"The Good Earth," A Great Book and Movie

Many of you may have never heard of Luise Rainer, but she was the first person to win back to back Academy Awards, winning the Oscars for Best Actress in 1936 and 1937. Luise Rainer lived in Germany (born in Düsseldorf, and she was Jewish), Austria, the United States and Britain. She passed away December 30, 2014 at the age of 104. Her second Academy Award came for her performance in "The Good Earth," a black and white film based on the book of the same title by Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author Pearl S. Buck, whose family lived in China for decades beginning in the late 1800s, thus giving Ms. Buck a great deal of first hand knowledge about the Chinese people she wrote about. Pearl Buck was born in Hillsboro, a little town in West Virginia.

The book and film have several parallels to China's society at the time, like the tethers of the past and traditions, but the attempts to change to a more modern society. The film is pretty faithful to the book, but there are some differences. The story centers around the lives of Wang Lung (played by one of my favorite actors, Paul Muni) and his wife O-Lan (played by Luise Rainer in her Oscar winning performance). Together the two work very hard to make their small farm successful, all the while raising their children. Success brings greed, and Wang Lung begins to buy more and more land. A drought wipes away the material wealth accumulated by Wang Lung, and the family has to move away to try to find work so they can survive. They eventually return home to successfully work their land and the years pass. The couple's sons grow up and get good educations, but they feel no special connection to the land which has provided for their family. O-Lan, worn out by a life of hard work and child-rearing, is shunned by the again successful Wang Lung, who takes a young dancer as his second wife, but she proceeds to "get involved" with one of the couple's sons, causing great turmoil in the family. A swarm of locusts descends upon the land, threatening to destroy the crops. The family unites to drive the locusts away, but O-Lan is dying. Wang Lung sees how much she has meant to his life.

If you've never read the book, nor seen the movie, please do both. You will not regret it. The movie is available on DVD. A "Word History" is below the picture.

Photo is of the 2006 Warner Brothers Home Video DVD

WORD HISTORY:
Ketchup-This word, also at times rendered as "catsup," ^ comes from one of the Chinese dialects, perhaps Cantonese, where "ke-zhap/ke-jiap," meant "tomato sauce." Whether this word was then picked up by English traders in the early 1700s directly from the Chinese version, is uncertain. Another possibility is, several of the Chinese dialects, all part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, ^^ have similar words, but some mean "fish sauce/brine," which then was borrowed by Malay, a southeast Asian language, but with the fish brine meaning. The leap from fish brine to tomato ketchup is a bit tough for me, so I lean much more toward the borrowing from Cantonese.

^ When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, "catsup" was a fairly common usage, but as the Heinz brand came to dominate the market, their use of "ketchup" also began to prevail. To be quite honest, I'm not sure the last time I heard the word "catsup."

^^ Sino-Tibetan languages are widely spoken in parts of Asia and it is a language family just as is Indo European, the family to which the Germanic languages belong, and to which English belongs.

Tea Time

Expanded a bit on 12-27-2015 and photo added, as well as a little editing on 8-19-21

Tea drinking apparently goes back at least 4500 to 5000 years in China. It wasn't until the mid 1500s that western Europeans came into contact with tea, as the Portuguese settled in Macao (also "Macau") in southeastern China, which remained as a Portuguese colony until 1999! Then Dutch traders established themselves in southeastern Asia in Indonesia in the early 1600s, which later became the Dutch colony "the Dutch East Indies." The mid 1600s brought the marriage of England's King Charles II to a Portuguese princess, who made tea drinking a prominent feature among the nobility. The price of tea in those times was prohibitive for the spread of the drink to those not in the upper classes, but increased trade and involvement in India brought more tea, and lower prices, and sugar, into England. It wasn't long before the British began to sweeten their tea with sugar from the New World and tea drinking became popular with the general population, making tea the national drink. The ancestral homeland of the English (the Anglo-Saxons) is northern Germany, and their close relatives, the Saxons and the Frisians, still inhabit the area. The similar climate to Britain along the North Sea coast of Germany, and the availability of tea from Dutch importers, made tea a popular drink with the Frisian and Saxon population of the area, where tea is still the regional beverage. In the East Frisian part of northern Germany, rock candy is used to sweeten their tea, with some cream carefully layered a bit below the surface. The idea is to provide three distinct tastes: the bitter black tea at the top, the tea/cream mixture in the middle, and then the addition of the sweetness of the melting rock candy near the bottom. The East Frisians are known for their pickiness for black tea and their brands are considered topnotch.

Russians have had a strong attachment to tea going back to the 1600s, although its high price initially limited its availability to the upper classes. Russians traded directly with the Chinese by overland route, organized in caravans. It was quite a trip and "supposedly" the tea acquired a smoky flavor from being near the campfires during its long journey,* a characteristic still common in the most popular form of black tea in Russia, although the flavoring is now added. It is the national beverage of Russia, although vodka drinkers may question that... hic! Hey, I'm a tea drinker, honest!

Chai is a spiced black tea (sometimes green tea) and is my favorite. Chai typically has a lot of milk and sugar, and you can most certainly get it in any Indian or Pakistani restaurant in the U.S. or elsewhere. I make my own, pretty much every day, although I'm sure some Indians might not approve of my recipe or technique, although from what I'm told, there are considerable variations, even in India. Generally chai is black tea in about a 50-50 milk/water mixture, but I use far less milk (I use evaporated milk). When I've bought chai at Indian restaurants, it has always been very sweet, and I make it somewhat less so. I use fresh grated ginger, some ground cardamom, a bit of ground cloves (and often some ground allspice, too), a small bit of mace (or nutmeg), and some ground cinnamon. Some Indians or Pakistanis use black pepper in chai, too, and others use fennel seed. After letting the spices steep for awhile, you can strain the tea into your cup. You can buy tea bags already with a spice mixture in them, but I've never been very impressed with the result. You can also put the ingredients into a pan and gently boil the mixture. In this case, I tend to use a cinnamon stick, rather than ground cinnamon, as well as whole cloves and crushed cardamom seeds. I prefer to add the milk after the cooking is done, but you can cook it right along with the tea. Note: A while back, I also started using black pepper in chai, sometimes ground or sometimes whole crushed peppercorns. It gives the chai that added "zip."  

* It seems a bit of a stretch to me that tea packed for such a trip would acquire the smoky flavor this way. I wonder if at some point some open tea was exposed to the campfire smoke, the users liked it, and they then chose to repeat the process?

 

WORD HISTORY:
Tea-This word comes from a Sino-Tibetan word, "sla/tsla," which likely meant "leaf." Sino-Tibetan is a large language family in Asia and Southeast Asia which is the ancient ancestor of the Chinese dialects, like Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as southeastern Asian languages like Burmese and others. Sino-Tibetan is to these modern Asian languages what Indo European is to English, German, Italian, Russian, etc. Min Nan, a dialect of Sino-Tibetan had "te." Malay, an unrelated language from the Austronesian language family^  in southeastern Asia, borrowed the word from Min Nan as "teh." The Dutch East India Company was a private company granted Asian trade rights by the Dutch government in the early 1600s. The Dutch picked up the word from Malay "teh," rendered in Dutch as "thee," which they then brought back to western Europe, along with a lot of the product itself. English borrowed the word in the mid 1600s as both "tee" and "tea," before finally settling on the latter. Many other European languages borrowed the word from Dutch, for example, German has "Tee" (pronounced "tay"), West Frisian has "tee," French has "thé." Interestingly, the Portuguese had established themselves in southeastern China, at Macao, in the mid 1500s. The Chinese dialect in Macao pronounced their form of Sino-Tibetan "sla/tsla" as "cha." The Portuguese took the term as "chá," which they have retained to this day as their word for "tea." This same Chinese term spread elsewhere, providing forms to Russian and Persian, and from Persian to Hindi and other languages/dialects in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. English borrowed the word, likely from Hindi, as "chai," a term now used more specifically for "sweetened spiced tea." It is pronounced "ch," as in Charles, and "eye."    

^ Hawaiian is from the Austronesian language family, too.