full taste of the tea.  I've even used it for some tea packs of oolong someone gave me that I've otherwise been brewing red rose style in an open mug.  Much better to drink directly from the competition cup after brewing it--rather more like drinking espresso out of a demitase.  A quite different tea experience!

A Park at Evening, Chiayi

Every time I step into the Wen Hua Public Park in Chiayi I know that it's my favorite place in the whole city and--barring the beaches at Kenting and the mountains to the east--my favorite place in Taiwan.  It thrills with innocence and shuffles with all faces and sounds.  Although situated in the middle of the city, right next to one of the busiest streets (a night market), it's large with winding paths, allowing you to walk aimlessly, passing through green spaces filled with cricket song and where young couples and old walk alone or with their small dogs.  Then there is the intermitant sound of children playing unheeded in the center of the park, a grassy area that is scooped out from the center of the winding paths, creating the illusion that you walk upon the edge of a large pool filled with dark grass, running footsteps, and glimmers of iridescent frisbees and sky rockets propelled by invisible, laughing bodies.  Other scenes include large groups practicing Gongchi, a type of Tai-chi; an area where fountains spout in constant variation from a flat concrete surface so that children, or anyone daring enough, can play among them; a large boardwalk on one side where musicians can perform, dancing couples can gather, old people can sit, and where artists can hawk their work.  Tonight, on the boardwalk alone, there was a couple performing classic old songs, such as Deng Li Jun's "My heart is as the moon" on harmonica, an artist who was selling spray-paint paintings of pandas (he was a foreigner, too!), a group performing various Taiwanese songs (dancing and singing), crowds of people, and a pushcart selling coffee that has been grown in Taiwan.  And this was a regular Wednesday night, 8:00ish.

I stopped my scooter and walked around down the boardwalk, then back, then walked over to the fountain where a small Falun Dafa group was sitting cross-legged and reciting a text and where kids were playing.  I walked through the trees with the crickets and the silent night park walkers, and returned back to the boardwalk and my scooter.  What follows is a recording, and a point by point guide, of all of these events.  So, my suggestion: turn off the lights, or close your eyes, and....listen.
 
A Park at Evening, Chiayi: http://www.ourmedia.org/sites/default/files/ia/original/96Kbps MP3/JosephNabholzAParkatEvening_Chiayi/ParkateveningChiayi.m4a

0:00 a harmonica rendition of "My heart is as the moon" and the sound of my scooter as it idles on the side of the road
0:17 my keys as I turn off the scooter
0:28 a woman begins speaking on a microphone who stands next to the man playing the harmonica
1:15 another group performing Taiwanese songs, which becomes more and more clear as I walk closer
1:37 the former harmonica group, now rendering another Deng Li Jun song, "In my dreams," grows louder as I return in that direction
2:02 a dog barks, ushering in the sounds of water as I approach the fountains
2:35 faintly, the sounds of a group of seven, reciting a text near the fountains
2:47 crickets emerge as I approach a path with arbors
3:08 footsteps
3:50 the group playing harmonica as I return full circle
4:35 my keys, and subsequently the scooter as I start the ignition

Statues, Mountains, Marriage

I once heard that the only way for something to count as truly having happened is if it has happened twice.  Today begs me to believe that that is true.

I took off work and instead went up to Taichung with Fiona and baby to visit the man who is generously offering a beautiful, 4 foot tall Amitabha statue from his collection for the shrine in the Buddhist center in Asheville, "Urban Dharma, NC."  I had been under the impression that the last time I had made the trip up we had discussed all of the possible details, and the only thing remained was to put it in a box and ship it.  When I arrived, however, the statue was in the same place, no more ready to be shipped than before.  We talked about the same details as before, and then decided that I should come up within a week's time to officially see it off.  So, perhaps things do need to happen twice for them to really happen.

Then Fiona, baby, and I followed the man up to his house in the mountains.  It wasn't high into the mountains, but mountains were all around it, as well as farms, steep roads, and groves and groves of persimmon trees which were in full production.  He had built a two floored concrete and steel structure, with lots of open spaces next to a stream.  Because of the steepness the area, and perhaps the way that the structure fit into the landscape, you could barely notice it after you walked by it.  He had landscaped the place with great boulders and streams and everywhere a place to sit in absolute silence.  We ate lunch and drank tea.

On our way home, Fiona and I decided to get married.  We had finally received the Affidavit that claimed that I was single and eligible to marry, and we had been bringing it around with us ever since.  So we stopped off in Baihe on our way home to fill out the necessary papers.  Baihe is a small place and correspondingly their Household Registration Office, and those employed there, are not familiar with processing marriages with foreigners.  At one point, three women were circled around a computer with paper all over the desk, and I heard someone say, "do I enter the name in all capital letters?"  Fiona's father even left early before it was finished (he had come to give Fiona some necessary papers that he had had).  I ended up playing with William who had been stuck in a baby seat in a car for most of the day.  It made me think of how restless he would be on a plane when we returned to America. 

When we finally left, I had to ask Fiona, "Wait--so are we married now or not?"  Well, we are married now, at least officially--that is, unless things have to happen twice before they can really be said to have happened at all.  Won't we be getting married again in June in Pennsylvania in a real ceremony?  So for now, I will continue to believe this little thing, whether it is true or not, that things don't really happen until the second time around. 

Because the processing took longer than expected, I ended up being late for my afternoon classes.  Oh well, now I just need to convince my boss that the first time doesn't count. 

English Class: Several Translations by Li Bai

I showed a class of senior high school students a series of translated Chinese poems.  There weren't a lot of students so I had each one read one poem.  It was fun to watch who recognized what they were reading while they were reading it.  For some it was a visceral shock, and the shock was often quickly followed by laughter.  Several girls, by the second poem we read, had scribbled the original onto their paper apparently by heart.

Because of the laughing and guffawing, the first several poems actually took awhile to get through. They were laughing at, not only queerness of seeing the old words in a totally different context, but also the "mistakes" of the poems. Now I am a lot more lenient in understanding some of the choices the poets made, and that's why it was slightly a hard lesson learned for myself. When a poet uses "the third-month mists" he is trying to communicate the reality that in Chinese that they simply number the months; it is a literal translation. The translator also might be trying to communicate to the reader the strangeness of the original language. If one pretends it is an English poem, like any other, is it not disingenuous to the original's cultural, spacial, linguistic identity? But to them it just sounded lame. One of them declared, "it's not a 'long, long river,' the river's name is actually Long River." Again I felt more lenient: why had Li Bai chosen Long River as opposed to, say, Yellow River? Didn't he want to emphasize the fact that his friend was going a long way away, and wasn't it alright if this poet tried to replicate that?

And then there were some quite obvious differences in the poems themselves: sometimes the traveler was going east, while other times it was ambiguous, while other poems had the traveler definitely going west.

One boy kept shaking his head; obviously the English versions were all no good. Most of the students agreed. I told them that I liked when one poet said that the shadow of the traveler was like "his lonely sail." And they agreed that it was actually what the poem said.

I also pointed out that several of the poems were in the present tense and while others were in the past tense. Of course, it is always ambiguous in Chinese, but we talked about the differences in English. Did they like "border of heaven," or "edge of the sky?" While I liked heaven, they liked sky. I said, "but in Chinese don't you use the same character?" But they disagreed. One said, "it sounds like he died if you use heaven."

It made me think a lot more about translating classic Chinese poems, but it reminded me, that if I ever did, I would probably wait a long time before ever bringing them into my ESL class.

Here's my good old friend
At the Yellow Crane Terrace
For a western departure.
We're saying good-bye.
He's in a cloud of third-month blossoms.
He's off downstream to Yang-Chou.
That shadow is his lonely sail.
Now it is gone.
All the blue is empty now.
All you can see is that long, long river.
It flows to the edge of the sky.
tr. Ken Hope

My old friend takes leave of the west at Yellow Crane Tower,
in misty third-month blossoms goes downstream to Yang-chou.
The far-off shape of his lone sail disappears in the blue-green void,
and all I see is the long river flowing to the edge of the sky.
tr. Burton Watson

My friend bade farewell at the Yellow Crane House,
And went down eastward to Willow Valley
Amid the flowers and mists of March.
The lonely sail in the distance
Vanished at last beyond the blue sky
And I could see only the river
Flowing along the border of heaven.
tr. Shigeyoshi Obata

My old friend
Bids farewell to me
In the west at Yellow Crane Tower.
Amid April's mist and flowers
He goes down to Yang-jou.
The distant image
Of his lonely sail
Disappears in blue emptiness,
And all I see
Is the Long River
Flowing to the edge of the sky
tr. Greg Whincup

From Yellow Crane Tower, my old friend leaves the west.
Downstream to Yang-chou, late spring a haze of blossoms,

distant glints of lone sail vanish into emerald-green air:
nothing left but a river flowing on the borders of heaven.
tr. David Hinton

my old friend leaves yellow crane pavilion
he is going to the west

sailing to yangzhou in march
while blossoms curl like smoke on the river

how far away the lone sail
fading into the clear blue sky

only the yangtze river remains
it is flowing at the edge of the world
tr. John Knoepfle and Wang Shouyi


The next poem is one that we didn't discuss but also was on the website. Having time to read all of them that I had to choose from, I think it would have been interesting to include this one to see what they thought. It's a lot more definite and clear, more like a native English speaking poem--which probably means the poet took some liberties.

You said good-bye at Yellow Crane Pavilion
and sailed west, down into the valley
through the flowers and mists of spring
until your lonely sail vanished
in the blue sky's horizon,
and I was left watching the river
flowing gently into heaven.
tr. Sam Hamill

And one more:

Guangling send Haoran
Li Bai
Yellow Crane Tower West by the enemy, fireworks in March in Yangzhou.
Gu Fan Yuan shadow Bishan do, only see the flow of the Yangtze River skyline.
tr. Google translate

Encouraged by a poem from a friend,
and by talking 'baby' with a previous co-worker
who impressed upon me the fact that not only
will the baby be able to smell the mother,
hear, and feel our touch when it is born,
but that it will respond to the voice of the mother
and of the father as well,

I recited five or seven poems that I knew
because I couldn't think of anything else to say
to the perfect audience
bound in silence
who gave a rowdy kick when all concluded
at least to say,
I heard you.