Song

Sirrah. I wish I were a stay at home mom. A stay at home mom who could blog to her heart's content, take amateur photos of her pets, tell you what they're doing today, what I watched on the View, what I thought about it, and what I'm baking while watching it. A man can dream. Alas, I'm too busy teaching Korean kids, writing about Japanese Obentos, baking biscotti for professors, not getting good grades by baking biscottis for professors. It's a close second. But, here I am. Don't worry dear readers, I haven't forgotten about you. I never will. I think about you everyday even when I disappear into the depths of Academic abyss for a month. Consider these entries a test of my love.

I tutor a Korean kid (he's my age; we're kids in spirit) named Song. Like other Korean kids, he has an unhealthy affinity for video games (don't we all?). Song's a sweetheart- is what I gather from the stories he tells me. He collects as many greeting cards as he can for his girlfriend back in Korea and sends them to her as often as he can, so much so that he's been running out of resources and I, so selflessly (foolishly), recruited myself to join his effort, scaling the city to look for as many campy greeting cards as I can find. Hey, this is a trial of love.

I tell Song all the time that what he does for his girlfriend is probably the sweetest thing in the world; that, generally, all the things he does for his girlfriend are the sweetest things in the world. He once bought a rose for every day he liked her. Jinkies.

I've told Song that guys here don't do said things- at least, not as much. And that if they do, women aren't too responsive. Song says men here are macho- that's why. But in Korea, they're not. 'Could of fooled me. I've never been to Korea, but I've watched Old Boy enough times to assume otherwise. That's how I learn things- through media. I don't consider it junk, I consider it ethnographic research; equipment for living, if you will. But I digress, as I so often do . . .

So, the story goes that one day on the island of Jeju-do, Song and his Girlfriend (hereon referred to as 여자 친구) went to a café- I like to imagine specifically oriented towards lovers- where those in love hang their love letters on some sexually charged wall. That was a little harsh. Wall is good here. That being said, Song and 여자 친구 wrote a love letter together, put it in an envelope, wrote in characters too large for the envelope and hung it on the wall- I like to imagine like on a laundry line.

And so, one Friday, while tutoring Song, mmm, about Shakespeare, let’s say, he felt the necessary urge to tell me that he had, out of the blue, received an e-mail from his sister and uncle along with a picture of that very letter he wrote, the characters on the envelope being so large that they couldn’t help but attract whatever eye curious enough to gaze upon it. Not only a café popular amongst lovers, but sisters and uncles as well. Anyway, Song couldn’t hear the end of it, and I didn’t want to hear the end of it, his family still berating him to this very day (lovingly, I’m sure), and me still berating him for that very photo. Magical.

There’s something about food and spaces. Wonderful things happen when we sit down to eat; not only are we nourished physically, but emotionally as well. The lines are blurred very easily between the satisfaction of being fed and the satisfaction of being, in the case of Song and여자 친구, loved- emotionally appealed let’s say. Barthes would probably have something to say about it; Baudrillard too, although I reckon he’d turn it into something consumer-fetish related and ruin the good time we’re having analyzing this whole thing.

Let’s consider the café. Let’s consider the café and love. Let’s consider the café, coffee and love. The café is a place where people go to socialize, yes; but why over coffee? An item that would otherwise wake you up and give you more energy than you actually need in a space you go to relax seems counter-intuitive. But that’s just it, dear readers. It’s not about the coffee, it’s about what it means. The coffee is nothing more than a conduit for something else. An alibi for the hidden intentions of two lovers who go out to drink it. They need a place to be together and the café is the reason. They need a thing to engage in together and the coffee is the fee. Yes, the coffee may be nourishing, but it stands in place for the mediation that goes on between two people. They may buy the coffee, but they may not even drink it, too busy writing love letters. Indeed, it is only a cover for something else that is going on. The cup of coffee is nothing more than a distraction for nosey viewers, like the boy who buys vast amounts of chewing gum to cover the box of condoms he intends to check out. Did I ruin it? I am pretty macho.

Indeed, if there were no such thing as love (and dating ritual, for that matter) the café may cease to exist. Or so I like to imagine. So next time Will Hunting tells you that coffee is arbitrary, you tell him otherwise. That coffee isn’t arbitrary; that it’s, as Song so genuinely taught us, 恋の試練 .

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抹茶デ俺のマチ

Plain matcha seems a rarity in this town, so I was more than surprised when I came across a plain cup of matcha tea for 1.25 at the city's only Gelato place: Whole Lotta Gelata. I didn't expect much; but I received a lot in terms of volume. Not in taste, however. It was expected. Why would anyone expect a Gelato place to know how to make a proper cup of matcha tea? It's not as easy as water and powder. The place gets points though for sophistication. If only my Italian fore-fathers knew how far they had come; alongside some Japanese kid's Japanese fore-fathers, of course.

However, as much as I would have liked to discuss the tea's pleasant taste, it will have to wait for a place with pleasant tea because the matcha here was nothing more than chalky and bitter, not sweet like a true, properly mixed matcha should be. What made this tea blogworthy however, was the way it was presented to me. Regardless of its taste, (which should have been the reason I sent it back, assuming I did send it back) I was enamored by the matcha's rich, rhetorical materialization. It wasn't tea in the generic (yet usually sleek) white coffee cup/tea cup/ some kind of cup we'd all expect, but in a double layered, almost bowl like (very reminiscent of the cups used in Japanese tea ceremony- probably a fluke), windblown glass cup, sans handle. Yes, it could be argued that the double layered, windblown glass was to insulate the tea and prevent scolding the drinker's hands, but I argue that there was more to it than that. Its shape was reminiscent of the East; yet, its design and the materials involved echoed the contemporary cosmopolitan lifestyle that makes tea drinking today such a sophistication, even if it tastes terrible. As long as you drink matcha, you're cool. The thing itself does all the talking for you. You only need to read some Burke quaintly in the corner of whatever café and be.

This brings me to my next question: what happens when something like matcha is prepared incorrectly and tastes aweful, but is still drank by the connoisseur because they hear about its benefits and play their own sophistication off of its connection to the exotic land of the Rising Sun. Bad tasting things can be good for you, but so can good tasting things, and in the case of matcha in my city, this is something I have a problem with. I've likened the flavour of a matcha latté to that of a strange breakfast omelet and plain matcha to that of cigarette ash. At this point, I can't help but wonder if it ever tastes good. What happens when these misappropriations in taste occur? I'll tell you, dear reader. You have a loss of proper taste, and nothing more than rhetorical propaganda. No longer is it about taste, but association with the thing itself. A cup of matcha and saying one drinks matcha comes to signify the drinker's own exalted position in foodie-ism, even if it means it tastes aweful. It becomes a kind of social proving ground, even when it doesn't have to be. Why not refuse to drink terrible, bitter tea? Will you lose face? Only amongst the biggest phonies who think matcha, for example, should taste bitter. Then again, are people like that really worth knowing? They probably read about matcha in a women's magazine. Tell me if I'm going off on a tangent, but sometimes, it seems that kids truly are the only honest connoisseurs. They'll tell you if something tastes bad and if they don't like it due to nothing more than their honest, genuine taste. They don't care what someone else thinks- until, of course, they grow up. But at least in that finite time they have integrity, which is something we should all aim to have when eating. Because when you fake sophistication, you're no better than a kid.

Did I just melt your brain?
Whole Lotta Gelata120 King St S,
Waterloo, ON, Canada

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Tea Gentrification

Tea gentrification

I was dazzled today by the city mall’s new expansion. I love spaces. I’m a sucker for suburban sprawl, huge strip malls, even bigger parking lots. I could lie on the hot lifeless cement and let the pink fuzzy arms of heat that rise off it hold me down forever. I could people watch forever, be in total awe at the lengths young shop girls go to get attention.

Indeed, the mall, assuming it’s a good one, is a huge hole for culture, as commodified as it may be. If it’s anything, it’s a place where consumerism not only perpetuates itself, but draws in the purist traditions, beliefs and worldviews and makes them into something marketable. Hey, baby, that’s business. Trump did it, Marx wrote about it, and we all live it.

Consumerism is nothing more than our displaced comradery projected and manifested into something Man alienated from whatever good social relationships the world used to have. It’s the phantasmagoria. What the ideal world should be like. Alas, it never really is. We’re no longer gift givers, we’re consumer fetishists. And when something as zen as tea gets thrown into that mix, I imagine myself taking that hot “Japanese” kettle off its ridiculously marketed (useless) candle holder/heater and pouring that luke warm sencha/chai/bullshit blend down whatever sales person’s throat until they choke, hearing the echoes of Marx in my head: “the bourgeoisie won’t save you now!”

If there is a food that gives us perspective; that allows us to reflect and withdraw from the rabbles of everyday life, that stands in place for everything good and pure, then tea is it. The colonialist stole it, the farmer drank it, (if not to flavour the hot water he had to boil and drink or otherwise fall ill by because of the myriads of parasites in an un-boiled pot), the samurai had it beside him while writing his last poem, doing his last war dance, before going on into battle for the very last time, and the kung-fu adherent drank it, even when he was dying of thirst. My Old Master drinks it, and so do I. Without him, I still would have touched the stuff, but I would never have appreciated it. Something, I’m sure, that comes with time and enough curious intention to enable a person to riddle through as many books and people about tea as possible. And, of course, when it’s the only thing on hand after doing 1,000 tornado kicks.

Food can shape your identity if you want it to. And it can also challenge it. Mine’s been challenged. It’s scary, comrades. 提心吊胆 同志.

Though grateful that I had my phone on hand, without which I would not have been able to take pictures, I couldn't help but feel like some terrible interloper. Sho ga nai. It was for the greater good of tea.

The sale of tea in the West is not my beef. The gentrification of tea is. When something as sincere and necessary, rejuvenating and affordable as tea is recognized as marketable and exploitable for a market of new-aged fatheads, I can’t help but be a little discontented. Maybe I felt like I was part of a club, or part of a history. I knew the secret to harmony, I was privileged enough to be a part of someone’s harmony. I knew how much tea meant to the poor generations who depended on its flavour because they couldn’t have anything else. It stood for working hard, climbing mountains, 吃苦。Or so my Old Master taught me. I eeked out know-it-alls, risked being called 鬼佬, being hit on the back by old women from Laos only to learn whatever subtleties I could so that someday, maybe I could be a part of something. Now all that seems terribly compromised. My city’s no longer subtle. The teashops have been compromised. Those women in sweaters with cat prints have been compromised, threatened by the sophisticated yuppies that head to the mall, not the “smelly Chinese store.” Don’t get me wrong, sophistication’s good. If it comes with humility. Otherwise it’s just arrogance. If that’s the case, sophistication seems more reserved for coffee, not tea. It seems wrong. If there were such a thing as immortals, they might agree. But I still stand by it.

Tea is for the hardworking body, not the complacent, sedentary consumer that needs to impress his girlfriend. When a girl says she loves tea, I don’t believe her. When a guy in a mall’s giant (chain) tea shop comes up to me, decked out in Gucci shirt and shitty (shitty being the pejorative here for unnecessary designer) pants and claims it will help me lose weight, I laugh. What employer grilled him with that? How much more was he forced to know? How long did it take him to know it? And when the same guy convinces a young Chinese girl to buy the shittiest blend of dust for 11.95 my heart breaks. (Probably because he couldn’t have been older than 17, and she believed him.) Where’s her grandmother, is all I can ask myself. And why isn’t she saying anything about the glamourized, post-colonial photos of migrant workers hunched over tea bushes with huge sacks on their backs on display over the shelves of metallic tin cans and assembly line tea pots? Why, when I enter these places, do I feel like the only one who thinks something’s wrong?

glamourized, post-colonial photos of migrant workers hunched over tea bushes with huge sacks on their backs.

A cup that says “guru” won’t make you a tea aficionado, but I know that’s what they want people to think. And those flashy electric scales that measure your grams in neon blue digital numbers may make things more precise, but they won’t make things taste better. Another effect of the technological fetish we all seem to be a part of.

Let’s not forget the cherry on the cake of a fabulous store. The 3 foot tall Buddha sitting cross-legged, with what looks like a bowl in his hands filled with pennies from passersby. If that’s not an allegory for the marketability of spirituality, I don’t know what is. Joke’s on them. They gave their income to an entity that doesn’t even need it. He reached Nirvana a long time ago. Maybe next time I see a crucifix, I’ll leave some money at Jesus’s feet. Maybe he’ll give me long life and double happiness.

The Buddha doesn't need your money. He reached Nirvana a long time ago. Judging by your spending habits, neither do you.

There was something delightfully satirical and post-modern about the whole thing. Tea discovered, taken, relished in, novelized, and then recycled to be new, kitschy and profitable. It’s only a matter of time before people actually assume that a monk summoned a lucky dragon to make the tea bushes grow. Although, it is a nice story. A story more or less dwarfed by the commodification that overshadows the magic and lore of tea. But I should stop here and be grateful that I still have my own tea spaces to dwell in, and that I always have. Like the saying goes, “think about the misfortune of others to be satisfied with your own lot.” I know where my tea is, and them, theirs.

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