After the “Puer” tea is ready, the journey begins.
For the Pu’erh that I buy, Emperor’s Pu’erh, it leaves Yunnan, reaches China’s coast and then crosses the Pacific to end on a shelf at a Whole Foods Market. However, before that, for centuries, Puer tea traveled to Tibet and China’s capital for the Emperor.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 1 1/2
Most people have heard of or read about the Silk Road from China to Europe. I’m sure that few have heard of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, which I discovered in the May 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 1 2/2
Legend says that tea from China arrived in Tibet as early as the Tang Dynasty (618- 906 A.D.). After that, the Chinese traded tea for horses, as many as 25,000 horses annually.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 2 1/2
But that isn’t what struck me the most about the piece. It’s the example that demonstrated why the peasants loved and possibly worshiped Mao Tse-Tung.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 2 2/2
For more than a thousand years, men fed their families by carrying hundreds of pounds of tea on their backs across rugged mountains into Lhasa. Some froze to death in blizzards. Others fell to their deaths from the narrow switchbacks that climbed into the clouds.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 3 1/2
This all ended in 1949 when Mao had a road built to Tibet and farmland was redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. “It was the happiest day of my life,” said Luo Yong Fu, a 92-year-old dressed in a black beret and a blue Mao jacket, whom the author of the National Geographic piece met in the village of Changheba.
CCTV 9 Travelogue – Tea and Horse Road – Part 3 2/2
Before ending the four posts on Puer [Pu'erh] tea and moving on to Kombucha Fermented Tea in Post 5, Numi Organic tea, Emperor’s Pu’erh, the one I buy at Whole Foods, says, “These old-growth rare Pu’erh trees are communally owned by the local villagers who pick them for their livelihood, ensuring that they continue to grow for generations to come… Pu’erh is an ancient healing tea picked from 500-year-old organic wild tea trees in Yunnan, China. Pu’erh has more antioxidant than most green teas.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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The fermentation of “Puer” tea demands a perfect mix of water, moisture and air. This provides the conditions for the development of microbes and the necessary fermentation.
The fermentation of broad leaf “Puer” tea produces a substance called theaflavin often called the soft-gold of tea.
Clinical experiments show that theaflavin reduces blood fat and cardiovascular disease among other benefits.
In animal experiments, the mice fed theaflavin had their blood fat reduced by 30% compared to the control group’s 10% blood fat reduction.
Due to the process of producing “Puer”, the tea may be stored as long as a century without losing its flavor or health enhancing benefits.
The 110 days of fermentation for “Puer” is important to achieve the best flavor and enhanced, health benefits—the time must not be shortened. The temperature and humidity must also be stable and many warehouses are built partially underground to achieve this.
I’ll bet you didn’t know much about the process the tea you may be drinking went through before filling your cup. The process to produce Puer tea represents almost two thousand years of China’s tea culture.
“Puer” got its name because it used to be sold in a town by the same name.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Puer tea is mellowed by aging, the period by which it is transported and stored.
The largest, tallest tea trees in the world grow in the mountains of Yunnan. This region also produces black, green, Oolong and other kinds of tea.
The leaves for “Puer” tea are divided into three sizes and the largest contain more of the health benefits attributed to “Puer” tea.
For centuries, the process of making tea from picking, to washing, to boiling, mixing, pressing, clustering, baking, and packing has been improved to enhance the flavor of the tea.
Chinese Puer tea – Part 2/3
Dao Linyin, the governor of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous region in China says, “Puer tea contains many vitamins. Very few Puer drinkers get high blood pressure.”
Standards for selecting the thickest broad leaves for “Puer” tea means only about 30% of the tea leaves that are picked pass inspection to be processed into the final product. This selection process is important because the wrong leaves will have a negative impact on the fermentation process.
The fermentation step in the process of producing “Puer” tea takes 110 days.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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My weekend cup of Numi Organic Pu’erh teareaches back into China and Tibet’s history almost two thousand years. The journey this tea takes starts in China’s Southwest Yunnan province along the border of Laos and Vietnam.
There are several varieties of tea — white, black, scented and green to name a few.
The mountainous region of southwest China in Yunnan Province produces a special tea called “Puer”.
The custom with “Puer” is to pick new tea and drink old tea. This refers to a practice unique for “Puer” tea of aging the tea in storage to obtain the unique flavor.
In addition, modern science has recognized “Puer” for its health benefits beyond black tea.
Chinese Puer tea – Part 1/3
In 225 A.D., when China was divided into the three kingdoms of Wei, Shu, and Wu, the prime minister of Shu led a military expedition to Yunnan.
Historical records say that many of the Shu troops came down with eye diseases. After they drank the boiled tea, it is believed that the troops were cured.
The leaves came from a tea tree in Yunnan. Over time, tea drinking for health benefits became a tradition in other areas of China including Tibet.
There is an old saying in Tibet. “Better three days without food than a day without tea.” Historical records show that Tibetans started drinking tea during the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD) in 641.
Tibet does not grow tea trees, so the famous Tea Horse Road from Tibet to Yunnan was opened. Over the centuries, tens of thousands of horses were traded with China for tea.
In the early 19th century, Emperor Daoguang named “Puer” tea as a “Divine Tribute to the Kingdom of Heaven”.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Atrocities abound in the history books concerning treatment of Native American Indians during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The Spanish destroyed the Aztec and Inca civilizations with disease and warfare, and the Catholicmission system in California enslaved Native American Indians.
After the Civil War, the United States military was sent west to drive North American native Indians from the land they had lived on for thousands of years and slaughtered men, women and children—millions died.
Today, many of the surviving American natives live in horrible poverty on reservations.
Then the American government grabbed Hawaii from the native Hawaiian people against their will. (There is a native Hawaiian nonviolent separatist movement asking for freedom from America.)
After the Spanish American War, America took possession of the Philippine islands and waged waragainst the native people killing
more than two hundred thousand. This went on until America entered World War II.
In fact, the treatment of American Indians has not changed much. The United States government might not wage brutal war against Native American Indians today as they did in the past, but in recent times billions of dollars slated to support Native American Indian tribes on reservations went missing, and no one seems to care where all that money went—except the native Indians.
It would appear that the era of lies and broken treaties has not ended.
Nearly a quarter of the Cherokee Nation froze or starved to death on the trail to Oklahoma Indian Territory. This video explores America’s darkest period: President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma in 1838.
It is best to stay away from Hollywood movies if you want to discover the truth.
When I brought this topic up in a 2010 E-mail conversation with a conservative, evangelical Christian friend, he said what happened in the past does not count today.
I disagree. History always counts. Jesus Christ said, “Let he who has no sin, cast the first stone,” and, “Go and sin no more”, and investigations in Iraq revealed that under President George W. Bush, the CIA was torturing prisoners.
Errol Morris examines the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Most in the West and America have heard about Tibet and the demands by Tibetans in exile that Tibet be free from China to rule itself. We hear claims of human rights violations taking place without much evidence to support the claims, and people that fear and hate Communism (the word not the reality) will believe anything.
The American media recently revealed that tens of thousands of illegal aliens in America (some seeking political asylum) were locked up in detention centers and were not getting proper medical care and were dying because of it.
Unlike Mao’s time, today’s Chinese leaders must answer to the seventy-million Party members scattered throughout China. These people listen to the 1.3 billion Chinese that do not belong to the party. The result: if an elected official is not doing his or her job, that person usually isn’t reelected.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Pub Med Central provides a better history of the one-child policy.
“In 1979, the one-child family policy was developed and implemented in response to concerns about the social and economic consequences of continued rapid population growth,” Pub Med said, and, “implementation was more successful in urban areas than rural areas.”
Pub Med says, “It was hoped that third and higher order births could be eliminated and that about 30% of couples might agree to forgo a second child… In some of the largest and most advanced cities like Shanghai, sizeable proportions of couples already chose to have only one child (regardless of the law).
“As a result, it was not long before 90 percent of couples in urban areas were (easily) persuaded to restrict their families to a single child.”
However, Pub Med says, in rural areas of China the opposite happened, and 90 percent of women with one child went on to have a second (regardless of the law) and there wasn’t much the Communist Party could do to stop them.
AP’s Louise Watt writes, “Under China’s one-child policy in place for the last three decades to control population growth, couples can be penalized for having more than one child. In Beijing, the penalty is a one-off fee 3-10 times the city’s average income, a maximum of 250,000 yuan ($40,000).”
Watt also tells us that among the 20,000 Chinese with at least 100 million yuan ($15 million) 27 percent have already left China and 47 percent are considering it, and they want to leave so they can have more children on the cheap and buy land that does not belong to the government.
These wealthy Chinese Louise Watt writes of may be surprised to discover that if the U.S. wants to build a school, park, freeway or shopping center, and your house is in the way, it will be bought and bulldozed.
The law for this is called Eminent Doman and 60 Minutes at CBS Newsreported on possible abuses of this in the United States in February 2009. Rebecca Leung of CBS News wrote, “But did you know the government can also seize your land for private use if they can prove that doing it will serve what’s called ‘the public good’?”
In addition, it would be interesting to discover if some or all of the wealthy Chinese claiming to have left China to have more children and buy a home left for other reasons they are not talking of.
In The Danger of False Truths, I mentioned that thousands of corrupt Chinese officials stole more than $120-billion U.S. and fled overseas—and the U.S. was a top destination.
If so, the real reason many of these “wealthy” Chinese left China may have been to avoid going to prison or being executed.
In addition to Eminent Domain, if an American cannot pay the annual property tax or income tax in the United States, the house will be lost to the government. I estimate that the property tax I paid since I first owned a home in 1973 would have paid the penalty for a dozen extra children in China.
In fact, due to property tax, no one really owns their homes in America and everyone is just a tenant, and the U.S. Government is the landlord. In China, they call it like it is, while in the US, most people believe in fairy tales.
And if you were worth $15 million dollars and wanted a second or third child, $40,000 a child would not dent that fortune. In addition, in China when someone buys a house for that 70-year lease, the property tax is paid only once at the time of the purchase and currently there is no law that says you have to pay any property tax again unless it is an investment property.
When these rich Chinese arrive in the US and buy a million dollar house, they will be paying property tax annually. Taxes on land and the buildings on it are the biggest source of revenue for local governments.
In California, for example, property tax for a million dollar house costs about $10,000 a year, and forty years of property tax would cost about a half million dollars, which is much more than $40,000 for the second child and another $40,000 for the third child.
Maybe Louisa Watt should have also mentioned that U.S. citizenship is for sale for foreign millionaires and the details may be found at All Voices.com, and most Americans could not afford this legal bribe (sorry, I meant deal).
In fact, there’s a lot about China’s one-child policy that Louise Watt isn’t revealing, and what she writes may have to do with America’s busy-body, do as I say morality, which interferes as often as possible in the domestic philosophies and affairs of other countries—something China does not do.
For decades, China’s one-child policy has been criticized in America and/or the West mostly by evangelical, fundamentalist Christians that represent one of American’s squeaky wheels with a political agenda to force their beliefs on others.
However, what these critics do not know may shock them, but I doubt if it will deter their misguided zeal.
In the September/October 2011 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Phillip Longman wrote The World Will Be More Crowded With Old People, and said, “Another related megatrend is the rapid change in the size, structure, and nature of the family. In many countries such as Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, the one-child family is now becoming the norm (without a law)… Today about one in five people in advanced Western countries, including the United States, remains childless.”
AP’s Louise Watt also doesn’t tell us the one-child policy does not apply to the hundred million people in China that belong to one of the fifty-six minorities or many of the Han Chinese living in rural China where most Chinese don’t pay property tax, rent or a mortgage payment since the land is owned collectively and may not be sold.
Since minorities in China are a small segment of the population, China’s government practices flexibility with the minority birth rate in order to keep minorities an important part of China’s culture.
For example, Tibetans may not live the feudal, nomadic lifestyle with the 35-year lifespan they once had under the Dalai Lama (the average lifespan in Tibet today is more than 60 without the Dalai Lama), which they had before Mao sent the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into Tibet in 1950.
Isn’t it horrible how the Tibetans were forced to give up that shorter average lifespan and feudal servitude?
However, as a minority, Tibetans may have as many children as they want and the penalty Louise Watt writes of does not exist for them.
We often hear of the Uighur Muslims since this minority has an Islamic separatist movement in the northwest near Afghanistan where the US is fighting a war against a similar insurgency, but the Uighurs are a minority so the one-child policy also does not apply them, and they are not the only Muslims in China.
The Hui are unique among the fifty-six officially recognized minorities of China in that Islam is their only unifying identity. They do not have a unique language as the other minorities do and often intermarry with Han Chinese.
In fact, many live outside the Hui autonomous region. Since the Hui are considered a minority, the one-child policy also does not apply to them.
The Chinese government says if it weren’t for the one-child policy, there would be another four-hundred million mouths to feed and provide shelter for. Instead of 1.3 billion people in China, there would be almost 2 billion—more than six times the population of the US, and China cannot grow crops on about 90% of its land.
Chinese law allows married couples in Shanghai that are both the only child of their parents to have two children even if they are Han Chinese.
To make sure these married couples are aware of this exception, China provides support from government run family planning centers that check on women’s health and inform them of their rights and responsibilities to have more than one child.
The Shanghai government encourages married couples eligible to have more than one child to do so, which, in Shanghai, means most married couples.
The Shanghai Family Planning Commission first promoted this policy in 2009. The reason for this campaign lies in Shanghai’s population demographics.
Because of the one-child policy, Shanghai has been particularly hard hit by an age disparity, and 22 percent of the citizens of Shanghai are over sixty and these numbers are expected to grow.
Xu Xihua, the director of Shanghai’s Aging Development Center says that by adjusting the one-child policy in Shanghai, this disparity in ages can be partially reduced and giving couples an opportunity to have two children is part of the plan.
However, the central government stresses it is not abandoning its family planning policies or its control over the number of births. Fear of overpopulation and potential famines remains high in a country that has a history of droughts, floods and famines, which is something the U.S. has not yet experienced in its brief history.
France 24 International Newsalso reported how one Chinese couple wanted to have more than one child and the couple took advantage of loopholes in the one-child policy to have three.
The mother’s first child was a boy, and she was desperate to have a girl.
Since fines are less for a second child if delivered in a remote rural province, the couple moved south.
However, the mother discovered she was pregnant again soon after the birth of the second child, which was a girl, and the doctor told her that because of health reasons she couldn’t have an abortion.
And recently, authorities in China’s most populous province have asked Beijing to ease the one-child policy.
In addition,wealthy Chinese businessmen, television and movie stars often avoid the one-child policy since they have money to pay the fine Louise Watt writes of in her AP piece, and ten percent of rich Chinese have an average of three children and this practice is spreading among the upper-middle class. Since they stay in China, these wealthy Chinese avoid paying annual property tax in America.
Peng Xizhe, dean of social development and public policy at Fudan University, says “In the Maoist era everyone was controlled by his work unit. It’s over now. Many workers are independent. It becomes more and more difficult for the government to pressure people to having only one child.”
In fact, according to some experts, China will adopt a two-child policy in several years.
However, unexpected problems besides an aging population may have developed from the one-child policy, which is explained by a NPR All Things Considered report by Louisa Lim’s Lightning Divorces Strike China’s ME Generation.
Lim says Beijing has the highest divorce rate in China with 39 percent of all marriages ending in a split.
One Beijing woman, Cheng, tells Lim of her six-month marriage that ended as fast as it started. Cheng blamed the divorce on belonging to the generation of spoiled singletons (one-child), known as the post-1980′s generation.
Dr. Perry, a professor of economics and finance in the US, agrees that the upsurge in China’s divorce rate is because of the selfish and narcissistic generation of spoiled one-child children in China (have you already forgotten that many of these urban parents decided to have only one child before or in spite of the law).
But hold on, there may be another explanation why Beijing’s divorce rate is soaring. Eight years ago, a married couple needed permission from their work unit to divorce. Today, couples have the freedom to divorce in China without asking.
Although it may be difficult to link China’s changing divorce rate to the one-child policy, there is another outcome that cannot be denied.
China may have cut off a foot to save its stomach from starvation.
Studies predict that China will soon be short 24 million wives. It doesn’t matter that it is illegal in China to take a test for non-medical reasons that determines the sex of the fetus.
Since China’s culture traditionally prefers boys to girls, many parents go to underground private clinics to find out what the sex of the fetus is. If it is a girl, many terminate the pregnany with an illegal abortion.
The results is a growing shortage of women leading to illegal forced marriages and prostitution (sex slaves), which is a challenge for the police and courts to deal with.
After you learn more of the details of China’s one-child policy, you discover that it was a law without many teeth and didn’t deserve the criticism it received, which leads to the conclusion that the American and/or West’s reaction is due mostly to racist Sinophobia.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Steinfeld points out that “patterns of inequity are unfortunately not unique to the Chinese experience”, and then he makes a strong point when he writes, “One need look no further than the United States and Western Europe for developmental histories replete with exploitation, abuse, violence, and environmental degradation.”
By coincidence, the same day Carter sent me the link to this forum in the Boston Review, I read Wage theft a scourge for low-income workers by John Coté, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.
It seems while many Americans and the Western media often criticize China for exploitation of migrants, low-skilled wage laborers, and the rural poor, the same practice is alive and well in the United States.
Coté writes, “It’s part of a national scourge known as wage theft. More than two-thirds of low-wage workers (in the United States) reported some type of pay-related law violation…”
The piece Coté wrote for SFGate was on two pages and ends with six facts. One says, “$56.4 million is stolen every week from (low-wage) workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.”
In addition, Poverty News reports, “Low-wage workers in the United States are gripped by increasing financial insecurity as they inch along an economic tightrope made riskier by pervasive job losses and rising prices. Many struggle to pay for life’s basics—housing, food and health care—and most report having virtually no financial cushion should they stumble.”
How many Americans are considered low-wage workers?
According to the Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College, “The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2008, 39.8 million people (13.2 percent of the U.S. population) lived at or below the Federal Poverty Level (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2009).”
When it comes to poverty, America ranks 3rd worst among developed nations.
If two-thirds of these low-wage workers (and there may be more) in the U.S. are being cheated, that is about 26 million people that are not being paid what they earned.
It seems to me that the American media, the nation’s leaders and most Americans should focus on solving these types of problems in the U.S. before criticizing other countries.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Eclipsed by the neon blaze of Guangzhouand lost in the limestone peaks of northern Guangdongis 1,000 year-old Qiannianyaozhai, the oldest Yao minority village in China.
Over 7,000 Yao peopleonce occupied the mountain community; however poverty and generational differences have dramatically thinned the ethnic population, leaving Qiannianyaozhai in its present perfectly preserved state.
6am: Rise and shine in Liannan County for a long day of exploring bucolic North Guangdong. Unlike steel-and-glass PRD, the north is a poem-inspiring swath of farmland and karst summits.
7am: Ask several locals for directions, but either their regional dialect is unintelligible or they each point in a different direction. These are the joys of traveling in rural China.
8am: Well-informed bengbeng taxi takes us twenty kilometers southwest up a lush mountainside to “Nangang Thousand Year Yao Zu Village.” Crowning the 800-meter crest we behold our destination: the mystical Qiannianyaozhai.
12am: Spend several hours wandering this living museum. The only sounds to be heard are the whispering wind and an occasional farmer’s hoe against soil. Clustering against the amphitheater-like gradient are approximately 400 stone-and-slate homes, standing majestic and unscathed since their Song Dynastyconstruction.
1pm: Qiannianyaozhai is reportedly the largest Yao village in China, but with less than 200 current residents we veritably have the entire 159-mu grounds to ourselves. Tilling the terraces are barefooted, red-turbaned Yao farmers, regally draped in dark blue robes and scarlet sashes, ancestors of an ancient agrarian society and the last generation.
2pm: Invited for tea in the home of the yaowang village chief of the Pai Yao clan. The simple dwelling is warmed by a wood-burning stove and accentuated with hand-wrought farming tools, whicker baskets and other antediluvian household goods. No modern appliances in site. While Mother mends clothing, Granddaughter chats with us. She must walk four hours every day to attend primary school at the bottom of the mountain.
4pm: Capitalize on the clean air with a long stroll back down the mountain, peeking into other nearby villages and stopping to chat with locals. Everyone is so unbelievably kind it’s a bit shocking; definitely no relation to the Cantonese.
5pm: Spot a woman with a satchel that glows like a rainbow – the Pai Yao’s signature accessory. Females will spend up to three months hand-embroidering their own bags, each with a unique, blindingly-bright design. I attempt a purchase, but she drives a hard bargain. Apparently, some retail high-rollers have already passed through here and set the standard, which is too much for my backpacker budget.
7pm: Dinner at a riverfront restaurant for fresh caoyu grass carp and locally-grown greens, then retire to our luguan boardinghouse for some much-needed sleep.
12am: Awoken by a riotous KTV parlor next door, Mandopopblaring from a pink-glowing room full of high-heeled, mini-skirted xiaojie. I guess no matter how far you stray from the big city, in China some things just don’t change.
Getting there and away: Qiannianyaozhai is well off the beaten path. From Guangzhou City bus terminal, catch the ___am bus to Liannan County, ___ hours, ____ RMB. From Liannan, best to hire a taxi directly to Qiannianyaozhai, 20 RMB (at the time), 30 minutes.
Tickets into Qiannianyaozhai were 30 RMB per person when I was there and contribute to the preservation of this rapidly-vanishing minority culture.
Liannan’s main, and only, drag is comprised of several guesthouses (20 RMB per bed) and one three-star hotel (100 RMB). Xiaojie cost extra.
____________________
Discover Tom Carter’s Guest post On Crime in China. Photojournalist Tom Carter traveled for 2 years across the 33 provinces of China to show the diversity of Chinese people in CHINA: Portrait of a People, the most comprehensive photography book on modern China ever published by a single author.
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This film (based on a novel by Lisa See) is the story of four women and of the complexities of China — Lily and Snow Flower live in 19th century Southwest China, while Nina and Sophia live in 21st century Shanghai.
Even in the 19th century, Shanghai was a world apart from Southwest China and still is. It is safe to say that the day-to-day grind of life probably hasn’t changed much (except for foot binding and more freedom for women) in remote rural villages in Southwest China, which is off the beaten track of most foreign tourists that visit China on fast-paced packaged tours.
I read Lisa See’s novel soon after it came out and although I enjoyed the book and felt it was well written, I couldn’t understand why it stayed on the New York Times Bestseller Listas long as it did. And to be honest, I still don’t. However, if there was a formula to predict why a few books are wildly successful and many fail, no one has discovered it yet.
The original story Lisa See wrote shows a small part of China and in no way represents all of China and all things Chinese. That would be a challenge since China is a diverse land with many spoken languages and cultures and one written language and a very long history.
From what I recall, Snow Flower and Lili, the characters in 19th century China, live in Southwest China and belong to one of China’s fifty-six minorities, which have unique cultures apart from China’s Han majority, and as children these two girls are sworn to be loyal friends for life.
Considering what life was like in China for woman in the early 19th century, it is understandable why such a custom would have evolved. However, to be clear, I will remind the reader that women were mostly treated this way everywhere in the world at that time, and many still are outside the US, Europe and China. Sex slavery and abuse of women still exists in many countries such as Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
These reviews, written by Sino-blind Americans, demonstrate no clue that the real purpose of this movie may have been to highlight China’s past and present and not as another cloned US movie such as two I saw recently, which reflect what is mostly popular in America. Both of these American movies, Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon and Horrible Bosses, lacked depth without a soul, and I cannot recommend them to anyone. However, I must admit that I’m capable of enjoyed both depthless movies and films with depth such as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
I’ve been to China many times and sat in movie theaters watching movies made in China for a Chinese audience and this movie, to me, is a Chinese film with Chinese actors and actresses set in China. After all, a Chinese film company was behind its production and the director is Chinese.
Most Chinese do not think like the average American that is often stuck on a linear path incapable of seeing the meaning between the lines. However, Chinese think metaphorically meaning if you want to understand and enjoy this film, look between the lines and learn from what is hidden in sight?
As we travel with the ancient (19th century) and modern (21st century) sworn sisters with scenes that shift from past to present, we discover that although there is more personal freedom in China today than there was almost two centuries ago, life still comes with no guarantees. The scenes in modern Shanghai show a city in transition with old being torn down being replaced by new as if China is emerging from a cocoon. I saw this transition as a metaphor. The scene where Nina is taking off her high heels and rubbing her feet compared to the ancient Lili (both played by the same actress) taking off her three-inch shoes and rubbing her bloodied, painful bound feet demonstrates how far China has evolved.
In fact, because this film is more Chinese than the novel written by American born and raised Lisa See, I feel it captured more of a sense of China than the novel did.
For those reasons, I cannot agree with most of the American media critics that trashed the film. Of course, to be fair, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan would be considered a failed and flawed film to most Western critics because it is a Chinese film adapted from a Western book.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is more than just a disjointed film jumping clumsily between centuries. This film represents China and the complexity of Chinese civilization and it demonstrates how much China has changed while so much that is often out of sight of most foreigners stays the same.
If you have the patience to suspend your Western values and expectations of what movies should offer and want to discover something new, I recommend seeing this film. But be warned, since this film is Chinese (in my opinion), it pushes the melodramatic envelope beyond what most Americans are comfortable with.
Shallow thinkers that flock to see movies such as Transformers 3, Horrible Bosses, The Zookeeper, and Cars 2, etc. may want to avoid Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. However, if you are an individual that enjoys learning and expanding your horizons, go — and take a box of tissues.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Jonolan is an anonymous Blogger who writes opinions at Reflections from a Murky Pond.
The name of Jonolan’s Blog is appropriate because his knowledge of Tibet and China is often “Murky”. However, that is not unusual since most people outside China are ignorant of the facts.
One of many definitions for “Murky” reads, “Hard to see through, as a fog or mist; Gloomy, dark, dim; Obscure, indistinct, cloudy; Dishonest, shady.”
“Jonolan’s political leanings are far to the Right on some issues and equally far to the Left on others. In areas of foreign policy, he favors isolationism in the vein of walk softly but carry a big stick. On social issues he favors a more liberal view that follows the guidelines of Do what thou wilt shall be the whole Law and An it harm none, do as thou wilt.” Source: About Page of Reflections from a Murky Pond
Listen to the Facts — not Popular Myths
In response to one of my posts, Border Crossing and the Blood on Our Hands, Jonolan wrote, “Again I’m forced to point out the difference in situations. Tibet is a conquered / occupied territory. Its people are not allowed the same freedoms, such as they are, that are allowed the Hans. Do you really believe that the Chinese didn’t murder Tibetans trying to reunite with their government-in-exile? Don’t get me wrong. China won that war and I accept the restrictions placed upon conquered peoples until their culture can be destroyed and their population assimilated. The world-at-large doesn’t though.”
As usual, my “reply” was too long. I can’t help it. I’m more of a novelist than a Blogger.
Since I’ve already covered the Tibet topic in depth, I built a menu for “The Tibet Issue” and placed every post I’ve written of Tibet in that menu on the home page for iLook China.
Anyone interested to learn the facts of Tibet, may visit the Home Page, scroll down and hopefully discover enough to blow away the cloud from a “murky pond” that obscures this issue from “the world-at-large”.
Just because Hollywood types such as Richard Gere, considered His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s most high-profile disciple, parrots the words of the Dalai Lama, that does not mean those words are the truth.
Instead, those words are the myths people want to believe.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
