come see me in taipei! eat drink march chat, part 2

Um, is this an earthquake?”
Uh-huh.
[time passes]
“It’s really long.”
Uh-huh.
[time passes]
“You wanna get under the desk?”
You get under the desk, I’ll stand in the doorway.

Last night Taiwan expressed its displeasure at the thought of Emily leaving so soon; but despite a magnitude six point something earthquake and two mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night, it looks like she will probably make it out of the country alright. I saw her to the airport bus this morning, the walk through Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park giving her the chance to observe one of her favorite phenomena, old ladies doing fuzzy-ball-on-a-stick dances to raspy eighties rock-n-roll, a crowd of forty doing Tai Chi in the open space to our left, and a voice counting out numbers slowly over synthesized traditional Chinese music, for some unknown purpose, in the trees to our right. As Emily was getting settled in the bus I gave a big two-armed wave, and the two men standing behind me expressed their support with a chorus of “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” Don’t ever stop being foreign, baby.

But back to Saturday.

The Yongkang Park area tea house is behind a gate and little courtyard on an inconspicuous alley right off the park. Emily heard about it from Sebastian, a nice sounding guy with a tea house in Brooklyn whom she met at the Slow Food festival in Turin a couple of weeks ago (as you can tell, a little bit of living it up has been going on in between the Bar and the job).[1] They sat through a really boring presentation on Chinese tea together; it sounds like a bonding experience. We had actually gone to check out the teahouse already last Wednesday, in the tuna fish salad part of the day that was sandwiched by election return watching, and we found it to have a most soothing effect. The owner had been delighted to hear that we’d been sent there by Sebastian, sat us down at a little table, made us some tea, and spent quite a while talking to us. This tea house sells tea implements and tea leaves more than brewed tea or the space to drink it—it’s not a Starbucks type of establishment, more like a wine store with tastings and a little haven of connoisseurance. The first time we were there I realized how comforting it was to hear people in the little group that preceded us calling the owner “Teacher.” There’s something so relieving about knowing how to address someone properly, perhaps especially because the teacher-student relationship is such a familiar and easily enacted one (as long as you don’t get too involved, of course).

Teacher He[2] specializes in Taiwanese teas. Chinese teas, he explained the first time we went, gently pulling the pinky of his spread right hand, tend more toward the green side: not oxidized, gentle, subtle. Western teas, he said, moving to the thumb, are fully oxidized, flavorful, stimulating. Typical Taiwanese teas fall in the middle—he brushed the three fingers in between. They are oolongs, somewhat oxidized, with a little more oomph than the plain green teas of China but more peaceful than the black (in Chinese, red) teas of the West. He gave Emily an article in a newspaper published that day about his shop: “Promoting local (bentu) tea culture.” Bentu 本土 not only means local or this-land-ish, it’s also the name for the political movement that brought ethnic Taiwanese people into the higher levels of the government apparatus, brought (a concern with) Taiwanese culture into mainstream discourse (in a move away from concerns with the mainland), and generally participated in the democratization of the country and its growing, though still pretty ambiguous, nationalism. I bet a cultural-studies type anthropologist could make a nice little point using Teacher He’s fingers, about how Taiwan sits between China and the West but does not really belong to either of them.

When we went back on Saturday, Teacher He once more made us some oolong, asked Emily about her trip to the mountains, and, after feeding us some crackers, brought out the Mature Tea. Mature Tea is tea (in this case Dong Ding Oolong) that has been stored away for many many years (in this case fifteen). Oolong tea is slightly oxidized, but when you store it, the oxidation process continues very slowly, resulting in a brownish color and a taste “like archaeology, it has different levels that you can discover.” I am a novice in tea tasting, so all I can say is this was probably the weirdest-tasting tea I’ve ever had. It was kind of like archaeology, actually. You could taste a distinct layer of greenish oolong, but then on top of it was something dank and bitter, and then on top of that again something a bit syrupy and sweet. Even the smell was like that: depending on what part of your nose you focused on, it turned bitter, sweet, and green by turns. Emily, who is not a novice tea drinker, looked like she’d died and gone to heaven wearing a tea-leaf halo.

Emily repeated to Teacher He what the Dong Ding Oo Long growers had told her, that “Gaoshan (high-mountain) Oolong is very aromatic, but its kougan is not good. Our teas may not be as aromatic, but the kougan is better.” Kougan (口感 mouth-feeling) is usually used to talk about the texture or consistency of foods, so I found this phrase puzzling: what kind of texture or consistency does tea have? Teacher He spent a long time explaining to us how taste was different from kougan, but unfortunately I was trying to understand too hard to be able to quote anything of what he said. I remember him talking about how sometimes a bitter taste—a good bitter taste—will leave a sweet feeling in the mouth: the mouth’s response to the bitterness is to ameliorate it with some sweetness. A bad bitter taste, a bitter taste with bad kougan, will not evoke this reaction in the mouth. He seemed to find tolerable my summary of his explanation as “the taste is a property of the thing itself, and the kougan is how your mouth reacts to it.” (Which would make sense, right, with a word like mouth-feeling.) I’m kind of excited about this new, interactive, way of thinking about foods.

[1] And a propos of the bar, this explanation from a friend: “As English common law tradition took shape in the fourteenth century, the nascent profession of lawyering consisted of people who had cause to travel frequently to the King's courts in Westminster, where they tended to stay in a few popular inns. In the evenings the taverns at these inns would be the scene of animated discussion concerning the day's affairs at the court, and young people aspiring to enter the profession would gather in these taverns to listen to the discussions. As legal institutions formalized, these taverns took on the character of exclusive legal societies, and a novice who wished to enter the profession would thus have to be "called to the bar."”

Is there really any doubt, after that, that I belong in law school?

[2] Pronounced something like the “he” in “her.”