The city is big, and all sentient beings are there. How to gain a comprehensive, objective and rapid understanding of a city?
A good way to do this is to cut the "cell" of the city and then analyze the cell under the "microscope". Teahouses, izakayas, and cafes are such cells that can make our understanding of urban society more concrete and in-depth.
The first three works: "The Tea Shop on that Street Corner" (People's Literature Publishing House, October 2021 edition), "The Birth of Izakaya" (Shanghai People's Publishing House, January 2022 edition), "Global Addiction: How Coffee Stirred Human History" (Guangdong People's Publishing House, January 2019 edition), just can provide us with "cells" and understand Chengdu, Edo, Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna...
The teahouse is Little Chengdu
The term "microscope" comes from historian Wang Di. Wang Di has been observing this "cell" sample of the teahouse for many years. "The Tea Shop on That Corner" is a collection of essays by Wang Di, which does not depart from the scope of his early masterpiece "Tea House: Chengdu's Public Life and Microcosm 1900-1950", and is roughly an easy-going, friendly, simplified version of the popular reading book.
From childhood memories, Wang Di said that studying The Chengdu Tea Shop seemed predestined when he was a child. If there is really a time machine in the world, send him back to the past, let him, a child, go into the small tea house on the corner, and tell the tea guests sitting around the small wooden table drinking tea at night or the busy hall that he wants to write history for the tea house and the tea guests, which will definitely cause laughter in the hall.
This description is naturally just a fantasy, as a Chengdu native, Wang Di's feelings for the city have long melted in the blood. In such fantasy memories, we can appreciate the bustle of the tea shop on the corner of Chengdu, as well as its profound imprint in the lives of the locals, and the tea house invisibly shapes the cultural memory and personality of Chengdu people. Chengdu people seem to be born with a kind of idle temper, do not care about people, things, many people, especially the elderly, the first thing to get up is to go to the tea house to "eat morning tea". Wang Di repeatedly mentioned a special moment, that is, January 1, 1900. On that day, the tea customers in Chengdu were still comfortable, and they knew almost nothing about the earth-shaking changes that were about to take place in the distant North China Plain. Wang Di deliberately highlighted this contrast in order to find their voices in the daily lives of ordinary people and to examine their thoughts and behaviors.
"The Tea Shop on the Corner"
Wang Di
Published by the People's Literature Publishing House
Sitting in a tea house and eating idle tea, the cultivation of this custom is related to the geomorphological environment of Chengdu. It is especially suitable for the growth of tea plants, and because of the steep terrain, it is difficult to transport and sell, and can only be digested locally. Over time, every Chengdu person loves to drink tea. Once the food customs are cultivated, the rhythm of life will also match, and eating tea has become a part of the daily life of Chengdu people, even if the cannon rumbles elsewhere, and drink a cup of tea, laughing at the Dragon Gate Array. This often makes outsiders very unpleasant, especially when the country is in crisis, and the controversy over the tea house is wrapped up in the regional cultural conflict between the provincials who came to Sichuan during the war and the locals. Are the people of Chengdu not striving?
Chengdu people will certainly feel aggrieved and indignant, and those who say such things will certainly not understand Chengdu and the way of life of Chengdu people. This work may be able to change some of the similar biases. With the rationality and meticulousness of a historian and the sensual warmth of a literary scholar, Wang Di wrote about his cognition of the tea house and Chengdu. He tried his best to portray the activities of various people in the tea house, the sounds and smiles of the tea shops and tea guests, the tea mixing technology of the experienced tea shops, the doorways in the tea guests' "please eat tea", how the robe brothers used the tea house to resolve disputes, how women entered the tea house theater garden, how the tea shop became a good place for social interaction between the sexes, how to play the function of public forums, and how to become a leisurely and occasionally relaxed refuge for the poor...
Even if life is bitter and busy, as long as there is a teahouse, you can stop your steps, dust off the wind and dust, and relax your mind. Why can't people choose their preferred lifestyle?
Edo, a drunken city
Our eastern neighbor, the Japanese also love to drink tea, in addition to drinking tea, they also love to go to taverns.
More than 200 years ago, izakaya sprung up in Edo, and they sprung up all over the streets. Kyoto dumps clothes, Osaka dumps food, and Edo? Edo was drunk with wine.
Ryoichi Iino is an expert on the history of Japanese food culture. The work has many interesting slang, colloquialisms, haiku, short songs, and illustrations. To me, it seems to me to be a ukiyo-e in another form that takes us back to Edo.
Ryoichi Iino sorted out the process of the birth and development of izakaya. The meticulousness of the work, even the rope warm curtain hanging in front of the izakaya, will be said a lot. In order to attract guests, izakayas hung up ingredients such as chicken and fish in the early days. Ryoichi Iino quotes a story about a countryman who first arrived in Edo, saw an octopus hanging at the door of an izakaya, and exclaimed, "This is the boiled Ai-dye Ming King," the embodiment of the Japanese folklore octopus. Similar stories are readily available, and they are visible again and again, so that the work presents a strong old-time style. The evolution from hanging objects to symbolic rope warm curtains reflects the simplicity of Japanese aesthetics.
This is the era of capitalism that is emerging, and as the world's first metropolis with a population of more than one million, the pressure on the people living in Edo can be imagined. Behind the popularity of izakaya is an image of the times. Cargo men, short-term workers, coachmen, caravans, servants, junior samurai... These low-level members of Edo society were regular visitors to izakaya, which in fact broke through the restrictions and flourished as a drinking place for the common people of Edo. There, people can get warm wine, some cheap food, and someone will talk to the person sitting next to them, and people will push the cup to change the cup, and soon it will become familiar.
"The Birth of Izakaya" [Day] by Ryoichi Hinaino
Translated by Wang Xiaoting
Century Wenjing Company
Published by Shanghai People's Publishing House
I am reminded of the phrase that Asai, an early literati and monastic writer in Edo, intended to say in The Tale of Ukiyo: Life is for pleasure in time, and attention should be focused on appreciating the beauty of the moon, the sun, cherry blossoms, and maple leaves, singing and drinking, even if you face poverty, don't care, don't be depressed. Today, the guests of the izakaya are still like this. If anyone breaks the wine glass, don't care, there are too many night returns in this city.
Cafe, the salon of European literati
Global Addiction was first published in 1934 and remains an important reference for the study of coffee to this day. The author Jacob is full of enthusiasm, with a tone similar to the romantic literature of the late 19th century, describing coffee as a stubborn hero in history, a protagonist who cut through thorns, and overcame the siege of alcohol, tea and other drinks all the way to become an irreplaceable love object for Europeans. From Paris to London to Berlin, from the Ottoman Empire to the courts of British and French monarchs to the social circles of the Viennese literati.
Coffee is inextricably linked to literature. There must be some kind of spirit in the coffee beans that is related to the artist's thoughts. Parisians find that "the public" is a "necessity" and that coffee can help people break down walls of their hearts. Speeches on the street, while far from enough to have an impact on the country and business, are inspiring. A new century is coming. Coffee arrived in London in a somewhat different situation than in Paris. Jacob humorously called him "Brother Coffee," saying that though it was just a commoner's drink, he appeared like a dark-skinned noble Puritan wearing a Dutch wide-brimmed tweed hat and dressed in aristocratic attire decorated with a ravish collar and white hard cuffs, which had a sobering magic and taught the world.
Jacob highlighted the role coffee played in changing the nature of the British. The taciturn English were accustomed to solitary talk through lengthy literature, and coffee destroyed that loneliness and reduced the paranoia in the minds of isolated scholars. Swift, Pope, Peppis and other well-known literati were regulars in the café.
In Berlin, it's a different story. In public, Berliners present themselves as beer lovers, deriding coffee as a "woman's drink" and using it as a material for cartoonists. This, in turn, proves the role of cafes in making women aware and making women a community.
Global Addiction: How Coffee Stirred Human History
[de] Heinrich Edward Jacob
Chen Qin Yu Shanshan translated
Published by Guangdong People's Publishing House
Austrian cafés originated in Vienna. As the art capital of Europe, café owners strive for writers, scholars and artists. Every good café has a group of such guests. Jacob says that refreshing coffee nourishes more literature than it nourishes in the literati café, which was once the stronghold of viennese literati.
Seeing this, I can't help but sigh, the temperament of the book "Global Addiction" is really very "coffee". Isn't that kind of passionate writing, the passionate emotion, the kind of "addictive" magic that stretches out, the representative of "coffee literature"?
Chengdu, Edo, old Europe, tea houses, izakaya, cafes, one city and one mark, one place and one person, time is walking, history is changing, and what does not go is still our basic desire for life. How is the word "person" written? One stroke after another, supporting each other. Under the microscope, this apostrophe will appear as many capillary-like interconnections and supports.
Author:Lin Yi
Editor: Jiang Chuting
Editor-in-Charge: Zhu Zifen
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.