STORIES - The Coffee Sage

If you take the elevator up twelve floors to the roof of my housing complex and look north, you’ll see the highrises and shopping centers of Xiangshan framed by long strips of neon that glow through the haze. If you turn your back on the light, looking south, you’ll see nothing but raw jungle, its ominousness exaggerated by the abrupt darkness. There are no suburbs here. Civilization does not transition into countryside, but simply cuts off at a long, well-lit street that runs along the south side of my building, demarcating the frontier of this city’s expansion pressed up against the wilderness.

Some nights, if you’re there at the right time, you can see the coffee sage emerge from the jungle with his cart and start unpacking various beakers, boilers, grinders, colanders, and vials of coffee beans ranging from pitch-blacks to chocolate browns to mottled greens. Native Chinese and foreigners gradually arrive to mingle and practice different languages, energized by the caffeine and the general feeling of spontaneity that surrounds the cart.

I got my first cup at the suggestion of a friend at about 3 am. We were in a taxi, riding home from a bar themed in an endearing attempt at Americana. He had been talking about his time as a nurse in a retirement home. Medications, diapers, catheters – the tubes and nozzles and needles needed to preserve people a few more years or months or days. He wasn’t tired, and I was still curious about the technicalities of old age, so we went for some coffee.

Upon arriving at the cart, it was instantly clear why this man had been dubbed a “sage.” He was a living caricature, with his long gray hair tied back in a ponytail, a thin beard, and a calm, meditative demeanor. I got the impression that, if my Chinese was better, I’d hear him speak exclusively in metaphors and aphorisms. He looked at me as if he recognized me, and yet he must have known that I was a new customer because he said, in heavily accented English, “the first is free.” I had watched enough television to realize that this was going to be a very special cup of coffee.

The sage set about meticulously measuring out different proportions of different beans, grinding each variety by hand then slowly dripping hot water over the smithereens, which would then leak into a beaker only slightly larger than a shot glass. The whole process took about twenty minutes, which I used to formulate a response worthy of what I was about to experience. I sourced all the travel shows I used to watch in the States: Man Vs. Food, No Reservations, Bizarre Foods– extracting the perfect performance from ground-up bits of television personalities.

By the time the beaker was finally full, I was ready for my recital. I picked up the glass without drinking and examined it, not really knowing what I was looking for. I brought it to my mouth, still not drinking, but sniffing the brown liquid like some sort of incompetent sommelier. My nose was unable to detect anything more specific than the general category of “coffee.”

Once this show was over and I was satisfied that I had established the appropriate degree of reverence for what was in the glass, I took a sip, raised my eyebrows, and paused.

“Wow,” I said.

It was not an exclamatory, “wow!” but a rather understated “wow,” hopefully conveying some sort of authentic yet unexaggerated surprise at what I had just tasted. Again, I held the glass and examined it. Again, not knowing what I was looking for. I took another sip as if to confirm my initial judgment. Again, I raised my eyebrows. “Wow,” I said, this time even more softly. “This is fucking delicious.” (I had decided on more of a Bourdain-style antiphon.)

My friend was watching me, smiling skeptically, and this bothered me because I was sure my performance was Oscar-worthy. I finished the last sip and concluded by announcing, “that was a religious experience.” My friend burst out laughing, and the sage just smiled. I think they both knew I was full of shit. I thanked the sage and went up to the roof, choosing the north view. The caffeine and thoughts of a nurse changing my diaper sixty years from now were keeping me awake.

I woke up tired the next morning, craving some coffee. After a solid half-hour of working up the motivation to get out of bed, I got in the elevator and punched the first floor.

In the lobby, there was a vending machine with a brightly lit mascot of an anthropomorphic coffee bean dressed as a barista. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, trying to decipher the Chinese in front of me. The language suddenly seemed frustratingly inefficient. Guessing was impossible, there was no alphabet to work with. I wondered if there’d be some sort of automatic translator we could plug into our brains before I’m back in diapers. It didn’t seem so far-fetched.

I pressed some buttons, brightly lit with sound effects. The vending machine crunched and gurgled, and then spurted out some steaming hot coffee, pre-mixed with cream and sugar and something that tasted vaguely of hazelnut. I drank the whole thing at once, and it was fucking delicious.

The buzz didn’t last too long, but it got me through the morning. I never went back to the coffee sage. It was nice of him to give me a free cup, but it wasn’t something I’d pay for.