What's so good about black tea? (China)

A current student texted me on WhatsApp about the pu'er tea she'd been given, packed in an orange-skin casing (hollowed-out orange).

    I responded with, Quote 普洱茶 pǔ ěr chá was a newcomer over here in the late 70s / early 80s, more often sold as a health drink (especially for weight loss??) than just "tea". Unquote

    This reminds me of a Channel Four TV docudrama series I'd worked on in 1985, called Commodities, a six-part series released in 1986 on coffee, tea and sugar.

    I've already written a blog about something behind the scenes in that series: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2019/05/sloppy-set-up.html.

    This pu'er tea WhatsApp text conversation with the student has pulled up another memory from the depths.

    The tea episodes of the Commodities series focused on tea production in Hangzhou in S.E. China, Assam in India, and Zimbabwe.  I worked on the footage shot in China, doing the translations and helping out with the editing in the cutting room.

    One batch of rushes [unedited film footage] had the interviewer asking the tea plantation manager about the black tea that his company was exporting.

Interviewer:  What's so good about black tea?

Manager:  It's rich in ... (a long list of nutrients), and good for ... (a long list of conditions).

Interviewer:  So, do you drink it at home?

Manager:  Oh no!  I drink green tea.

    The look on his face and his tone of voice were most interesting.  If I'd been allowed to add a subtext line in the subtitles, it'd be, "(This stuff is for non-Chinese people.  We only drink the real thing.)"

(China, 1985)

* For those who might not know:  (my version in a nutshell)  The Chinese traditionally drink green tea.  Black tea is something created for the export market.  Traditional "proper" tea (i.e., green tea) is roasted once, but the moisture retention is too high for it to withstand the long sea journeys across the world -- tea clipper Cutty Sark took 100–120 days to get from China to Britain, and that was considered quick.  A double-roasted [hence the darker colour and stronger flavour] version was thus created, so that it wouldn't go mouldy during that time. 

Cultural conventions: The power of kneeling (Korea / China)

An ex-student had very kindly made me a guest on his Netflix account a few years back, so I was watching quite a lot of Korean dramas.

    What I noticed was how often someone asking for forgiveness would go down on his/her knees, and how effective it is:  the person who had been angry before would almost always immediately grant his/her forgiveness.

    I've since lost access to the kind student's Netflix account, so I've switched to YouTube and started watching mainland Chinese modern-day drama series.

    The one I was watching recently is centred on an old couple with six children (all married, bar one).

    The unmarried son had brought so much upset to the family with his waywardness in one particular incident that the sister most directly affected (with serious financial and reputational consequences for her husband's business) fell out with the father (and the rest of the family) over this.

    Much later, that sister (and her husband) decided to make it up with the father who'd been deeply hurt by her behaviour and therefore not likely to forgive her that readily.

    The moment she went down on her knees (followed a second later by her husband), however, the father thawed.

    Quite an amazing bargaining tool.

(Korea / China)

One form of self-therapy: 03 (Writing to the dead person)

Another then-student in the 1990s told me about her bereavement therapy.

    Part 1:  write a letter to the dead person, then actually post the letter (to one's own address).

    Part 2:  when the letter arrives, the grieving party sits down to write a reply as the dead person.

   

    Again, like the visualisation workshop exercise, I can see how Part 1 might or can work, as it's cathartic, but I can't visualise Part 2 somehow.

One form of self-therapy: 02 (Confronting the dead person)

(From googling)

Quote

Confront means to face, meet, or deal with a person or situation directly, often in a challenging, hostile, or defiant manner. It involves presenting evidence, addressing an unpleasant issue, or standing face-to-face with someone. It commonly means tackling problems head-on rather than avoiding them. 

Unquote

I first heard about this in the mid-90s from a student who went on a holiday in Greece and attended some kind of imaging workshop.  (I think that was the word: imaging.  Or maybe it was "visualisation"?)

    This is how she'd described it to me, but in my own words as I can't remember her precise wording now.

    (Her imaging workshop experience, in my own words)

    We were given two chairs:  one for us to sit in, the other for the dead person.

    Part 1:  We'd start by telling the dead person how we'd been feeling about their death:  anything that came to our heads, just let it all out.

    Part 2:  We'd then go and sit in the other chair, and play the role of the dead person, responding to what we'd just told them.

    (End of her story, in my own words)

    Now, I can see how Part 1 might or can work, as it's cathartic, but I can't visualise Part 2 somehow.

Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (Chinese)

It is true, as pointed out by reader Valerio, that the Chinese script offers no help visually, with no indications of where words are broken up or clustered.

    A consolation for the modern-day learner / reader of Chinese is that he's not having to read Chinese presented the traditional way -- with no punctuation marks, leaving one to rely on, e.g., markers like sentence-final particles (working like full stops).

     Punctuation marks are a borrowing from the Western practice, formally introduced and standardised during the New Culture Movement (which was closely tied to the 1919 May Fourth Movement).

    One finds, down the ages, footnotes by commentators offering their various and varying interpretations of a chunk of classical Chinese text, e.g., 

* Commentator A in Year X would say the text should be broken up at a certain point and parsed as Version.1, 

* Commentator B in Year Y (could be a few hundred years on) would say the same text should be broken up at a different point and parsed as Version 2, 

and so on.  Sometimes the footnotes are longer than the source text.  Luckily, this doesn't happen all the time...

    There is a famous cluster that's often used to illustrate how many variant interpretations there can be to a piece of text with no punctuation.  I shall share it in a separate blog as it's longish.  

    I used to work with someone (John B. at Sino-British Trade Council / SBTC) who'd done his degree in Chinese at Cambridge in the early 70s.  Back then, the Oxbridge degree courses in Chinese only taught classical Chinese.  Like at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), there was an exam at the end of Year One.  If you passed that exam, you were deemed good enough to survive the rigours of the next three years, with no exam until the Final Year.

    The passage for John's Year One exam was the proper style for a classical Chinese text, with no punctuation at all.  The problem, he said, was that it was presented in a square, i.e., with as many characters down as there were across.

    He didn't know if it was to be read:

(i) the traditional way (vertically down, starting with the extreme right hand line, then across the page, vertical line by vertical line);

or 

(ii) the modern way (horizontally, moving from left to right, then down the page, horizontal line by horizontal line, just like a text in the English script).

    He said, "After the exam, I found out that I'd read it the wrong direction -- but I passed anyway!"

    Even with gaps provided between English words, one still needs a certain level of basic knowledge of where to break or cluster within a word for the sense to emerge or to help the learner remember.  An English-equivalent example (cited in blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html) is the word "disappear", where one does need to know how the language behaves so that one doesn't end up breaking it up into "disap" and "pear", on the basis that one knows "pear" does exist as a word.

    So, if you look at it like that, Chinese is not unique (or impossible) after all.  It's just a matter of having a basic set of tools to start with, then building up further strategies based on that knowledge -- and gaining confidence in the process (if not fun as well by treating it as a game).

    I have three Advanced Level private students who've been with me now for 26 years (not continuously) for one of them, and 18 years (not continuously) for the other two.  Over their years with me, they've been drilled so much by my teaching of strategies that they're able to cope with unseen text (no time for prepping beforehand) by applying the Guessology (my coinage) skills I teach them, and arriving at the right analysis a lot of the time.

(From googling)  

Quote 

The New Culture Movement:  an intellectual and cultural reform movement in China, generally active from 1915 to 1921. It aimed to modernize Chinese society by promoting Western science and democracy while rejecting traditional Confucian values, culminating in the political May Fourth Movement of 1919.

The May Fourth Movement:  an intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform movement that occurred in China in 1917–21.

Unquote

Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (English)

 

This series is prompted by reader Valerio's comment on https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/04/chinese-is-learner-friendly-language-in.html about what a challenge the Chinese script presents to the learner, with no gaps between the characters -- what I call breaking up and clustering.

    I've raised some English-equivalent examples of this in the blog covering German (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html), so what's here are further instances of how one does need some basic knowledge of how the language works.

    I wish I'd been directed more at school to look at English and Mandarin in this way, which would've made it much more illuminating, not to mention fun.  Knowledge of how a language works, to a certain extent, is very useful, something not every learner is taught, from what I've seen (mainly in students who'd done their Beginner level elsewhere before coming to me, either privately or my evening programme classes when I was teaching them).

    Further to the Jonathan Smith vs Jon Athansmith example in the blog on German, here's something to illustrate how it could be done.

    There was a phone company advert on TV in the 80s featuring a grandma talking to her grandson on the phone, asking about his exam results.  He was not particularly pleased, saying he'd only passed one subject: Sociology.  The grandma said proudly, something like, "He's got a pass in an ology and he's not happy."

    That was clever, I thought as a language teacher, guiding the learner of English to look at the language from the angle of patterns in the language, something I use a lot in my teaching of both Mandarin and English.  Some examples:

* It would help the learner enormously in delineating the reference if s/he knew that words that end in ology denote "the study of", e.g., zoology, biology, psychology, sociology.

* Like -ology words, those ending in -ment, -tion, -ness, e.g., are abstract (development, contentment, entertainment; irritation, agitation, imagination; happiness, weariness, dizziness).

    Once you start applying these principles and learning the vocabulary in groups of related words, the burden will be lightened.  You can even begin playing the game of looking out for the next -ology / -ment / -tion / -ness words, to see if the general rule applies, thus making the learning more fun than sheer memorising without seeing some kind of pattern to help identify future unknowns that crop up.

    Remember:  rules are never 100%, just use them to your advantage, and forget about the irregulars for now.

Cultural sense of humour (Eastern Europe)

In the mainland Chinese drama series that I'm currently watching on YouTube, the woman reads bedtime stories to her six-year-old son.  There's one about a mole, which turns out to be a famous Czech cartoon made in 1957 (I discovered by googling it).

    This reminds me of an Eastern European whacky cartoon I saw on telly in the 1980s (when I had a TV) about a banquet.

    The whole cartoon leading up to the punch-line scene enacts the preparation for the banquet, with the staff setting out the long table in an opulent setting, then the guests (at least 20) arriving in chauffeured limousines, all dressed to the nines, one after another.  After the guests sit down, the waiting staff, who are all in formal gear, serve up the food in cloches. 

    The punch-line scene:  the cloches are removed to reveal what's underneath -- lobsters, suckling pig, whole roast chicken, etc., who then leap up and eat the guests.

    The cartoon then starts all over again with the beginning -- the prepping of the food, the laying of the table, the guests arriving in limousines, leaving us to know what is going to happen...

    Talk about a perverse sense of humour, hahaha.  

    The only one that I can find whose description seems to match it is Zofia Oraczewska's “The Banquet / Bankiet” (1976), but what I've found (as a rubbish researcher) does not tell me what happens at the end.