Jasmine Devils

Ah! Yam bui! Here are some of my students taking a good slurp of 鐵觀音 (tit gun yam, a famous tea) on my roof. Yes, Lantau people, there are still some morning/early afternoon slots left in the Cantonese course at Lo Uk Tsuen Country Club! Sign up, sign up.

Talking about tea, last weekend E and I went to Shenzhen for a quick foot massage/fake DVD/yam cha raid. As always we stayed in the excellent Railway Station Hotel

on whose 4th floor is one of the best Yam Cha restaurants in Southern China. AND the menu is in normal characters to cater to hong Kong people. (Take that, Hang Seng “Suck Up To Mainlanders” Bank.) We ordered 水仙 (seui sin)， a green tea not unlike tit gun yam. The waitress came up to our table carrying a pot of tea and I heard her mumbling “Oh! Seui Sin!” in Mandarin and shuttle off. I said to E: “I bet you that was her realising that she had brought proper Chinese tea to foreigners while everybody knows we can only ever drink jasmine.” We both shouted: Wei! Come back! We ordered Seui Sin! but she wouldn’t listen. Another option was of course that she had mistakenly brought jasmine, then remembered it should have been Seui Sin, but somehow I didn’t think so.

Then a trouser suit-clad floor manager hurried forth: “You wanted jasmine, right?” Ha! I knew it. The other waitress had indeed brought seui sin and thought better of it when she saw our faces.

So even if you order the tea you want, you’ll still get bloody jasmine. Because it’s written in stone since the beginning of time: Foreigners can’t drink Chinese tea and if they can, only jasmine.

In my Cantonese course I have lots of course material that deals with this and similar problems. Roll in! (收皮！）