Whispers in the Ether

Whispers in the Ether

Chinese people are afraid of ghosts.  This is something I purely don’t understand, but, belief in ghosts can be useful at times.  I found out about all of this a couple of months ago when walking with a friend.  I heard someone calling my name so I turned to see who it was, and my friend absolutely freaked out, she was terrified.  She told me that I was acknowledging the ghost behind me, and that anytime you hear someone calling your name behind you, it is a ghost.  It wasn’t until recently that I realized the extension to that. 

I thought that it was going to be one more cultural thing that I don’t understand, and that it was more likely to drive me insane over time when I yelled out friends names and they continued to walk away from me, forcing me to run after them to “prove” that my voice isn’t a ghost.  Perhaps that’s what cell phones are for though.  There is a very positive application for this belief though.

Everywhere you go, there are people around you.  Learning Chinese, you start to realize that many people around you are actually talking about you, rarely in a positive light.  By accepting the fact that they are ghosts, you can ignore them as “whispers in the ether”.

I’ve actually been discussing the fact that people here talk about you constantly, and not in a good way.  There are a ton of entitled little boys running around trying to cleverly make fun of you while being completely incapable of subtlety.  It gets a bit frustrating, and many of my friends and I have been trying to figure out why this is.  Many foreigners lose their tempers easily due to this, those who I hang out with actually love China, and want to understand the thought process behind everything, and to see how it can benefit us in our future in China.

I shared my ghost theory, but a good friend of mine actually explained things to me in an entirely different light.  In western countries, eg Canada, USA, England, South America, Ireland, etc we are raised with a Christian mentality.  Regardless of your religion, or lack of religion, you’re taught that you should be good to each other, the golden rule, what goes around comes around, or any variety of cliché.  China is a truly atheist nation.  They don’t believe that there’s any actual positive reward for treating their fellow man well, and the only negative repercussions are randomly enforced laws, that they will most likely not get caught out on.  This is probably why China is disorganized and completely utter chaos on a regular basis.

When I first came to China, one of the expats I met told me that I should go to Hong Kong to “decompress” every 2 months, and that 2 hours was not enough time, I need at least 2 days every 2 months.  For whatever reason, my competitive nature came to the surface and I thought that I could last longer than he had.  The truth is, he was actually doing me a favour, and I made the error of not following his advice.  Thankfully, I am actually able to learn from my mistakes.  Perhaps I should try Macau, but I honestly have a hard time thinking that the island version of Las Vegas will help me to decompress.

A couple of days ago I took a friend of mine, a Chinese friend and we all went on the search for a tea set.  A tea set in China isn’t just teacups and a pot.  There’s a whole big set up.  You need to get some sort of a table top, the older styles are made out of wood, although there are ceramic versions as well.  My Chinese friends all say that the best are made from bamboo, but I don’t want to have that kind of a tea set on display, let alone use one, I think it would just embarrass my friends.

Inset on the tea-set table needs to be some sort of drainage system.  There’s also two main ways that the water is boiled and cups are cleaned for making tea.  You can either have the stove set into the table, or you can purchase it separately.  Additionally, most people have a tap attached to the stove with a hose running down to a water container.

Once you have the stove, you need a pot with enough room for 10 or more small teacups inside placed on their side, and a teapot to boil the water in.  You then need the tea-set with a small pot for washing the leaves, a strainer to place on top of the straining teapot for serving, and a minimum of 6 cups.  Most of those who enjoy tea have around 3 tea serving sets. 

If you have 3 sets, you can reserve one set for black tea, one for red tea, and one for green.  Red tea is good for the belly and the digestion, green tea is good for the throat, and black tea, from what I can see, is a fantastic substitute for red bull (which sucks in China, by the way).  When making tea, you wash the leaves, and pour the tea into the teapot.  On the first wash, most use the first wash to wash the cups out before serving, that way you don’t have any contaminants in the tea.

It’s been my experience that there’s one person sitting at the head of the table, and the rest just sit around and enjoy the tea.  

I found what I thought was a good tea set store near my house, located a block away and just behind me.  Phoebe, Thomas, and I went into the building to find out that it was a 4 floor building full of tea, tea-sets, and tea tables.  We spent a couple of hours wandering around, and found a fantastic store full of tables.  We started bargaining, and the sales lady pushed the wrong button, so we left.  She told Phoebe that when we first walked in, she was giving us the “pretty girl” price, but she had since realized that close up, Phoebe was an ugly girl.  We immediately left her to enjoy her own spiteful company.

We went upstairs and into a teashop, to find a very interesting man who sold tea.  We sat down and talked to him for a bit, as he was a fascinating man, and had the most incredible store I’d ever seen.  There was a tea table, and a room that was so full of tea, you couldn’t actually move around in it.  He introduced us to a better place to purchase a tea-table in, and even gave us his discount card.  We looked around for the better part of an hour before finding the perfect tea-set table, with a built in stove, and included boiling utensils, and also picked up a matching set of tools for handling and washing the cups, as well as matching coasters.  Mr. Long also showed up at the end to make sure that they gave us their best deal.  He told us that he had ordered up dumplings and rolls for our dinner, and called his part time employee in to serve tea for us.  We then spent 4 hours drinking tea all night long and talking.  It was a fantastic night, although the black tea kept me up until 4 am.  We didn’t have time to find the three sets of tea cups though.  I need to do that this week, so that we can serve when my friend Bob from Texas comes to town next weekend.

At school, we’ve started learning characters this week.  The Chinese have a name for every single stroke, so that my teacher can just tell me the stroke name while I write it.  For example for water or “shui”, she would say, “shu gou, heng pie, ti, na” with the end result “水”.  I’m learning somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 characters a day, and 10 new words a day.  I finally decided to take classes Wednesday to Friday, as I actually have about 6 hours of homework for Monday thru Saturday regardless.  Also gives me time to work out new ways to say things, study with 3 or 4 people, and practice talking.  I’m somewhat amazed at how much time is taken up trying to figure out how to speak and understand Mandarin, read and write pinyin, and read and write Chinese characters.