wave_code wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 9:44 am
I think you are reading waaay too much into the tea here.
That could certainly be so.
wave_code wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 9:44 am
As for Americans adding sugar, this should come as no surprise. None of this is about replicating anything genuine, and even if it was I wouldn't be surprised if restaurants were adding sugar too in order to appeal to American tastes. They certainly weren't serving authentic Szechuan dishes, and its not like General Tso's chicken is some wildly popular dish in China.
This may be true, but it's also important to recognize why this explanation is so appealing to some folks. Often when people become fascinated with another culture, they become fixated on revealing its "hidden mysteries". This was common with Orientalism, but can also be found with Anglophiles, Francophiles, and really many groups of people who are touring an area they are not from who fear they are not getting the real experience.
Have you ever met someone like that for Germany? Perhaps they insist that there is some secret German beer that is even more authentic than the local beer that you have given them, even though there really is no such secret, that is the local beer that suits local tastes.
Like let's say that an old British planter said that Indian chai was British tea dumbed-down for Indian tastes. Some Indians would find that to be a rather arrogant statement, but an Indian Anglophile might become all the more excited because it implies that there is a secret truly British tea only available for the worthy, and that maybe they, unlike the others, could gain access to it with enough effort. In that way it is a subtle sort of marketing along the lines of Groucho Marx, "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members."
Wikipedia suggests that with France this can lead to something called Paris syndrome, when the seeker goes through all the steps, completes all the tasks, awaits for the mysteries to be revealed, and well, there's nothing there to reveal --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
wave_code wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 9:44 am
The first Chinese restaurants in Boston served "Peking Ravioli" because it was the only way to sell it to Italians, and often orders would come with loaves of white bread instead of or in addition to rice because for an Irish or Italian background family no meal would be complete without bread, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with the food. Americans love sugar, so its going to go in to the dishes a lot, and probably anything else that winds up on the table.
American-Chinese food is its own thing, as is American-Chinese tea. They are collaborations between the eater and the chef, the drinker and the tea-maker. In this case, it was the result of a trade embargo with mainland China and a historical love of Formosa oolong tea mixed with whatever the motivator was that made people want to do something like host a party with this type of food and drink rather than another type, which as you pointed out might be due to social pressures rather than personal interest.
Still, it is part of the history of Taiwanese oolong in America, and helps answer the question of what was happening to the remaining Taiwanese oolong as the habit of drinking it on its own faded.
