This day, 1 October, in 2020, President Xi Jinping delivered an important speech via video at the High-level Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly commemorating the...
Take a trip to a tea plantation. Nanjing is surrounded by mountains where tea grows. You’ll bump into one soon enough if your eyes are open to it. If you already know one, go to that one.
Steal a handful of leaves. Not many. Just a handful. The farmer won’t see you. Don’t worry.
If he does, just blame me.
Now, if you put those leaves into your mouth, they will taste like “leaves”. And that’s pretty much all they will taste of. Infuse them in hot water and the liquor will...
No matter how much we enjoy a thing, it’s not enough; our enjoyment seeks validation.
Imagine a friend gave us a new DVD, but without introducing it. It’s blown us away. What a film! We’ve lingered over the credits, and, well, we’re now just one click away from checking the review on Rotten Tomatoes. But why would we read a review now?
Because we desperately want to see our opinion echoed in a forum higher than our own heads. Secretly, we want to see opinions like ours validated in the highest...
Delicious, isn’t it? Remember the smell when you unpeeled your first credit card?
If you have bought electronics, you will know the excitement of transparent sleeves and instruction booklets. Let us also mention polyethylene.
If I write here about the smell of new bin liners, you will experience something quite specific in your “inner nose”. Polyethylene.
It is the softer plastics that seem more generous to give off their scent. PVC raincoats and toy umbrellas. We all know the aromatic explosion from a roll of bubble wrap. Tiny seams of injected modernity.
It...
You don’t need to come to Asia to encounter bamboo; it’s there on the steering wheel of the E-Type Jaguar, on umbrella handles, there on that corporal punishment device once kept behind teachers’ desks.
Even edible bamboo was a concept familiar to me before I arrived here; bamboo shoots in tins were part of my English mother’s cooking in the 1980s. But, as with many things we already know about China, we’re not prepared for the abundance or the variety.
The bamboo shoots that appear in Chinese dishes in the real...
