“It’s just like sending gifts to myself!”
It’s often said that the charm of Taobao is in the 4-day-long narrative it establishes. You order the products distractedly on your phone, return your full attention to work or family… and then, just when you have forgotten all about it, there’s a surprise knock at the door!
Well, I guess I’m too materialistic for any of that forgetting. The childish excitement of Christmas Eve still dances in me for all 4 days. There’s also the nagging awareness that I may need to send it back and quibble the whole deal.
The Taobao reward loop is just too fast. If only the delivery could be delayed several months… then I may receive a true surprise!
Well, that’s kind of what I get from the third tier of our freezer, a place stashed with gifts to myself. It contains that leftover Thai and Indian food which I alone enjoy. I haven’t switched my family on to those cuisines, so my lentil experiments and coconut concoctions can only be aired when the family travels. Only once they’re past the province border do I start defrosting a stinky, daddy curry.
I don’t know what I’m going to eat until it starts thawing; some of these brown ice balls are years old. But that’s the enchantment of it. It will go well with rice, anyway. I enjoy my own food more without the exhaustion and trepidation of live performance.
For years, I advised doing something similar with tea. Perhaps you have read praise for the freezer within these pages.
Even tea kept in the fridge eventually takes on a garlic or porky pong, making the freezer my go-to tea place. But now I want to add some caveats to that advice.
I have a cake of raw Yunnan pu er which I bought from a Shanghai market. That was five years ago, and it’s still not (quite) done. Freezing this expensive tea seemed like a good idea at that time.
Actually, freezing it was a stupid mistake. 5 years of raw pu er should have been my chance to witness a mellowing process. But my mistake also extends to the green and white teas I placed in the deep freeze. The problem, I now believe, is related to the frequency of opening.
Think of those pornographic beads on the surface of an ice-cold Coke can in advertising images; that’s all the moisture in the air migrating to the coldest place it can find: the Coke can. And this condensation effect draws moisture into my tea packet every time I take it out of the freezer.
I now recognise in some of my teas a “freezer taste”, which isn’t disastrous, but is still distracting. It’s not the taste of the squid in a neighbouring bag, nor of the plastic materials holding the freezer together; it’s like the empty, tasteless taste of the crystals on an ice lolly. It persists into every infusion of tea. A different kind of staleness. An unwelcome influence.
So here’s my advice, version 2.1:
Only use the freezer for storage if the tea is firmly sealed; don’t freeze paper packaging (like my pu er); don’t treat the frozen tea like refrigerated tea, opening and closing every day (every month is more like it); only use the freezer for greens, because most varieties don’t need freezing; and if you’re not going to drink it soon, consider giving the tea to a friend instead.
Actually, my wife is considering having herself cryogenically preserved, her head only if that’s all we can afford. I’ll probably be gone by the time that decision is made. Still, I intend to write instructions preventing her head from being wedged between my green tea and green curry. That’s not the kind of surprise she’s paying money for.
