Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 10:11 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related

A recent wine tasting I attended in Bangkok reminded me that I have never been good at large parties and I especially hate weddings or social events where the majority of people present are strangers. I cannot make scintillating conversation with people I have only just met; I cannot form that instant connection that some people seem to make. I am almost relieved when a chatty networker wanders round and removes from me the burden of finding interesting topics to chat about. My repertoire seems to be limited to asking how long that person has been in Bangkok, how they know the host, and what they do for a living: my conversation quickly dries up after that. I seem to do best with people who can talk for ages about themselves, but any sort of conversation that requires more than the occasional nod or grunt from me is often more than I can manage. I am often guilty of huddling in corners with people I already know, desperately avoiding the gaze of strangers.

The same thing applies to English pubs. A large Wetherspoons where you have to queue to get in on a Saturday night is not my idea of a good night out. My ideal pub is a free house located in a village half-an-hour to an hour’s drive away from the nearest city that serves mainly local brews; you wander in and two or three of your friends are there. The background noise should be at a level where you can still hear each other speak without having to shout, and finding a seat ought not to be a problem. There should not to be pressure to move on and you should feel comfortable sitting at a table playing a game of cards.

The ideal Chinese tea party has no more than three people in it. By the time you reach five in the party, it becomes difficult to control the temperature and steeping time of the tea (although there are ways around this). All the better if you know each other, but if you don’t, sitting around a teapot is cozy and not intimidating. Even if you have nothing in common socially, at least you have the tea to talk about and the ritual of making tea is still sufficiently unusual to most non-Chinese that it often becomes the focus of the conversation. If the people present are not familiar with how Chinese tea is made and drunk, then having more than three people present is really not possible because it then turns into a class and not a social gathering. I try to explain to novices that the Chinese tea ceremony is not a ritual as such (certainly not to the extent that the Japanese ceremony is), but that it is merely a way of making good tea. Indeed, the ritual of Chinese tea is a hugely varied exercise with as many versions as there are people who make tea. It is best done in a relaxed manner and ought not to be intimidating, so I usually dispense with the traditional names that accompany each of the steps and I tell my friends that mistakes are common, never fatal, and that they should feel free to improvise or to change things according to personal taste. There is nothing to be didactic about in Chinese tea and as with any such gathering, it should be about having fun with friends than being drilled about precise timings and temperatures by an anally retentive school master.

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