FT: Like nothing else on earth

Like nothing else on earth

By Nigel Andrews

Financial Times
Published: March 7 2008 21:23

I wasn't doing anything as I stood on the corner of People's Square in
Shanghai. I was just looking at a map. But in China that is the equivalent
of sending up a distress flare. People flock around you, clamouring to help.
You insist you know where you are but they ­ it is part of their ancestral
wisdom ­ know better.

An amazed and amazing day, my first full one in China, began when a young
man and girl swirled up to me, chirping, "Hello, are you lost? Are you
English? Where are you from? How long are you in China?" They were both
about 19 years old, she a moon-faced gamine with large eyes, he a lean-faced
youngster who couldn't stop talking. My map wilting in my hand, my
protestations that I wasn't lost totally ignored, they said: "We are going
to a tea ceremony. Will you come with us?" So I went.

It is great to know that old traditions survive in China, such as being
shanghaied in Shanghai. Touching down the previous day, I had already been
"helped" a dozen times, pointed to airport buses, semaphored to taxis,
dragged out of harm's way when I tried to haul my suitcase across a dual
carriageway in Pudong. (I had recklessly started walking towards my hotel,
the Grand Hyatt, without knowing that you cannot walk in Pudong. Nothing
horizontal exists there, save for cars. It is a skyscraper kingdom:
everything goes up, up and up).

So a tea ceremony in the bustling, earthbound part of Shanghai across the
river sounded just the thing. An ancient and venerable Chinese custom, with
Chinese people to introduce me. Nothing prepared me for the uniquely cuckoo
experience that followed. It was a day weirdly mirrored (read on) by a day
one week later, in another part of China, that strengthened my intuition
that in this country life is lived as a ritual, or series of them, that the
novitiate must repeat until he gets it right. It is very Buddhist and, for
willing souls, quite educative.

I expected a large, august chamber for this tea ceremony. I got a walk-up
broom closet presided over by a sternly smiling matron in buttoned-up black.
A series of bewitchingly incomprehensible practices ensued. Several teas
were offered in turn, served in different tea sets. Much tea was poured
straight down a drainhole in the serving table. (The first cupfuls are
discarded, I gathered, like the first olive pressings). Even more tea was
thrown over the small figure of a three-legged frog-like creature. "Should I
throw mine over the frog?" I asked. "It's not a frog, it's the tea god,"
reprimanded Rei-Rei, the girl.

Every different tea was said to do something good: "This is good for the
heart ... this is good for the feet and kidneys ... this is good for the
brain." One piping-hot tea was sloshed by our hostess over the black dragon
design on the side of a cup, whereupon the black turned red and yellow
before reverting to black. Magic!

Everything was astonishing, including the bill, which came to Rmb1,700, or
£110. I paid my mortified whack, which included an outlay for buying the
colour-changing dragon tea set, which I couldn't resist. Shanghaied in
probably the fullest sense ­ drugged (by tea) and rendered powerless ­ I
soon heard myself agreeing to meet Rei-Rei and Yao Qiang (his name) for
dinner. They were such fun I didn't care if they might be hustlers who had
been complicit in a tea ceremony sting. They took me to a Mongolian
restaurant for a whole new "going native" experience, the hot pot.

In this ceremony, an army of waiters and waitresses, dressed as if for a
feast day in Ulan Bator, set fire to the gas-rings built into your table,
then set down a large brimming pot, before bringing dishes that the eater
must empty into the bubbling broth flavoured with chilli and garlic. I
chopstick-winched into the mess of potage, then chopstick-raised to my mouth
the gristly mutton bones, the unidentified forms of seafood, the unnerving
balls of something or other. It was delicious, and seemingly endless and
washed down with Mongolian beer and the chatter of my pals.

We were on friends-for-life terms by now, so I asked Yao Qiang and Rei-Rei
why the Chinese are mad for Christmas. This was late December and kitsch
reigned everywhere in Shanghai: trees, lights, loudspeakered carols. You're
not Christian, what is this all for, I asked. "We like the trees and
decorations," they said. I shrugged and moved on to telling them how
impressed I was by their English. Many young Chinese people learn it, they
said, which makes one of the big divides with the older generation. Rei-Rei
wants to get a job that involves speaking English. Yao Qiang has been
studying for a job in "I Chi".

"I Chi? Like Tai chi?", I said, meaning the mind-body exercises practised in
parks. "No, no," he said. "IT."

No wonder this is a tiger economy. As a castaway flung on the shores of
Shanghai, I had been picked up, pressed into instant consumer service,
frisked for facts about the west, then humbled by my go-ahead polyglot
hosts, who combined the energy of Genghis Khan with the entrepreneurial
flair of Donald Trump. By the way, dinner cost Rmb170, or £11, one-tenth of
the tea ceremony.

History may repeat itself, but hysteria doesn't. So my grandmother taught
me. But she never went to China. My experiences in Guangxi province a week
later were another "going native" bliss-out with side orders of battiness. I
had been urged to visit Guilin by an FT colleague who rhapsodised about the
Li river and its mouthwatering mountains, famed in song and scroll. These
soaring tapers of contorted limestone tinged with greenery rise sheer and
giddy, like nature's answer to the Pudong skyscrapers. Chinese painters
captured them long ago in a few flicks of pen and brush. Flicks of another
kind, the ones I know as a film critic, have honoured them in China many
times since.

My heart was set on a river day, even in shallow-watered December, when the
Li is navigable for half its length, and less than that if you go in a
tourist boat. My cunning plan was to find a lone boatman in Caoping, the
village above the embarkation point for larger craft at Yangdi, and pay him
to boat me to the southernmost sailable point at Xinping. (I got this idea
from The Rough Guide to China.)

So it happened. Voyaging down the Li is like nothing on earth. It is like
entering the jaw of some fantastic dragon, the bright sky the roof of its
mouth, the mountains its molars, the river its unrolling tongue.

My boatman Tsao had a sun-grizzled cheeriness. He kept drawing my attention
with "Hello!" ­ the Chinese's favourite English word ­ when a crag shaped
like a camel or elephant appeared, or when a black-garbed fisherman flanked
by captive cormorants boated by, a surreal and Stygian sight. The cormorants
have their necks tightened by string so they cannot swallow the larger fish
they catch. Their master then takes the big fry for his haul.

After one gobsmacking stretch of scenery, Tsao cried "Hello!", did an eating
mime and pulled up the boat. We climbed a slope from which I saw an
open-eaved, bamboo-roofed building that looked like something out of
Apocalypse Now. It was a restaurant for locals.

I couldn't believe any European had set foot there before, especially when
lunch was previewed by two performances that might have driven a white man
screaming back to the river. First the owner approached, holding a large
glossy game-bird as if asking me to stroke it before I ordered it to eat. I
backed away, knowing my first aid kit was a Tamiflu-free zone. Then the
man's wife and cook, a petite banshee in an apron, emerged from the galley
area holding out a silver bowl full of leaping, pop-eyed fish and wriggling
eels. Disconcerted, I reached in my bag for my mini-dictionary and
spluttered the Chinese for "rice." I ad-libbed "tofu" too, just in case,
trusting to its internationalism.

All hopeless. The fish and eels were cooked, the hot pot was served. For a
moment I was back in Shanghai with Yao Qiang, Rei-Rei and the dredging
chopsticks. And ­ you guessed ­ it was delicious. Even pincering a fish's
head while trying to nibble off its lower body seems bearable in good
company. There was much phrasebook chat with Tsao. A bowl of rice arrived
late like the US cavalry.

We hit the river again. For the last and shallowest stretch, we swapped
boats, taking a bamboo raft with a tiny outboard motor. From my reclining
chair under a canopy, I gazed my last at those soaring brainstorms of
nature, those mountains like dancing, exultant graph-lines against the sky.

Back in Guilin that evening, I was kidnapped again. I had got chatting amid
the market stalls to a Chinese chap who spoke English. He said, "Would you
like a drink?" I said yes. He took me to a broom-cupboard-sized emporium in
an alley. A woman was pouring tea at a table with a drainhole and several
different sets of china. She pushed a cup at me saying, "This tea is good
for the brain ... this tea is good for the eyes and pancreas ... " I picked
up my bag and valuables and fled.

China is, as I said, one event-packed learning experience. Life recycles
itself for your betterment and enlightenment. Even the bad things are good
in their way. But the good things are better.

Nigel Andrews is the FT's film critic

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