Warm Water

I don't remember my first encounter with water. By the time I came to consciousness of myself, I was already in the water every week and I loved it. Thanks for the swim lessons Mom!

Moving to Texas cemented my swimming habit. We had a neighborhood pool which quickly became my summer home. I was one of the lifeguard designated “pool rats.” Nearly every single day I was down there in the water. Whether lake, river, swimming pool, or the Gulf of Mexico, water did not scare me. I was at home and in heaven. Seattle cured me of that.

Swimming in the Puget Sound is a full body shock, and people have died from it. I did it off and on in shallow water, waiting for that first clenching of muscles to release so that I could breathe and move again. By shore I was not worried, but nor did I take much joy in swimming in that deep, frigid sea. Between experiencing true hypothermia on the Oregon coast, and moving aboard a small sailboat, I developed a deep respect and even fear of northwest waters. In Puget Sound, with temperatures averaging about 10º (50º F), survival times range from 30 minutes to 4 hours. Staying on the boat is a good idea.

The first challenge in facing cold water immersion is muscle seizure. Without a floatation device, it is easy to become fully submerged and have no way of regaining the surface. Survival times go up dramatically for victims who survive the first minute of immersion. Lifejackets are essential. The next test is resisting the urge to do something. Swimming or moving about exhausts the body's energy, heat, and ability to produce heat. The key is to keep arms and legs tightly together and to move as little as possible. This is how survival can be extended to 4 hours. Back in Texas, shipwreck victims sometimes floated for days before being rescued.

Here in Taiwan I live a short ride from the beach, but in six months of living here, with a swimming pool in my apartment complex and the beach a short ride away, I didn't swim even a single time. But finally, last week, I purposely placed my entire body into the ocean.

Oh sweet heaven, warm welcoming water, hours and hours of floating on the waves. Home again.

Would an Oriental Beauty by Another Name Still Taste as Sweet?

There is a saying in Chinese: "You can study all the names of all the teas for all your life and you will still never know them all." And this vexing fact just gets truer when it comes to translation.

Take for example "Oriental Beauty." Now this is a good name, both evocative and accurate. Better yet, it is close to being accepted in the tea world as the standard English name for this tea--one tea, one name. But of course it can't be that easy. This tea carries several other names as well, being sold in America as "Silver Tip Oolong" and "Baihao Oolong" and even on a rare occasion as "White Haired Oolong," a transliteration, an evocative translation, and a literalist translation of a single Chinese name--one of two Mandarin names for this tea. Luckily for us the transliteration of Oriental Beauty, "Dong Fang Mei Ren," has never come into popular usage.

As troublesome as this proliferation of names is, it just got worse. We haven't even touched on the Taiwanese names for this tea, which until recently we had no reason to know. But one newly published Taiwan government web page has set out to rectify this, the Toufen Township "Peng Feng Tea" page.

Yep, "Peng Feng Tea." This page has chosen to represent Oriental Beauty, not by its English name, but instead by a transliteration of its Taiwanese name. So now your “White-Haired Oriental Bai Hao Silver Tip Beauty” just got a new name "Peng Feng Tea." But it gets worse still. The page uses both "Peng Feng" and "Pong Fong" interchangeably. How many names are we up to now? I know the translator of the Toufen Township site personally but could not dissuade him from his attempts to expand the English lexicon.

So, not wanting to fight a losing battle, let me switch sides. I'd like to join the enedeavor by proposing the next English name for Oriental Beauty: "Braggart's Tea."

Those familiar with Oriental Beauty know that the tea gets its sweetness from being bit by tiny leaf hoppers during summer sprouting. As the story of its discovery goes--or at least one version of it--one summer the leafhoppers devastated a farmer's crops, biting the new shoots and stunting their growth. The farmer, crestfallen, harvested the tea and lamented his fate. It is well known in Taiwan that Summer tea is the worst and the lowest in value. Add to this the damage done by the leafhoppers and the farmer knew he was in for lean times.

And then along came an idiot English tea buyer, or so it seemed. He tried all the farmer's best remaining spring tea and turned his nose up at all of it. Fed up and impatient, the farmer said, "You are truly a man of taste. I will bring out my best tea." He treated the Englishman to the worst of his bug bitten summer tea and the buyer was smitten. He demanded to buy the entire harvest and paid a mint. When the farmer told his neighboring tea farmers what he'd done, they had a good laugh and named the tea "Braggart's Tea." Of course, being curious, they had to taste it as well. When they found out how good it was, they boasted of their tea far and wide and have been planting "Braggart's Tea" ever since. The name stuck and across the island a majority of Taiwan's tea farmers and tea drinkers refer to Oriental Beauty by its Taiwanese name: "Braggart's Tea."

But if "Braggart's Tea" still leaves you wanting more you can rest easy. We haven't even mentioned any of the Hakka names for Oriental Beauty, neither in translation nor transliteration, and the Hakka are the minority group most responsible for cultivating it. We should certainly be able to find a wealth of new English names there. After that, we can mine the local aboriginal languages. When we run out of source material, we can continue our endeavor with a series of alternate yet equally accurate translations of the various names such as "Boaster's Tea," "Far Eastern Beautiful Woman," and "White Haired Black Dragon."

Or perhaps everyone will settle on the one obvious English name for Oriental Beauty: "Bull Thrower."

Waiting for Good Oolong

Farmers, like sailors, are superstitious by necessity. Their entire livelihood depends on the benevolence of the fickle heavens.

The weather during this spring's harvest season was perfect--sun and heat but not too much, day after day of the kind of dry weather essential to oolong tea processing. I waited with great anticipation for the arrival of a remarkable crop of tea. For years now, each season's harvest conditions have been not quite right, and the tea, although good, has not risen to the level of greatness that I have been longing for. With this year's nearly perfect weather, I could hardly wait to begin tasting the incoming tea. And yet, many samples later, it is not the kind of harvest I've been waiting on. The spring tea harvest in Taiwan is good but not great.

So what happened? Even though it is the weather during harvest and processing which has the greatest impact on the flavor of the final product, the weather throughout the growing season plays its role as well. This year Taiwan is suffering a drought. The spring monsoons failed and winter was abnormally dry. And although varying rainfall throughout the growing season does not normally have such a decisive influence on flavor, abject drought has its consequences. I now have one more tea lesson under my belt. Now we wait for November, and pray.


ps. There is still some good tea out there. When Seattle's tea lady was in town she sent me a sample of a baozhong that she bought for Floating Leaves. It's my current favorite. I've also had some good high mountain teas from the various peaks, one Shan Lin Xi in particular was the top of my list for nealry a month. But all told, I'm still waiting. Unless you want to talk about the puers I have in my closet that just keep getting better and better. In that case, sometimes I just can't wait.

A Fool's Errand

With the economy on the verge of collapse, we quit our jobs and launched ourselves into Northern waters aboard a small boat.

It was April Fool's day 2008 that Chiayu and I began our life together. She flew in from Taiwan, landed in Seattle that morning, and then we dove headlong into life aboard the boat, much of the time our tiny living space in complete chaos as we completed final preparation for our departure. This is how we began, bound together inside a space of less than 150 square feet for six months.

It's perfectly fitting that the 'Fool' of the tarot deck is seen blithely stepping toward a cliff's edge. My favorite card in the deck, the 'Fool' represents the beginning of a journey. Blissfully ignorant the young fool is on a journey from innocence to experience, completely unaware of life's challenges. But to launch a fool's journey later in life means something else. It means stepping into life joyfully, with full knowledge of its challenges and pitfalls.

One year ago, Chiayu and I cast ourselves together into the unknown, and we have thrived. Our journey , through wind, foul weather, and sunny days, continues today with just as much joy as when we first set off.

We take April 1 as our official anniversary. Please help us celebrate by taking your next step with a smile.

Sulphur Man!

Life has been 'fragrant' lately, sulphurous emanations filling the atmosphere around me. Probably someone out there would like to take this as proof that I am indeed the 'hellion' that my grandfather used to call me. And indeed the source of my sulphuric presence does come from deep within the earth, but as far as I can tell the source is divine. Even better than a hot tub in the back yard? Hot springs in the mountains!

Taiwan is more than a little bit geologically active. We get compensated for our earthquakes with an uncountable number hot springs. My favorite sites date from the time of Japanese occupation in the 1940's--tubs made of cut granite slabs and an atmosphere of an old style Chinese bath house (like you can see in the movie "Shower," which if you haven't seen is sweet, uplifting, and just plain beautiful. Please watch it and don't delay).

Unlike that bath house however, we prefer the private rooms with our own tub. Chiayu and I have taken to soaking once or twice every week. Layer after layer of tension has been falling away. It's been like an archeological dig into recent history--two weddings, a trans-Pacific transplantation, parents, all of their worries and frustrated attempts to express love, my own stunted responses, all in the bright light of growing self-awareness which spares one little space to hide in, half a year of heading into wildnerness waters on a sailboat--as each layer releases, a memory comes. Little by little I can let go and settle in.

Finally, after two full years of non-stop accelerated change, we actually have a life of our own to settle into, and the time to ease our way into it. It is a beautiful part of the world we are in, living where the city turns to country side. We bought a pair of bikes and ride almost daily up into the steep, young mountains. I am strong, happy, healthy, and feel like I am exactly where I belong.

Life has seldom smelled so sweet.

ps. The Taiwan Hakomi website is up: www.hakomi.com.tw

Life Like Fire Hose

The biggest challenge to maintaining this blog is not lack of ideas. The biggest challenge is actually stepping out of the stream of life long enough to string words together.

Since my last post, I have had a Chinese New Year's feast with my in-laws and another with my extended Taiwanese family. I have attended 7:30am Taoist New Year's prayers. My parents have come and we had our Chinese wedding banquet. We travelled with both sets of parents to the Central Mountains, stayed with tea farmers, and took in a Beijing opera. My parents learned how to use chopsticks. And we feasted, again and again with the family, to the point that my first hunger pangs came as a long lost friend. What a sweet greeting everyone gave my parents.

Any one of these events would be plenty to write about, but the list itself barely scratches the surface. When life is at its most interesting, when one after another remarkable events are occurring, where is the time to chronicle even one of them? And how many must be left out?

So, leaving nearly all of this remarkable time period unmentioned, here ae three sentences on one event:

My parents' visit to Taiwan is a watershed event. I am deeply moved that they took the time and expense to come here and experience first hand this culture that has made up so much of my adult life. It brings us closer together.

Fur Elise

The official end of the Chinese New Year holiday in Taiwan is marked by the playing of Beethoven's “Fur Elise.”

This song has been with me from my very first night in Taiwan. Sometime just after dinner, the tinny electronic strains of “Fur Elise” wafted up from the street. I was immediately lost in reverie and conjecture. It was the ice cream truck music of my youth. As the sound traversed the neighborhood, I wondered what strange Chinese delicacies might be sold from such a truck.

Twenty years now since that day, the tune still haunts me. Every night it echoes from the canyon walls of Taipei's neighborhoods, that same exact tinny music, forever branded into my psyche, utterly obscuring the song's original beauty. For the last three days I have had a break. Not once has Beethoven's "Bagatelle in A Minor" been played within my earshot.

But today, the fourth day of the Year of the Ox, “Fur Elise” is once again being played throughout the city. The holiday is officially over. Trash collection has resumed, and Beethoven's tinny ghost summons us to deposit our rubbish in the truck.