Tuesday, August 30, 2005
1. put tea leaves in pot2. pour in boiling water from a transparent teapot that allows you to count the bubbles!!
3. wash all the cups with the tea
4. pour in more water
5. cover and wait for 30 seconds
6. pour tea into square (flagrant) cup
7. wait
8. pour tea from flagrant cup into round cup
9. smell the flagrant cup ( not quite so flagrant, actually. rather smeowlee)
10. drink
11. repeat steps 4 to 10 four times, with the amount of time needed in step 5 increasing by 5 minutes each time.
and that, times three, because we went through 3 sets of tea, the most flagrant of which was bai mu dan, was how i spent my tuesday evening.
i left tea chapter thinking of a million things.
do you really think we have a history of amnesia? i think that is so ironic for 2 different ways. 1. the oxymoron and 2. we don't even have a history.
actually, i disagree with what vince said, about there being a negative culture of obliterating all that's old and replacing with the new. that is actually a very positive thing to have. people and places who fail to do that, inevitably, fail. just like what we talked about in the BAND session today.
i think, then, that the negativity is because of the timing. these build-destroy-rebuild things happen in cycles, everywhere, all through history. its just that in singapore, by virtue of the times we're in and the space we (don't) have, the cycles have no choice but to happen faster. it happens so fast that nothing lasts. but at the same time, that's our way of doing things. so the question is, is there a way of turning this sort of culture to our benefit?
having said that, actually not everything gets destroyed here. upgraded is more like it. another singaporean idiosyncracy.
but that was just one of the million things.
the rest of the stuff makes me alternately furious and delighted to think about. i feel furious that people, people who, dammit, ought to know better, cannot give what i expect, what anyone would expect. what did they do to earn it? why must everyone be classified, put in a box to be ticked off, career-pathed, coursed the right way, when there are others so much more worthy of it? and the strange thing is, that's exactly the same reason why i'm so delighted. i have never heard such genuinity, such real concern, if not such pure involvement for nothing other than interest, the "right" things spoken not cos they're "right' things but cos they're personal experience and personal struggle, at any of the places and from any of the people i'd expect to hear them from. it makes me so happy, somehow, like a new plum being squeezed somewhere inside my chest, both sweet and sour at once, and leaving behind a stone.
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