Rose Petals and Orange Peel

Mrs Mu told me I could buy loose flower tea from a man at the address on the little slip of brown paper she handed me. The flower tea I’d bought in the hypermarket out in the suburbs of Shanghai had little lumps of sugar in it that looked like styrofoam tucked amongst the rose petals and dried curls of orange peel. The blossoms and whole flower-tops bobbing in her tea jar were impressive. I wanted the same.

The address was written out in pinyin, with the street names on the rough map scratched out twice when she couldn’t remember which angle of the crossroads housed this shop.

I went out during my lunch break, stepping from my tiny, silent university campus out into the immediacy of Shanghai. Before me lay a tangled spiderweb of six lane highways topped by eight lane overhead expressways, joined in a five way intersection at the corner.  It roared. The air was heavy and white and slightly gritty.

The stinky tofu lady outside the school gates was busy immersing the blue-veined cubes into hot oil and making the air smell like hot limburger. Scooters and electric bikes swarmed past in their lane, narrowly missing my toes, my knees, the hem of my skirt.

I started walking in the wrong direction.  Mrs Mu’s second map obviously wasn’t the right one. I turned around, crossed the street in the shadow of the looming overhead expressway, and dodged taxis making illegal left turns into my crosswalk. A bus went through two red lights and rolled calmly toward me, driver calm and expressionless. I was the only person  scurrying.

In Shanghai, you don’t acknowledge that you’ve seen traffic. You play dumb. You make it their responsibility to avoid you, not your responsibility to avoid them. I scurry. Everyone else shuffles. I am one of fifty crossing this particular segment of the six-lane crosswalk.

The tea shop is not a exactly a tea shop. At the far side of the road there are three other tea shops and a small alleyway. This alleyway opens up into a warren of more tea shops, each the size of my bedroom. Some sell loose green tea, others sell bricks of fermented black tea. Some have barrels of dried flower tops and bags of petals and bins of goji berries. A bored security guard points me toward my tea shop, down several corridors and around a corner.

I am faced with a tiny shop filled with flowers and fungus and dried roots and dried lizards stretched on a stick.  The owner and I exchange mutually unintelligible pleasantries, requests and suggestions. My Chinese is appalling. His English is non-existent. My dictionary and phrase book fail me. I have no idea what I want or how to ask for it. Every inch of wall and floor is stacked full with earth-scented mysteries.  A business man in a sharp, elegant suit appears next to me, an unexpected bag of roots and fungus in his hand, and in fluent, perfect English, he smiles and asks me,”What shall I ask him to get for you?”