Fairy Tales: The Magic of Black Tea 2 🧚 Kunming, China

Claudine de Montréal

As the morning light of the disco dorm hit Baldric’s eyes, he remembered with a shudder the cold isolation of his room in Dali. He sank even deeper into the warm white softness of his bed. He heard the shout of a hotel cleaner and the scampering of little feet. He peaked out from his mound of white cotton and saw two mice running into a corner of the room. He felt a pang of guilt at not acknowledging his old scampering friends. Yet they seemed too busy avoiding broomsticks to worry about auld lang syne.

He also saw a pair of sleek legs twist out from under a mound of white sheets on the bed next to him. She was wearing a tight muscle-shirt. He could see the ripple of her ribs beneath the thin, white cotton. She stretched her hands up the iron rails of the bed, her underarms slightly stubbled by days on the road. His stomach rumbling, her skin reminded him of Devon cream and tasty warm scones. 

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Poets of the Tang Dynasty

Having read his guidebook section on Tang Dynasty Poetry, Baldric thought about the girl in terms of Chinese nature imagery. The guidebook writer said that Chinese poetry was like the famous poem by Ezra Pound, where faces on a metro platform were like petals:

Baldric liked this image, and decided to apply it to the beautiful girl next to him. Creating a back-story of sorts, he imagined her face as a white petal (tinged with pink) looking out the window of a train en route to Kunming. Her face was full of beauty and promise, and yet the landscape hadn’t woken up from the sleep of winter. Frost and thin withered branches were everywhere — as were memories of Snow White, which he superimposed on the book’s images of old poets with wispy white beards.

After the train traveled through the yellow woods, it approached the city of Weishe, where the train would either go west to Kunming (in which case she would wend her way to Kunming) or would go north to Chongqing and Chengdu (in which case he wouldn’t be thinking about the railroad not taken). Baldric would’ve been happy to know which of the two directions might make all the difference, yet he had also read in the guidebook that for the Chinese poets “Poetry in philosophy was more important than philosophy in poetry.” Baldric concluded from this that it didn’t matter so much why she was where she was, or whether or not the one not chosen was just as fair, and had perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that the passing there, had worn them really about the same. What mattered was that in the present moment her face resembled the beauty of a delicate petal. Perhaps that was why Pound didn’t mention where the trains came from or where they were going. Nor did he mention whether it was Spring or Summer, or when the petals would fall.

The guidebook writer also likened Chinese poetry to the poem written by the 9th century Japanese poet Ariwara no Narihira:

Baldric imagined her looking out onto the thawing landscape and yearning for blossoms to spring outward from the withered branch, taking the place of the ghostly faces on the wet black bough. He saw her small sweet mouth recite the words, “conceal the path old age is said to follow.” Overwhelmed by the poignancy of the moment, she cried out, “Too soon! Too soon!”

Just as Baldric’s poetic journey was in its final stages, just as she pointed a lacquered finger at the dead branches and the cherry blossoms that were blossoming at the tips of her branch-like arms, her bare breasts uncovered to the elements,

the train pulled into Kunming Station.

It all ended so fast. She finished stretching her arms, rose from her bed, stripped off her shorts, shirt and bra, wrapped herself in a white towel, let her panties drift to the ground, and marched to the shower.

Baldric’s head was so full of poetry that it fell back into the pillow and he fell asleep. In his dream she came back from the shower, yet she was stark naked, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Eight little cupids were hovering around her, trying to get her attention, yet she was looking directly at him.

He’d never seen such beauty before, at least not up close and shivering right above him. He wasn’t about to ask himself if he was really seeing this or if it was just a composite of memories playing in his sleeping head. So he decided to do what all the poets in the world told him to do: Seize the moment! Even Shakespeare, despite all his talk of airy nothing, would have agreed.

Baldric knew his French was dreadful, yet he dared to ask, Bonjour? Je m’appelle Baldrique? She responded simply and elegantly, Bonjour. Je m’appelle Claudine. As they talked, her towel, which she had hung over his bed rail, was dripping water into a puddle on the floor. This became a pool and then a lake that looked exactly like the one Baldric had strolled around the day before. Baldric took the towel and made it into a sail, whereupon they glided among the lily-pads. The air was fragrant with flowers and the first blossomings of spring.

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L’Amour Fou

Baldric moored the boat and together they walked the streets of the old town, where the wooden two-story buildings took on a rosy glow because by this time Baldric and Claudine were very much in love. But Claudine wouldn’t admit her emotions openly. Instead, she poked him with her slim fingers, and whispered Cartesian theorems that sent shivers up his body. Je penche, donc je poursuis. They reached a café known for its locally-grown coffees and teas, French bakery, and black market money exchange. Looking at the shop from the street, Claudine told him, “A hundred years ago the French built a railway line up from the coast in Vietnam to Kunming.”

Baldric didn’t consider this bit of historical trivia relevant, and countered, “The British built the Burma Road, which extended all the way from Morocco to Japan. Hong Kong could crush Saigon like a mosquito. The British could never be accused of spoiling the Natives with baguettes or café au lait. And wasn’t it the British who sassooned the Chinese into buying good English opium from Calcutta?” He noted to himself that his father was right: the French were never to be trusted. Even those who migrated from the barren fields of Poitou to the tropical paradise of Canada couldn’t unlearn their indecent ways. Ominously, the Great Canadian Fear rang out in Baldric’s head: Bilingual today, French tomorrow!

Fuming from the ancient grudges that started a thousand years ago with the invasion of the Normans, Baldric and Claudine more or less pushed each other through the front door of the café. There they saw a woman in a little glass booth, crowded all round with impatient customers who peered greedily at the piping hot buns and small madeleines behind the counter. Reluctantly, Baldric did the gallant thing and told Claudine to stay back while he waited in the line-up. He noted out loud, “Something a Frenchmen wouldn’t do in a thousand years.” Then, mumbling under his breath something about transfer payments “from those who worked for a living — to Quebec!” he doled out, once again, the cash for two teas, a baguette, and two madeleines.

Baldric felt that Claudine was more than generous with his money, and he didn’t see why he had to pay for such a frivolous luxury or for this bread that reminded him of a bobby stick that could be used at a moment’s notice. He began to admire the Teutonic Dutch for their system of payments. But then the Latin peoples were not known for their progressive policies, or so his father told him one night as he throttled a long-necked statue of Marie Antoinette. 

Claudine also had the nerve to suggest that the madeleines didn’t look quite right. She grabbed one from his tray and bit into it. “They have too much flower. They taste more like British pastries — yuck!” Yet when he glared back at her, baring his front incisors, she suddenly became hungry and said, “They taste more and more French the more I eat them.” Yet he could see by the way she bit into them with her slender, ravenous fangs that she was only saying this. “In any case, I’m not French. I’m from Québec. I have nothing against speaking English. Ah, quel gout! Ravissant!” 

In the kitchen at the back of the shop a women in a blue smock poured them two cups of Yunnan Pure Gold black tea, which was made from the golden tips of the coveted dian hong variety. With their hands full of pastries and steaming tea, they climbed the steep rickety steps at the back of the café. Claudine’s words I have nothing against speaking English rang in Baldric’s ears.

They went from a dark hellish world below, its jostled crowd resembling the scuffle of Agincourt, to a bright airy realm above, its placid patrons like angels, each in their own cloud of puffed pastry and caffeine. Baldric saw an English rock star dipping his baguette into a cafe au lait, just as he might after a concert at Porte de Pantin. Troupes of Cirque de Soleil acrobats were doing somersaults in the rafters, and angels were singing a tune from Neil Young.

Whatever it was about their climb to this upstairs room, it made up all their differences. Elba, Wolf, Vichy, the War Measures Act, Pétain, Pierre Trudeau, all these were quite forgotten as they pledged eternal amity and goodwill. Claudine started to refer to their previous conversation, but she couldn’t remember what she wanted to say. She concluded, “Je ne m’en souviens plus.”

Or perhaps it wasn’t the steep climb up the rickety stairs, the room with its lilac currents and madeleine airs, or even the sweet dian hong tea, that made them forget a thousand years of love and hatred. Perhaps it was the fact that Claudine and Baldric realized that they were more like each other than they were like the snooty British or the touchy French. As he looked into her dark eyes, and at the teasing grin on her face, her white face that reminded him of a petal on a black bough, he thought to himself, If French and English Canada can’t get along, who can?

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Next: 🧚 Yunnan Gold & the Madeleine

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