Growing up in a rural, slate-roofed village deep in the countryside of southeast China, the only English books my Chinese wife had to read back then were a brittle copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and a set of Harlequin novels.
Yes, I’m talking about Harlequin, those pulpy paperbacks found on revolving wire racks at supermarket checkout aisles across North America and the UK. Their enticing cover art – usually, nay, always featuring shirtless, square-jawed men hovering millimeters away from the glistening-red lips of a damsel in distress – and formulaic flirt/fight/fall-in-love storylines mercilessly targeted housewives and secretaries longing for a 200-page escape from the dirty diapers and pot-bellied husbands of their mid-life realities.
As it turns out, it was by reading books like “Stormy Voyage” by Sally Wentworth and Roberta Leigh’s “Two-Timing Man” (bought used for 7 RMB out of a sidewalk vendor’s book cart), amongst other Harlequin classics, that my wife managed to teach herself English (which explains her tendency to throw her head back dramatically whenever we kiss).
Curious how Harlequin, the forbidden fruit of literature, could be found anywhere in a Communist republic that has the world’s most strict state-sponsored vetting process for publications, I was surprised to learn that in 1995 (about when my fiancée found her copies) Harlequin received official, red star-stamped permission to place half a million copies of twenty titles in Mandarin and a quarter-million copies of ten English versions on the shelves of Xinhua.
Harlequin’s stated goal: “to bring romance to millions of Chinese Women.”
A China.org article on the increasing popularity of romance books in the P.R.C. concurred with Harlequin’s audacious move: “Chinese women today have new demands for their Prince Charming: first, he must be powerful and distinguished…next, he must have unlimited financial resources.”
Wosai! No wonder China has become home to the world’s highest surplus of single men!
Harlequin, which puts out 1,500 new titles annually in over 100 international markets, has yet to think up a romance set in present-day China (Possible storyline: wealthy, second-generation Beijing businessman seduces sexy xiaojie with his shiny black Audie, pleather man-purse and a thick stack of redbacks; he agrees to save her Anhui village from being bulldozed by corrupt cadres if she will become his kept woman.).
Until that day, we will have to entertain ourselves with stories set in China’s olden times starring princesses and concubines.
If you are arriving here from FRESHLY PRESSED – A Huge thank you and Welcome. I would be so grateful if you would follow me as storytelling and travel are my livelihood and if we share this passion you will have a blast here.
Cheers and Thank You!
Hong Kong is easily the most dynamic city I have ever visited. Alive, moving, walking, running, and most of all eating and all of this with great vigor.
The air conditioning units we see on the outsides of buildings in China are much more energy efficient than the whole house units found mostly in the US. We live in the Bay Area near SF and our house has a whole house unit, which can be very expensive as it cools or heats the entire house while we spend most of our time in one room.
The units you see in China are ductless and while there may be one unit outside of the building, there will be a different ductless unit inside each room of the unit, which allows the residents to run only the one for the room they are in thus saving energy and keeping the electric bill/use down.
However, I agree with you that these units probably do warm the city by several degrees in the summer. Imagine, China has more than four times the number of people that the United States has with about the same amount of land to live on. If everyone in China had these ductless air conditioning units, I'm sure it does run up the heat at ground level. In the US, when a heat wave hits, the amount of energy demanded by all the whole house air conditioning units often causes brown outs/power losses as the electric grid crashes from the demand.
The man that installed the one ductless system we bought (for a separate granny bungalow on our property) said that it would use less than a third of the electricity demanded by our whole-house unit.
I wonder if that means in China, if everyone was using the ductless heating-cooling unit in one room of their home, the Chinese would be consuming the same among of electricity that Americans would consume under the same circumstances.
Most of the Chinese cities we have spent time in all had the same amount of energy you experienced in Hong Kong.
We are taking a quick trip to Xian (in pictures that is). Xian was China’s ancient capital for more than a thousand years before being moved to Beijing.
After landing in Xian in 2008, (our third visit to the city since 1999) we found a great driver. He was honest and knowledgeable. Here’s the cell phone number he had at the time (136-0916-251). If you visit Xian, I recommend you book him for the entire stay. He also introduced us to some experiences we’d never had on previous trips.
The Famous Terra Cotta warriors were created to guard China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (221-204 B.C.). Qin Shi Huangdi made Xian China’s first capital until Kublai Khan moved the capital to Beijing where he ruled his Khanbalik Empire, from 1264 to 1267.
Xian was known as Chang’an before the Ming Dynasty and is one of the four great ancient capitals of China having held that distinction under several of the most important dynasties in China’s history. In fact, Xian was a cultural center more than a thousand years before Jesus Christ was born.
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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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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.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
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.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
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.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
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.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
Having spent over four straight years in the Chinese Mainland without leave, it was with both anticipation and apprehension when I finally crossed the southern border into Asia’s wealthiest city – Hong Kong.
Who wants to fly into Hong Kong?
Despite its one-stop-shopping popularity with Mainland expats needing new clothes and a new visa, I truly had no idea what to expect in the former crown colony that supposedly makes even rich men feel poor.
Rather terrified of exacting reverse culture shock, I hence saved English-speaking Hong Kong and its “One Country, Two Systems” self for the tail end of my journey across the 33 Chinese provinces.
And it is from there I report that all my preconceptions and fears about Hong Kong were—true.
To quote the under-appreciated American author Thomas A. Carter (me!) upon his brief sojourn in the legendary Chinese city, “I’ve never felt more poor than when I was in Hong Kong—I’ve never felt more ugly than when I was in Hong Kong.”
DAY 1: Cross the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border at Louhu and catch the immaculate KCR railway, immediately impressed that nobody is staring, shoving or spitting.
Arrive in Kowloon’s southern peninsula and emerge from the underground into the land of lights – Tsim Sha Tsui.
Blinded with excitement, I have to ask a resplendent group of Indian women draped in saris where the Mirador Mansion is.
They point their gold-ringed fingers straight up. A towering, rust-stained concrete block, one of Hong Kong’s only affordable accommodations.
I check in to a claustrophobic dorm room (three times the price of a Mainland dorm and three times as small), then hit Nathan Road.
Peering up into the neon lights, tripping in the crush of the crowds, I feel just like a migrant worker back in Beijing.
DAY 2: Awoken at 6am by one of my bunkmates stumbling in after a long night.
His name is Pat, a young American backpacker with long red hair whose introduction is immediately followed by a long-winded narrative about his two-week romp in Hong Kong, including scoring with the mythical “Asian girls who LOOOVE foreign guys.”
When I counter that I never had any such luck, the fast-talking but likeable Pat proffers some off-the-cuff advise (“Dude, lose the beard”) before launching into more useful information.
“It’s Sunday, okay, and there’s gonna be, like, 120,000 Filipino nannies and maids on their only day off – and looking for boyfriends!”
I’m a little dubious of Pat’s generalizations, but sure enough his mobile rings continuously with calls from adoring cleaning ladies he met the Sunday before.
An afternoon stroll around Statue Square indeed reveals a literal blanket of thousands of picnicking South Asian women (Hong Kong’s largest migrant communities) whose collective chatter sounds just like a large flock of seagulls.
When I attempt to candidly photograph one attractive young Filipino, she shouts “Hey! I klick jor ass!”
So much for getting a date.
DAY 3: Fieldtrip to Shek O beach on Hong Kong Island’s south side, savoring the soft sand and splashing in the subtropical South China Sea.
Supposedly this place is packed out on the weekend, but that’s what weekdays are for, no?
It’s one of those moments when I enjoy being unemployed and chase my fun in the sun with a tram ride up Victoria Peak for a breathtaking evening vista of skyscrapers, which appear to be constructed entirely out of lights.
Photo by Tom Carter
Dafnit, an Israeli girl clearly in awe of the Hong Kong skyline, remarks, “We have no tall buildings in Israel. Oh wait—we have one!”
DAY 4: Spend the day traversing Kowloon, the fashion billboards of TST segueing into seedy massage parlor billboards as I descend northwest down the Nathan Road side-streets, the sun lost behind precipices of neon signs stretching horizontally over the sidewalk.
The markets of Mong Kok are mobbed with uniformed students on lunch break: long-haired boys with untucked white shirts and loosened ties, and made-up girls in little outfits out of a Japanese kogal/hentai fantasy: knee-high black stockings, short skirts and a Louis Vuitton bag to carry their pencils and books.
They have tattoos, tongue piercings and smoke cigarettes.
After commenting that they are the hippest students in China I’ve seen, one 15-year-old boy replies in perfect English, “Yes, so cool, but so young.”
Photo by Tom Carter
DAY 5: I want to see how the other half lives and spend the day in Central, Hong Kong Island’s microcosm of capitalism. Cross Victoria Harbor by the centuries-old Star Ferry through a morning miasma of pollution and follow white-collared crowds of businessmen contending with cell phones, briefcases and lattés into their respective skyscrapers.
Later observe as many women shopping in designer department stores – these must be the wives. I notice that they all clutch their purses as I walk by, then realize why as I catch a glimpse of myself in the reflective facade of the Bank of China tower.
My head cast down in self-consciousness, I almost get rolled over by a Rolls (driving on the wrong side of the road, damn Brits!), then almost again by a double-decker cable car.
Everyone in Central must be against me.
My insecurities are firmed up that evening in Lan Kwai Fong, a gentrified neighborhood of upscale restaurants and bars on the Island’s northern escarpment.
Photo by Tom Carter
The steep streets are congested with young, well-to-do westpats toasting yet another successful day of money-making. I can’t believe there are so many white people in China who aren’t English teachers!
They are all smartly dressed and have well-groomed hair; I am wearing cutoff army pants, low-top fake Converse, an eight year-old t-shirt that I bought used, nor have I shaved or cut my locks in the 2 years I’ve been on the China road.
I want to belong, but I don’t. It’s one of those moments when I regret being unemployed.
DAY 6: I give the Island another chance and take the night ferry across the harbor to the north end’s older and seedier nightspot, the infamous Wan Chai.
Recall it is where Richard Mason penned his 1950’s tale of forbidden love, “The World of Suzie Wong,” though a lot has changed since he wrote “take a minute’s stroll from the center and you won’t see a European.”
The pick-up bars still line the road, yum-yum girls luring passersby into their neon-lit dens, but these are the illegitimate daughters of Suzie Wong, not of Chinese but Thai dissent, wearing not elegant silk cheongsams but cheap miniskirts raised to immodest heights.
And unlike the kindly ladies of the Nam Kok Hotel, these modern-day working girls are vicious, mercenary, cold.
When a group of obviously disappointed white boys emerge from one venue exclaiming, “In Thailand they take off ALL their clothes,” the brown-skinned door girl in plastic go-go boots is quick to shout back, “Then go to Thailand!”
Further down Lockhart, I follow a couple of older Europeans primed with drink and flirting heavily with a lovely bouquet of girls looking for generous company.
After making their arrangements, one of the men leans on me and confides, “Wy mife, I mean my wife, thinks I’m *HICCUP* at a conference.” The remaining girls give this poor writer a cursory glance then quickly cross the street away from
me.
DAY 7: I wake up feeling dejected and classless; the expatriates of Central don’t want me, nor do the waterfront girls of Wan Chai.
I take a stroll around TST, passing by friendly knots of third-world hustlers hanging out in front of the Chungking Mansions, the immigrant ghetto of Kowloon that serves as temporary living quarters for Hong Kong’s financially insolvent émigrés.
Photo by Tom Carter
A street corner tout from Kashmir says to me “The Mansions is where anyone not wearing pastel shorts or a suit stay.”
I realize this mad cauldron of multiculturalism is the only place I truly feel at home in Hong Kong.
The Africans on the never-quiet front steps always high-five me, the Pakistanis all think I’m a Muslim (must be the beard), and the Indians bat their eyelashes at me.
The Chungking Mansions are the international haunt for anyone who is no one, and I am one of them. It is a peasant’s epiphany – in Hong Kong, I am the ‘nongmin.’
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China - a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
God bless moms!
The consulate informed me that, while I was locked up, my mother had sent money to Western Union to cover the costs of my flight ticket home.
But when we went to pick up the money, the police wanted some for a “fine” and to pay for my exit visa.
The U.S. consular assistant explained to my police escort that the money was only for my trip home, because I had spent eight days in jail in lieu of a fine, and I was not legally required to pay.
Jobless in America unless you have the right skills.
It must have been a ploy by the escorting officers to earn a little on the side. Nice try!
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the immigration office at Pudong Airport waiting for my exit visa to be processed.
The upside to my deportation was that the immigration official informed me that because of my good attitude, he would allow me to come back to China whenever I wanted instead of blacklisting me for five years as was the usual policy.
After acquiring my exit visa, I was booked on a flight. I had no idea where I was going to land in the United States, but the ticket cost 13,800 RMB (USD $2,160!!!), which seemed outrageously expensive (this is about what my wife and daughter each paid the summer of 2011).
I suspect the police and immigration officers had worked out a way to get extra money for themselves. The two police officers escorted me to the gate to make sure I actually left China.
As I type this true to life story, I’m back in my room at grandma’s house in Middle America. I still haven’t found a job. When I touched down in the U.S., I felt as if I were walking on the ashes of a once-great country that had been nuked by economic collapse.
The jobs are few and far between and the wages even lower than when I had left for China.
Even if I found work, I don’t believe I could handle an office job, because I don’t feel comfortable being caged in a cubicle, which, when you think about it is like a cage surrounding the mind and isn’t much different from the Chinese jail cell where I spent eight 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.
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.
A Cautionary Tale for Expats in China – a Guest Post by Lionel Carver
On the 7th day of my incarceration, an assistant from the American consulate appeared with a translator. I signed some papers and he provided me with two English-language magazines to pass the remainder of my time.
He explained that after I was released, I was to hurry to the consulate before 5 pm to acquire my new passport and then get on a flight home that same night, because I was being deported.
The next morning came, and the police said they would take me to my apartment to pack my belongings.
Caution, do not overstay your Visa in the United States.
I wished the police had not been with me so I could have called some people I’d met in Shanghai and explain my situation.
Since I didn’t want to go home for fear of unemployment—and mom’s wrath, I wanted to negotiate with the consulate to go to Japan or Korea or somewhere, anywhere, in Asia instead of back to America.
As a child, I had fought and beat cancer (I’m in my early twenties now), which is why I decided to see the world instead of spend the rest of my precious life delivering Dominos or standing at a Walmart register.
My mom had been so proud of me for venturing off to China to find my fortune in spite of my physical limitations, but I had failed to find steady employment abroad and had gotten myself arrested and deported instead.
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.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
