This day, 27 August, in 1975, Chairman Mao Zedong met with Cambodian statesman, Norodom Sihanouk, and others, after their arrival in Beijing from Pyongyang by special train;...
Des Esseintes is a man with sick fancies.
He is the dissipated aristocrat at the centre of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel, “À Rebours” .
He is the collector of house plants which somehow look fake but aren’t. He owns a tortoise shell encrusted with gem stones. He didn’t want the tortoise to die from contamination. But so be it. Together with figures like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, he represents the Fin-de-Siecle End-of-19th-Century spirit of jaded pleasure seeking.
Something of this appealed to me as a young man confronting a new century of...
Strainer readers may recall, about 3 years ago, reading about a new concept in tea preparation. It was called InWE Tea (因味茶). It exerted on the tea leaf high pressure as well as high heat, much like brewing an espresso. I was excited.
Maybe I was wrong to be too excited. While most of the company’s tea bars do still exist, my prediction that we would all start fracking our tea leaves has been unfulfilled; tea capsule machines have not become mainstream.
Except that aluminium tea capsules are appearing. Maybe you’ve...
The tea was oolong, with just a hint of Formosa-perfume-tanginess. Or was it a hint of detergent? Anyway, this was a nice restaurant, too nice for pouring spilt water onto the floor.
This was a rare lunch with my teenage daughter, waiting for dumplings to arrive, cheekily spying on her friends’ QQ Music playlists.
To her cup I poured expertly. Now, trying to fill mine, arms slightly retracted, I… over-tilted… liquid seeping from the teapot’s lid. It wasn’t a big puddle, so I swept it off the table edge, hoping to...
Now, this may seem a little vulgar. But I beg your patience. I’m here to talk up the pleasures of burping.
As the father of a new baby, it’s a proud moment when I bash a burp out of her, especially a good dry one; there are no marks for puking the baby.
But I’m here to talk here about the pleasure of the
adult burp.
You see, food that “repeats” is my kind of food; garlic or
jiucai (韭菜) may only be a one-dimensional reminder
of a good meal well had, but...
