东山 – 龙虾和茶
Summer has been
pretty tough here – Suzhou: hot, humid and a lot of work. Recently I returned
to having two days off and the temperature dipped to something slightly more
reasonable, although the air remains stubbornly close. Given this somewhat more
clement state of affairs Celia and I decided to head to Dongshan 东山on our
days off. For me, this was mainly a way to scratch a culinary itch I had; my
friend Jason, a Suzhou native, had to my great interest informed me that Tai Hu
太湖,
a huge lake local to Suzhou, was the farming place of many fisherman who
cultivated and caught crayfish as part of their fishing staple. This
particularly interested me because I’m half Swedish, which may initially appear
to be apropos of nothing very much. To any Swedish readers it will in fact be
apropos of quite a lot, allow me to explain further. The Kräft Skiva (crayfish
festival) is a big deal in Sweden, a party at some point in July or August that
celebrates the former crayfish season, sadly a now largely non-existent species
there since a water borne disease decimated the population to near extinction
some time ago. In today’s globalised world this has provided only a small
barrier to crayfish based celebrations and Swedes continue to enjoy this annual
feast with catches imported from various places, one not inconsiderable
supplier being China herself. I fondly remember cycling home with boxes of
frozen Chinese delights, ready to be unwrapped from their hard scarlet packets,
precariously balanced on the back of my bike and quickly beginning to sweat in
the bright Nordic sunshine. Happily, Sweden is seeing a resurgence in the
crayfish population and trends are beginning to reverse in a somewhat
unexpected fashion as Sweden starts to export chickens’ feet (that favourite
Chinese snack, for more on this see my earlier post) towards the orient.
It was then with
some excitement that I found myself at what was most probably the source of
some of the scarlet delicacies so gladly recalled from my youth. But before
lunch we had some sightseeing to do. After one very long journey and one much
shorter one on the interminable
earthquakes that are China’s buses it was with great pleasure and no small
relief that we were enveloped by the silent serenity of Zijin Nunnery. This
nunnery was built in the early years of the Tang dynasty (618-907AD) and houses
some beautiful Arhat statues and various other pretty pieces of ancient art.
Arhat is a term largely attributed to Buddhism, although it was apparently
present before Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. It was at any rate pretty
humbling to be in the quiet presence of these ancient artworks. The nunnery was
also clean, emerald green and almost entirely devoid of people – something of a
nirvana following the hellish stint of almost continuous work in the noisy SND 高新区area
of Suzhou. We had a little walk around and then rumbled off on a bus towards the
banks of Tai Hu, enjoying the view across the countryside and the sleepy little
villages punctuating the winding roads.
Celia at Tai Hu
龙虾
We quickly found
a lady hawking for trade near her restaurant. She hastily informed us that
whilst she currently had no crayfish she could easily go and procure an ample
portion for two people from the nearby fishermen. A short while and a broken
conversation with some locals later, one of whom was a man of a certain age so
typical the world over, a self-proclaimed authority on everything, a steaming
bowl of these red treasures arrived. The Chinese experience is somewhat
different from the Swedish on, as one would expect, given the vast cultural and
physical distance separating the two. Swedish crayfish are normally served
cold, having been preserved in a mixture of brine and dill. The Chinese variant
were presented in a large bowl and cooked with lumps of ginger, a steaming
hillock of scarlet, still having been preserved in brine.
Crayfish are
funny looking things, painted a deep red by the boiling pot, gangly eyes on
stalks and disproportionately large claws hanging clumsily in front of them. They
could easily star in a 1950s Ed Wood B-movie as cheap stand-ins for Styrofoam
alien invaders. The Chinese call them Longxia 龙虾 (this
Pinyin is pronounced long-shee-ah), the characters translating literally as
dragon prawns. There is a certain poetic simplicity about the Chinese language I’ve mentioned before, elevators are called electronic ladders for example, and
that linguistic feature is preserved by this particular piece of elegant nomenclature. The term
can mean either crayfish or lobsters, but it was the smaller cousins that we
were to enjoy on this particular day. They are somewhat troublesome to eat, the
most succulent flesh being encased in a hard shell around their rear ends. One
can also eat the claw meat and even parts from their heads, known somewhat
optimistically as crayfish butter by the Swedes. It all requires a total lack
of table manners and the will to crack open various parts of these perished
creatures to get to the soft treasure within. In Sweden they have a selection
of tools for this, but the Chinese are made of stronger stuff and it is left to
the eater to puzzle out the best way to crack into their meal. All this means
that eating them is not really worth the effort, but like all the best
traditions we continue to practice it out of habit and in order to get that
implacable sense of satisfaction from doing something unusual, occasional and
largely pointless. I certainly enjoyed these salty scarlet treats to about the
same degree as their Swedish counterparts, but I won’t be enjoying them for
some time as frequency would be the death knell for the enjoyment of this
particular tradition.
茶
After
our crayfish feast we headed back to the non-descript one horse (or, less
poetically, one motorised tricycle) town that is Dongshan proper. Non-descript
and somewhat grimy it was but explore it we did anyway. After a deliciously
thirst quenching fresh lemon iced tea we came upon a small covered market.
There were several small stall owners hawking local fruit, strange miscellaneous
items and two parallel lines of hawkers perched behind small hillocks of
various kinds of tea. I managed to identify some as local Dongshan tea with my
rudimentary Chinese reading skills. I started to negotiate the sale of some of this to me, during which time some confusion ensued due to the impossibly cheap
price of the tea. The exchange led quickly to a somewhat bemused reaction from
the stall owner. I’m often faced with this bemused reaction when I try doing
all the silly things I like doing that westerners probably have no real place
doing in the middle kingdom. Buying tea from stalls in the middle of nowhere,
going to hidden local vegetable markets, taking buses to random outposts of
cities, getting lost in industrial zones, etc. The reaction is not so much
unpleasant as almost endearing in the confusion it barely hides behind the
ubiquitous Chinese saving of face. Clearly westerners did not often chat to
this chap in Chinese, and his stock of reactions did not cover this particular
situation. The expression is something of guardedness mixed with eventual
admiration for your dogged attempts to communicate. Also, somewhat pleasingly
for me, people off the tourist trail are generally too busy being bemused to
try to rip you off, indeed it generally seems not to be the done thing for stall
holders selling comestibles. The confusion was furthered by the
misunderstanding of his pricing. He gave me the price of forty kuai (the
unofficial name for Yuan, a bit like quid for pounds) a jin 斤 (a jin is 500g, a standard weight in China), but tea is often sold in
liangs 市两 (50g[1]),
since teas like Longjing 龙井 and Biluochun 碧螺春 are rather expensive. I therefore asked for a liang and tried to hand
over forty kuai. He gave me the common reaction saved for this kind of
situation, a look that seems to be searching for obvious signs of mental
deficiency or even lunacy, but then quickly gives way to the understanding that
you’re not stupid or pathologically wasteful, just foreign. It’s not really
your fault that you’re wasting his precious lounging time – you were born this
way and deserve more pity than anything else for your national shortcomings.
The transaction ended cordially however, and I decided to take some photos,
which he though was absolutely hilarious and told me I should take some
pictures of the “beautiful lady (mei nu 美女)” – the
owner of the neighbouring stall. These sort of endlessly entertaining
interactions almost always end up in good humour and someone complementing my
inevitably somewhat broken Chinese. This is a common experience for me in
China, an apparent abruptness that belies a friendly national psyche brimming
with good humour that rests just beneath that tough surface. It was a fun end
to what had been a pleasant day in Dongshan. I’m happy to report that I’ve been
drinking the Dongshan infusion, and that, whilst not the highest quality brew,
it is a good everyday green that unfurls in an ever aesthetically pleasing
fashion when steeped. A fine souvenir from another satisfying
Chinese experience.
[1] Note this is the standardised post 1959 measure, before which it was about 31g.
[1] Note this is the standardised post 1959 measure, before which it was about 31g.
Cuppa, anyone?
And finally a picture of some lily pads on Tai Hu to leave you with a pacifying view of Chinese summer.
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