Sacrificing Self For Tea

Wei! I’ve discovered a new tea! Don’t know how it could have escaped me for so long, as often as I go to yam cha, but there you are.

Maybe I’ve become too stick in the mud so I always order the same: 水 仙 (soy sin, water fairy) or 鐵觀音 (tit gun yam, iron buddha)? By the way, about yam cha: It vexes me that staff always but always have to plonk 香片 (heung pin, jasmin tea) down on the table without asking me what I want. Reason: I’m white and jasmine is all whitey ever drinks, even though she was there the day before ordering something else. I think any whitey who’s ever been to yam cha without a Chinese person with them will know what I mean.

Therefore, even if I loved jasmine tea, I would have had to send it back. And I don’t, so even more reason to order iron buddha… If you feel like I do about being lumped together with tourists and are vexed at never getting the chance to taste any tea but jasmine, you can say: “咦？點解唔問我飲咩茶吖？” (Yi? Dim gai m man o yam meh cha ah? What? Why don’t you ask me what kind of tea I want?)

But anyway, guess what, I’ve just spent three days with ah-Sa! That’s right, ah- Sa from RTHK. We went to Shanghai to NOT go to the Expo, and almost succeeded in that. Also, we were to make some programmes about Mandarin, the communist speech quackings of which we were there to investigate.

And it was in Shanghai I discovered a tea I’ve never tasted before (if I had, it would be goodbye 水仙 and 鐵觀音) namely 龍井 (long cheng – dragon well.)

We found it in the worst place in Shanghai, possibly the world – now you’ve been warned! Yu Garden in the Old City. It looked so good on the map – a place with a ring road circling it, with Old City in big letters. I should have known that anything the Chinese government, be it central or municipal, designates as a tourist attraction, should be avoided at all cost. How to describe it? Like … Lo Wu Shopping Center rebuilt in Disneyland by Liberace and Elvis’ bastard Chinese children.

We retreated into a dodgy looking building just to get away from the screaming and arm-touching touts; where in Lo Wu shopping center it’s “Missy missy melicure pelicure missy hello you buy DWD mowie hello missy you buy looking hello, ” here it was “Missy watchee, watchee you buy watchee.” Only one thing in other words – but that was enough! We dove into this structure supposedly built in the Qing Dynasty where they advertised “genuine Shanghai dumplings” which were made three days earlier and catapulted ah-Sa into a stomach upset. I, a purist, fortunately restrained myself, sticking to boiled soy beans. When in China I just don’t accept eating food off a plastic tray in a canteen like setting! I’d rather starve. For a while.

Anyway, next to dead dumpling mansion was Overpriced Tea House, the Hu Xin Ting, (湖心亭，Lake Heart Pavilion.) There they had the nerve to charge 68 yuan for one cup of tea. However, as it allowed me to discover my future drink forever 龍井, I won’t complain.

See how lovely ah-Sa looks! It’s the effect of Dragon Well tea. Actually, the effect of me drinking Dragon Well tea, thus wielding the camera better than usually.

We discovered many things in Shanghai, for example that the HK style has well and truly arrived: You address Shanghai people in Mandarin and they answer you in English … and some do the applauding thing and the” wewwy good lah” thing. I suppose it was inevitable.