Talking to old friend Chris, who is a fellow knowledge nerd, about linguistic matters (comparing Chinese, Japanese and Korean) produced this reference to 功夫 / 工夫 gōngfū, which just means effort.
For 功夫 as martial arts, one doesn’t just learn the moves, one has to drill and practise over and over again.
There’s 功夫茶 / gōngfū chá / kungfu tea, which is what my dialect group (潮州 Cháozhōu, or Teochew as it is called in Singapore, from the pronunciation of 潮州 in the 潮州 dialect) is famous for. It's not a particular type of tea, it's the way one brews tea and the effort that goes into it. Again, you keep at it until you get it right. The tea set is typically a small tea pot with small tea cups.
A 師兄 (shīxiōng, senior fellow male student) in my 功夫 group when I was a child was in one of those root-seeking phases, so he got himself a set, complete with a small charcoal stove and spent a lot of his free time perfecting the making of the tea, which includes building up a crust inside the pot — enhances the flavour of subsequent brews.
Came back one Sunday at the end of a day by the fishing pond to be greeted by his wife telling him off: “You’re terrible! You don’t wash your tea pot properly! I spent all day scrubbing out the inside of your tea pot.” He said he was close to killing her…. Took him months and months to build up that patina.
Now, that comes under 功夫 too, hence 功夫茶.
No comments:
Post a Comment