letter #50: Drinking tea&coffee in Hong Kong
There's a picture of a swear word in this letter, so please delete now if this will offend you
My dear friend
I didn’t intend to take a break from social media, but that’s what’s happened. I’ve often deleted the apps from my phone when I’m trying to focus on something or I’ve been on holiday. Usually, I love the moment when I download the apps again, log back in, and catch up on what everyone has been doing. But this time has been different. It’s been several months since I really engaged with my social media feeds and I’m not really sure when I’ll jump back in.
I started to write you a long, discursive explanation about why I think my social media life might have now come to an end, but then I realised I’ve already written a poem about it and printed it on a tea-towel:
I’ve found a big, huge, enormous tub of these tea-towels as part of my Big, Huge, Enormous Middle-Age Cleanup. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, and then I remembered I’ve got an online shop and I could put them in there. But I’ve only just reopened the shop and I wasn’t sure it would suit the vibe so early on. And then I realised I could add it to the shop, but hide it under the counter so if people ask for one, I can bring it out, but they don’t have to know it’s there.
The hard sell. Look, it’s just a tea towel, it’s not going to change your life, but if you’d like to buy one, follow this link and be part of the secret club. Use the code newsletter2 at the checkout and it will give you ten percent off this and anything else you want to buy (if you don’t sew, there won’t be much you’re interested in). The code expires next Wednesday 19 June and the tea towels are only available until next Wednesday 19 June or until sold out (there’s 70 of them available, I’ll be very surprised if they sell out!).
If you want to read something slightly more erudite about the algorithm, I can recommend, this piece in the Sydney Review of Books which might encourage you to buy the book its reviewing or it might not.
A New Experience
A few weeks ago, I went to Hong Kong. I was only there four days, but it’s the first time I’ve been overseas since 2018, so it was Extremely Exciting. (I have actually been to Aotearoa a few times, but I used to live there, so it doesn’t feel like going overseas even though I do have to remember to take my passport).
Hong Kong is the first place outside Australia that I ever landed. I was on my way to a three-month language course in Shanghai after finishing three years of Mandarin at university. (I had developed my language skills to such an extent that I ordered a pot of tea and was delivered a dish of pig’s ears, I bet that never happened to Kevin Rudd). While there is much I miss about my youth, I wasn’t unhappy to bypass Chungking Mansions and stay in a modest but comfortable apartment. On the first day, we visited the Tian Tan Buddha not knowing that it would pour with rain every other day, so that was excellent timing:
Late that evening, and after we’d been to a rooftop bar where a drink cost us more than a week in Chungking Mansions cost in 1992, we walked past a Don Don Donki store which is a Japanese chain overflowing with every kind of thing you never knew you wanted to buy. Normally I can’t take too much of the lights and the music and the crowds, but I was a few wines in by now so I freaking loved it and after I’d walked out turned around and went straight back in for a second go:
I have been to Hong Kong quite a few times over the years, but the next day, I still found something new to do. Settling in to my seat in a cha chaan teng to indulge in the fabulous tradition of a Hong Kong milk tea, I spied on the menu something I have only heard of in this classic scene from Gavin & Stacey (although what scene from Gavin & Stacey isn’t classic?). It was a milky tea and coffee. As in tea and coffee in the same cup (if you were like me and had an old-fashioned understand of how the ‘&’ works you might write it ‘tea & coffee’ or ‘tea&coffee’). The mister said it would be horrible, and he stuck to Milk Tea, whereas I took the road less travelled and ordered the Milk Tea & Coffee. While the mister wasn’t wholly incorrect, he wasn’t wholly right, and I enjoyed the experience. I actually could taste both the tea and the coffee separately and at the same time. I suppose if I looked into it this would be something to do with taste receptors on different parts of your tongue? If it were available to me, Milk Tea & Coffee is something I would have regularly but not often. For example, I would have it less often than once a week but more often than once a year.
As an aside, both Milk Tea and Milk Tea&Coffee come in this cup which I have always loved, and if you ever see them for sale please let me know:
They are thick and heavy and in many ways not at all the way you would drink tea, but I absolutely adore them.
I also saw a shop selling caviar cakes, but the mister was too far ahead of me and I didn’t want to lose track of him so I couldn’t stop to take a photo for you.
A Transformative Experience
You will see in the images above that I am wearing a cross-body bag. I came across the magic of this wonderful thing quite by accident, because it was a prop for my play Stitches. I started wearing it ironically, hoping to annoy my family, but what I discovered is the best thing I have bought since…well, I’m not sure I’ve ever bought anything better. My friend you need one of these in your life. I suspect I look extremely daggy, but this has truly transformed my life. Of course, I’ve over-stuffed mine with two notebooks and a diary, but all the same whenever I need something like my keys or my card, I just bring the bag to the front, unzip its zip, and there my things are.
The only disappointing thing about the cross-body bag has been my failure to convert people to its wonders. ‘Look at this,’ I say to all my friends, to the people around the table as we wait for a meeting to begin, to anyone who will listen. People look at me in highly bemused way, kind of like they think they’ve just heard Peter Dutton saying we should go nuclear but surely even he wouldn’t be that ridiculous. But in this, I am a force for good. I would even go so far as to say if you had to choose between buying a tea-towel and buying a cross-body bag you should choose the cross-body bag.
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As always, I have plans to write to you again soon, but I see it was February when I last wrote, so I won’t put a timeline on things.
Take good care.
Your friend, Tracy xx