A tale of tea and the intimacy of strangers amid the fostering of kindness

Xuezhuang and Olivia were sharing a pot of lemon tea on the balcony of a bar not far from the Lama Temple. I was sitting right next to them, but hadn't noticed because my head was buried in a page of words that were annoying the life out of me.

It was a Sunday and I'd taken the subway to the temple from Panjiayuan after spending hours wandering among the stalls at the antique market looking for a present. I was really just glorying in the late October sun, and trying to pick up words I could recognize in the conversations going on around the piles of serpentine jade rock and Zhou Enlai portraits.

Sundays in Beijing are something special. At Panjiayuan or in the Yongheng Hutong or around Yuyuantan Lake, you can watch couples, friends and families without number, reveling in each other's company. A lot of the time, the shops that surround them act like stage props. Some people get their photos taken by a window display, others point out an animal in a window, but not much seems to get bought. Consumption is not the point of these Sunday gatherings that linger into the dark.

Last Sunday at Panjiayuan, for example, I stood watching an auctioneer laud one painting after another, giving his pitch to rows of pensioners sitting around him on fold-up chairs. No one in the audience was scrolling on their phone, they kept their eyes fixed on the paintings and their champion, but they held running conversations in one another's ears all the while — nodding, frowning, chuckling. They were never on the point of bidding for anything, they were content just to while away their day there in good company, with a history of art as the background sound. And despite the lack of business, the auctioneer seemed content to be there too, calling for another painting to be unrolled by his assistant when he'd exhausted one more chapter in his matinee performance.

I'd too quickly forgotten about all this as I sat staring at words from home on the balcony of that bar by the Lama Temple, until Olivia got my attention.

"Are you unhappy?" she asked without introduction, minus polite preliminary, no messing around. "We noticed how your face looked and we thought you might not be happy."

I laughed and then realized I hadn't been scratching my head over a conundrum but had been trying to pull my hair out as I slumped over the page. Maybe she was being polite, maybe she was using "unhappy" in place of "unwell".

I don't remember a stranger ever asking me this question before. People we know intimately, for all our lives even, rarely ask us a question like this.

She'd forced me to think. I was drinking a beer as dusk fell, and I'd eventually found a present for my friend at the market, and I was able to haggle over the price with fragments of Chinese.

"I'm alright," I answered, putting the lid on my pen. Then, we introduced ourselves and we talked about accents and their home places and mine, and the Milky Way, and work.

Olivia is from Qinhuangdao in Hebei province and works in online retail, selling the packaging that sweets are wrapped in. One day, she wants to set up her own shop.

"Where are you going to open it?" I asked. "I'll call in and buy something."

"It's still on its way here from Mars," she laughed.

Xuezhuang is originally from Huludao in Liaoning and moved to Beijing to work in software testing. She puts her command of English to good use making sure programs from abroad will run without a glitch when they are released in China.

As she poured more tea, Xuezhuang told me the original story behind the recently released movie, Fall Into the Mortal World; of the forbidden love between Zhinyu, one of the seven daughters of the Queen of Heaven, and Niulang, a cow herder. We talked about the similarities between Chinese and Greek mythology, and the universal jealousy of the gods.

Olivia was quiet for a while, staring at the rooftops beyond, then singing a song quietly to herself, and then without warning asked me, "Are people kind where you come from?"

There was both playfulness and concern in her sporadic line of questioning, but also a ruthlessness that almost took my breath away, "Cut the crap," she was saying, "How are you with the world, and what about your people?"

Before I answered, I looked back down at the page I had been working on and the words, "we must foster a ferocious kindness in one another", that were written across the top of it.

"Kindest in the world," I told her, "but I would say that."