This Saturday I’m going to a Chinese New Year banquet, one I attend each year with friends from Hong Kong and China. Lots of good food and catching up, all in the comforts of my friends’ beautiful suburban home. The American Dream.
But that wasn’t always the case with Chinese New Year and me.
I can still feel the bone-chilling cold of the Lunar New Year, 1991, during my junior year in college. This photo was taken in the countryside about an hour from Nanjing. My Nanjing friends’ family didn’t own a toilet. Not even a squatter. We went outside for that.
 click to enlarge There’s nothing like a New Year’s fair. No Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse here.
 click to enlarge Back before people owned cars, streets looked like this. Usually there’d be bicycles, but during the New Year, it was more fashionable to stroll around the markets and visit friends and family en masse. Mr.Chen, my high school tour guide, is on the far right with his nephew. His wife is next to him with their daughter, and I’m standing near his brother and two sisters-in-law.
Video games? Who needs them (and who had them back in 1991?) when you have a yard to yourself and this new well. While the adults played cards and mahjong, I made sure the kids stayed out of the well. Scary.
 click to enlarge As I look toward the Year of the Dragon, I remember my friends in Nanjing and its outlaying cities and villages. Gongxi facai. Happy New Year!
Stuart Beaton’s latest guest blog hits home. I never became a coffee drinker precisely because of the huge Nescafe presence in China. When I needed to warm up, my choices in China were hot water, tea, or Nescafe. I quickly learned to become a tea drinker, although I was known to drink hot water in Hong Kong. Stuart has a great author interview site at http://rastous.podomatic.com/. Here’s his fabulous guest post about coffee in China. Enjoy!
My day here in Tianjin starts with a coffee – without exception. There could be rioting in the streets, the World might be coming to an end, but I will face it with a cup of coffee in me first.
Ellen has long since stopped wondering about the mechanics of this daily ritual – measuring the coffee into the cafetière, pouring in the no longer boiling water, stirring it and standing the pot, before plunging the grounds to the bottom. To her it’s just another one of those strange habits I have…
But she likes the coffee it produces.
Before she met me, Ellen had never drunk coffee. Tea is still the most popular drink (aside from hot water), and the streets are awash with it.
Coffee was viewed with distrust, as if the strange, foreign beverage would poison those who consumed it.
Mind you, I thought the same thing when I was first confronted with what passed for coffee in China.
Nestle were attempting to influence Chinese tastebuds by presenting coffee in an instant, easy to carry and consume form. They introduced sachets designed to be dumped into a cup or tea bottle, and have hot water added – coffee, whitener and sugar all pulverised into a fine powder.
The result tasted like coffee, if your only experience with coffee was to have it described to you by someone who’d once had a rather bad cup of lukewarm coffee tipped over their head. Utterly without charm or character, it is still haunting supermarket shelves as I type – luring unsuspecting potential coffee drinkers in, only to leave them never fancying anything to do with “coffee” ever again.
The only alternative to this “2+1” blend was to try and find a jar of “instant” coffee, which would crop up in Spring Festival gift sets. For Y300 (10% of my take home salary), I could get a 50 gram jar of Nescafe, flanked by two cups and saucers, in a presentation box.
At that price, I never weakened and bought one. I spent most of that year decaffeinated and dejected, wondering what was wrong with a country that had no cheese, coffee or even black tea to take the edge off.
When I moved to Tianjin, things began to improve. A bigger city meant more diversity, and so more places to shop around and try and find the things I had been missing. I also had a far bigger disposable income, so I didn’t mind paying a bit more for things to make me comfortable.
And yet coffee was still hard to get. Oh, I could buy small bags of beans at truly astronomical prices (at one point I was convinced that they had the price of coffee pegged to the price of gold), but without a grinder, let alone a press, they weren’t of much use to me. Instant coffee was the only choice, but at least it was now better blends.
Then Starbucks rolled onto the Chinese scene, and I was grateful.
Not because I was going and paying almost Y30 for a cup of coffee – I wasn’t even going through their doors – but because they made coffee an aspirational item. Other cafes opened, cheaper and less organised, who needed to buy beans and equipment at wholesale rates.
Having discovered “Kitchen Street”, I was able to access this market. When I run out of Mahalia #1 Blend (shipped from Robe, in South Australia), I can get cans of Illy coffee for Y80 – half the going price in the upmarket supermarkets.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that coffee is really that much more popular here. It’s not uncommon to see almost full cups of coffee abandoned outside Starbucks or Costa Coffee shops, when first time buyers discover that they don’t like coffee at all.
But these huge chains don’t care – they’re not really selling coffee.
They’re selling a dream.
In two and a half weeks, we’ll be leaving the Year of the Rabbit for the Year of the Dragon. And to usher in the new year and its mighty dragon, here’s a short list of dragon-inspired books for kids and adults.
One of my kids’ favorite new acquisitions is this fun picture book illustrated by Grace Lin.
The Seven Chinese Sisters (Albert Whitman and Co., 2003) by Kathy Tucker is a contemporary take on The Five Chinese Brothers from way back in 1938. When a big dragon sweeps down on the sisters’ home and swipes the baby sister, the other sisters work together to save her. It turns out the dragon is skinny and hungry, so the sixth sister–the chef of the family–promises a bowl of her noodle soup the next day.
My kids also love Christoph Niemann’s The Pet Dragon (Greenwillow Books, 2008).
The book tells the story of a girl named Lin who has a pet dragon. The illustrations incorporate one of a couple dozen Chinese characters.
How cool is that? My four year old can already recognize many of these characters.
One of my favorite memoirs is Linda Furiya‘s How to Cook a Dragon: Living, Loving, and Eating in China (Seal Press, 2009). Furiya moves to China to follow her boyfriend and learns to navigate Beijing and Shanghai as a Asian-American who doesn’t speak Chinese. She experiences ups and downs in her relationship, but finds her niche at a Chinese culinary academy. Each chapter ends with a delicious recipe.
If you like a little spice in your reading, check out Jeannie Lin‘s latest romance novel, The Dragon and the Pearl (Harlequin Historical, 2011). When Li Tao, the warlord from her first novel, Butterfly Swords (Harlequin Historical, 2010), kidnaps courtesan Ling Suyin, he finally meets his match.
Before Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See wrote a brilliant memoir of her Chinese family as well as a three-part mystery series starring Liu Hulan, a rising star in the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, and her husband, David Stark, an American lawyer. The last in this series is Dragon Bones (Random House, 2004), which takes place on the Yangzi River and its controversial Three Gorges Dam.
Of course, there’s also Swedish blockbuster, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which has already been turned into a film twice.
Do you have a favorite dragon book?
 One of the most remarkable things about the famine which occurred in China between 1958 and 1962 was that for over twenty years, no one was sure whether it had even taken place.
So begins Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (The Free Press, 1996), the first account of how 30 to 45 million–or more–perished in China during a time of peace and the absence of natural disasters.
How could 35-40 million die in three or four years?
Was it the call to melt down household metal like pots, pans, spoons, and knives in backyard furnaces so China could turn this scrap metal into steel and beat out the Soviet Union in its steel production? Or was it the policy to kill the four pests–sparrows, rats, flies, and mosquitoes–in which crops died as a result?
According to Becker these policies helped contribute to the problem, but the real culprits were the men in power. Mao was at the center, of course, but also leaders we’ve come to think of as reformers: Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai.
What’s ironic is that those who did speak out about the Great Leap Forward–Peng Dehuai and Liu Shaoqi–were ultimately killed for their stance against Mao. Both died during the Cultural Revolution.
Hungry Ghosts isn’t an easy read for a number of reasons. The subject of course is completely depressing (probably not the best reading choice on New Year’s Eve), but it’s also structured in a way that lends to repetition.
What stuck out was the opening line of the book. I’d always assumed the Cultural Revolution was the greater of the crimes, but according to Becker, it was the Great Leap Forward hands down. This book was published in 1996, and up to that time people in China still weren’t talking about the Great Leap Forward. Literature didn’t mention it and movies didn’t cover it, unlike the Cultural Revolution.
Becker explains this silence. Peasants were the ones affected during the Great Leap Forward, while intellectuals and city folks were attacked in the Cultural Revolution. The peasants didn’t have a voice back then–and they still don’t.
And when the party in power back then is the party in power now, no one in Beijing is anxious to come forth with the real story.
I’m so excited to feature guest blogger Stuart Beaton’s fabulous post about the tea culture in China. I learned to drink tea in China, first as a survival tactic during my initial experience with a Chinese winter (Nanjing, 1991), and then as a true connoisseur. Stu’s podcasts can be found at http://rastous.podomatic.com/.
When I was young, my Nan would often say that she wouldn’t swap something “for all the tea in China” – which used to confuse me no end, as tea box she took her tea from was clearly stamped “Ceylon”, and from time to time “Formosa”.
 Formosa, 1965 Neither of which were in China, as my Geography teacher often pointed out.
As time wore on, and I got more interested in all things Oriental, I began to explore tea and its role in Chinese and Japanese culture and history. I started to buy small batches of different types of teas sourced from different areas.
It was about this time that I discovered that adding milk and sugar to green tea was bloody horrible, too.
A spell with the military taught me that the best cup of tea was one that was warm and wet – and NATO Standard (white and two sugars). Often it was indistinguishable from coffee, but when it’s lashing rain, you don’t stop to question the origins.
So it came as a great surprise to upon arriving in China that there didn’t seem to be a lot of people drinking tea. Hot water was the drink of choice, which certainly took some getting used to. I remember well the first time a glass was plonked in front of me, and, thirsty after a long flight, I grabbed it, only to burn my fingers.
Green tea seemed to be in short supply, and Chinese members of staff seemed to only be allowed a pinch of them a day. They’d put them in old screw top jars, and add hot water from ancient Thermos flasks, sipping gently from the jar from time to time, before topping it up again with water.
By the end of the day, the contents of the jar didn’t resemble tea so much as some kind of strange soup, as the leaves parted with every last possible trace of tea. Then the leaves and dregs would be sloshed out in the street, to form clumps and mounds in the gutter, where they’d harden and dry into Rorschach patterns.
Black tea – or “Red” tea as it is called in China – was unavailable, even though myself and other foreign staff members scoured the city for it. Eventually I managed to prevail upon my parents to send me a few boxes of teabags, after endless protests by them that “Tea comes from China, you idiot, go out and buy some!”
Even then, it wasn’t the most satisfying experience. Without kettles, we relied on electric water heaters that didn’t boil the water, producing lukewarm cups of tea, into which unrefrigerated UHT full fat milk was splashed. Despite this, teabags were rationed out, and jealously hoarded.
In the last few years, tea has undergone something of a revolution in China. The screw top jar is being abandoned in favour of purpose made flasks, and the type and variety of tea on offer has greatly expanded.
Two major chains of tea stores are in close competition – often having stores next to each other in supermarket complexes. I’ve watched, amazed, as rival shop assistants will grab and pull people away from the other store to buy only their wares.
A desire for all things foreign has also seen an explosion of new tea products hitting the shelves of even ordinary supermarkets, with Liptons alone producing a range of black teas, and Hong Kong style powdered milk teas in sachets. Twinings is attempting to seize the higher end of the market, with a huge campaign running in department stores.
These days it seems that there are an awful lot of people who want to drink all the tea in China.
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