Chapter 6 #3
Jackie played a few Taiwanese pop songs over the speakers, but one of the Singaporeans complained that the static was giving her a headache, so he stopped.
We drove on for a while in silence, and then Jackie told us a story about how once upon a time, in another life as a delivery driver, he had been so prone to falling asleep on the road that he had resorted to chewing betel nuts as he drove with a tin bucket in his lap for spitting.
Then he laughed and said not to worry; our driver today was much more responsible.
OUR FIRST STOP WAS ALONG A MOUNTAIN ROAD BENEATH AN oolong tea field: a slope of dark-green shrubs in neat, terraced rows.
Jackie told us that many of the blends that we thought were different teas were in fact the same plant: The leaves had just been processed differently.
Black tea was just heavily oxidized green tea, did we know?
The Singaporeans gasped. The Philadelphians accused Jackie of pulling their leg, but then one of the Harvard parents looked it up and confirmed: Black and green teas came from the same plant.
Jackie explained that the fields we were looking at were a special variety of oolong that was harvested only after the leaves had been bitten by leafhoppers.
This tea was called 蜜香烏龍, which translated to “honey-fragrant oolong.” When brewed, Jackie claimed, this tea was just as fragrant as honey.
“苦盡甘來,” I said. I had just learned this chengyu in Thought and Society. It meant: When the bitter times end, the sweet times begin.
“No, no,” said Jackie. “It’s just a chemical process.”
We had half an hour to roam around the plantation, but we had to stay behind the ropes.
The dad from Philadelphia reached over and plucked a leaf to chew, and Jackie yelled at him to stop.
Jackie didn’t know the owner of these fields.
We could park here, but we were only entitled to the road.
We weren’t allowed to touch the tea leaves. Only the leafhoppers could.
Everyone splintered off to photograph the fields.
I was obviously alone, so the mother of the Harvard family asked if I wouldn’t mind taking some photos for the family.
The twins were so tall, it was hard to get all of them in the same frame.
I tried several angles, but no matter what I did, the twins looked enormous, or the parents looked like children.
The mother swiped through every photo when I handed her phone back, and I could tell she didn’t like them at all, but still she said, “Very nice, thank you.”
She spoke English without any trace of an accent.
I asked if she had family in Taiwan, and she said no; she was Chinese American, and her folks were from the mainland, around Shanghai.
“But Taiwan was easier to get to without a visa. It’s the first time the boys have come anywhere in Asia; we wanted them to have a better idea of where they were from. ”
There was no sense in which any of us were from Taiwan, but I understood her point. So they were just like me—using Taiwan as an entry point to the imperial core.
“My colleagues said that Taiwan is like, China on easy mode,” said her husband.
I asked what he meant by that, and he said, “I suppose it’s easier to visit democracies. Everyone said Taiwan would be safer.”
I asked what they had done so far, and the mother rattled off the classics: Taipei 101, Elephant Mountain, the National Palace Museum, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
One of the sons was interested in jazz, and so they had attended a basement jazz concert they’d seen advertised on a flyer, but she wasn’t terribly impressed by the music.
It had sounded more like a student production.
No one did any improvising; they just played from sheet music, and not very well.
“We’re from Brooklyn,” she told me. “So our standards are a bit higher.”
OUR SECOND STOP WAS A TRADITIONAL TEA SHOP IN PINGLIN.
Jackie asked us to split into two tables, one that could speak Chinese and one that couldn’t.
He would do an English translation at the non-Chinese table, but the Chinese speakers could hear directly from our host, Master Luo.
I sat down at the Chinese-speaking table with the attractive maybe-French couple and the Singaporeans.
There was some confusion at the English-speaking table.
It appeared that between the Philadelphians and the Harvard family there was not enough space, and so someone would have to join us.
Jackie asked if anyone might be willing to translate.
I glanced at the Singaporeans, and then at the attractive couple, and when nobody raised a hand, I said I could give it a try.
Rolling his eyes, one of the twins came over and sat down beside me.
He smelled sweaty and sour, in a confusingly pleasant way—the same way JC had smelled.
He was, alas, quite handsome. But I was immune to that now.
Master Luo explained that the steeping procedure he was about to demonstrate wasn’t particularly fussy or ceremonial.
That was more of a Japanese preoccupation.
He was just going to show us the standard way to enjoy tea at home—the methods of getting the most nuanced, complex flavors out of the leaves.
Still, the steeping process was far more complicated than I had expected.
First, Master Luo filled a clay teapot with dried leaves—up to about two-thirds, so that the leaves would have room to expand.
Then he poured in water heated to precisely 90 degrees Celsius.
Different teas flourished at different temperatures.
We could not commit the American mistake of splashing boiling water over everything.
The first steep took only twenty seconds.
Oolong leaves were meant to be steeped multiple times, at longer intervals each time, and we wouldn’t unlock the leaves’ true potential until the sixth or seventh steeps.
He poured the first steep into narrow porcelain cups.
The first steep was never that good, he admitted; more like a quick shower for the leaves, but still we had to drink it.
But we couldn’t drink out of these cups.
We had to place a second set of wider cups upside down over the narrow cups and then flip them both, then pull away the narrow cups, so that the tea ended up in the wider cups.
Everyone spilled. Master Luo said it took practice.
Then we still couldn’t drink the tea, because we had to appreciate its aromas first.
“Smell it,” he said, gesturing to the empty narrow cup. “Let the flavor unfold.”
I sniffed my cup. It just smelled like tea. First whisky, now tea—where were these alleged fruity notes?
“You can roll the empty cup in your hands for warmth.” Master Luo demonstrated. “Feel.”
“Why are we rolling?” the twin asked me.
“Just like, for the warmth.” We both copied Master Luo, rubbing the cups vigorously between our palms.
“But it’s so hot out.”
It was true; I would never have thought my hands needed warming up until I had an empty, fragrant teapot before me. “I think there’s medicinal benefits.”
“Eyeballs too.” Master Luo rubbed his cup over his face.
“Eyes too,” I told the twin.
“Why did we have to flip the cups?” asked the twin.
Master Luo had given some explanation, but I hadn’t quite followed.
“Oxidization,” I said, and the twin nodded, like this made perfect sense. “The tea has to breathe.”
WHEN THE TASTING CONCLUDED, JACKIE TOLD US THE STORE WAS offering us a 10 percent discount on loose-leaf teas, just for us, because we’d been such lovely customers.
I bought a pack of the honey-aroma leafhopper-bitten tea.
Master Luo told me it was best on its sixth or seventh steep, when it turned the color of a certain wine pronounced xiáduōlǐ, which I thought might be a Sicilian wine until I realized he was saying “Chardonnay.” I made a mental note to investigate the color of Chardonnay.
“That was very impressive,” the Harvard mother said to me. “How did you get such good Chinese?”
I told her and her husband all about the program: the rigorous schedule, the many electives, the small class sizes, and the homework load.
“That’s fantastic,” said the father. He turned to his sons. “You should think about something like that next summer. Go on, ask her about the deadline.”
“I think Harvard has a summer school in Beijing,” said the taller twin.
“They do,” I said, “but Harvard’s program isn’t as good as ours. Ours is the best by a lot.”
The twins seemed not to believe me. They didn’t ask me how to apply.
OUR LAST STOP WAS AT THE PINGLIN TEA MUSEUM.
Jackie distributed our printed tickets as we stepped off the bus.
He had visited this museum many times, so he was going to wait for us outside.
We were to meet him at the drop-off point no later than five o’clock.
We could not be late. The bus could stall in front for only so long, and we had to beat the evening traffic into the city.
Jackie went down our group, making each of us verbally confirm: five o’clock.
Then he waved goodbye and stepped back onto the bus.
I wandered half-heartedly into the exhibit hall.
I was chiefly invested in finding a place to sit.
I had drunk nine cups of tea in the last hour; I was dizzy from the caffeine, and I’d heard quite enough about the picking, drying, oxidizing, and rolling processes.
I found a bench just past the entrance and tipped my head back against the wall. My fingers tingled.
A series of paintings hung on the wall across from me: a blown-up illustration of prokaryotes, a colony in a petri dish, and what I was certain was the Big Bang. The label below read: “THE ALCHEMY OF STEEPING / THE BIRTH OF CREATION.”