The Tea Tower (A Christmas Story)

The thing that persuaded me to stick with my first job in China (with employers from hell) was that it was based in a very cool neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city. I was barely half a mile away from the ancient Drum and Bell Towers, and I had a view of them from the window of my regular classroom on the 4th floor. The Bell Tower, I feel, is much the more aesthetically pleasing of the two (pictured above from its sister tower, on this travel website); on clear, sunny days I would often gaze at it wistfully during my classes, drawing comfort from it, reviving my drooping spirits.... dreaming of my escape when the bell rang.

It became a regular place of refuge for me and my two fast friends of that year ('The Three Amigos') whenever we had a break in our working day. We soon came to know it as The Tea Tower. Like most 'historic monuments' in China, these Towers attempt to pay their way by renting out part of their floorspace to various commercial enterprises. The ground floor of the Bell Tower is a teahouse which attempts to flog overpriced speciality teas and souvenir tea sets to the hordes of foreign tourists who visit. This teahouse functioned as a finishing school for young girls attempting to qualify as tour guides (I never quite found out how this worked, but I've found the same thing in one or two other places - there used to be a similar teahouse in Ditan Park, for instance, where the staff were all trainee tour guides). These were some very charming and impressive young ladies; mostly from quite modest backgrounds, they'd never had the opportunity to go to university or even, in some cases, senior high school, but they'd educated themselves by their own efforts, to the point where they all had very serviceable English, and occasionally a smattering of some other language as well. We Amigos used to hang out there pretty regularly, singly or together, whenever we had a break between classes or a free afternoon, shooting the breeze with these delightful young girls. They would let us sample some of the cheaper teas, and we'd try to give them some help with their English - and chat with the tourists sometimes, giving them a friendly welcome and answering their questions about life in Beijing. The girls would also sometimes escort us up to the top of the Bell Tower to enjoy the impressive view over the city - without having to pay the usual 10rmb fee.

Four of them became particular friends: we invited them round to our flats in the college for small parties a couple of times (an evening watching DVDs at my pal Frank's place, and a Bonfire Night chilli cookout at mine), and took them out to dinner on my birthday. After six months or a year, they would move on to tour-guiding (or something else), but we kept in touch with them all for some time more.

And on Christmas Day that first year, I played Santa - turning up at the teahouse in the scarlet tunic and cotton-wool beard and handing out boxes of chocolates to them. I think this was the first time in my life I'd done this (well, I dimly recall a costume party back at university where I went as Santa and tried to persuade 'naughty girls' to sit on my knee - but perhaps we'd better draw a veil over that), and it would be another four years before I'd do so again. It was the highlight of my Christmas that year. (I also went in and ho-ho-ho-ed at our favourite local restaurant of that time - The Legitimate Businessmen's Club, as we called it - to give a huge box of chocolates to the three lovely waitresses there, and a Chinese chess set to the young chef who'd taught me how to play. I urged the girls not to eat all the choccies before I came in that evening, but..... they wolfed the lot within the hour.... thereby probably tripling their calorie intake for the week.)

Of course, it was too good to last. Good things in China seem to be especially ephemeral. The girls' supervisor in the teahouse was a sour-faced old battleaxe who resented the frequency of our visits. She objected that we were taking the girls' time away from the paying customers (although we took great care never to do that), and eventually she 'banned' us. We speculated that she might have had a more self-interested motive for this, rather than doing it purely out of meanness and stupidity. There were various bonus regimes in place for the girls if their sales of tea and knick-knacks exceeded certain targets each month. The group bonus for reaching the highest threshold was quite a generous amount, but the target was set at a somewhat unrealistic level and the girls had never come close to meeting it. Until we came along - in October and November that year they qualified for the big bonus twice in succession. Well, OK, October is the peak month for tourism; but not that much better than August and September; and things are usually slackening off rather badly in November. I do think the welcoming atmosphere we helped to create there for foreign tourists - effectively adding two or three additional (unpaid) staff to the sales team! - gave a little boost to the girls in earning those bonuses. If they hadn't made those targets, the supervisor would probably have got to keep the money - or some of it, anyway - herself. That's the way things go in China.

So, the great days of 'The Tea Tower' came to a sorry end. But we had five or six glorious months - those were some of my happiest times in China.