For a summer, I moved from place to place with my red suitcase – a wanderer in a foreign city humming the Chinese pop song The Olive Tree: “Don’t ask me where I’m from, my homeland is far. Why wandering, wandering afar, wandering.” The only things that brought me a sense of stability in the fast-changing swirl were my books, music, and the teapots Mama mailed me on my eighteenth birthday. In those hot, humid summer days up in a mountain in northern New Jersey in a hostile living environment, my constant headache was only cured by singing a piece of Fauré or Brahms while pouring myself some hot tea. As a bead of sweat rolled down my spine when I sang, I felt a slow liberation of my skull, that nagging pain forbidding me from writing my paper.

The afternoons, as the glaring sun invaded the window, a swoop of dizziness took over my head, and I had to stop writing on the paper again. Listening to Schubert’s music, I took out the ceramic tea sets – black on the cover and peacock blue from within, simple and easy to travel with. I made myself some white tea with tangerine Mama sent me from Fujian. I have the habit of smelling the dry tea leaves and letting the smell sit at the tip of my nose. That comforting aroma it is. I like the clattering sound of the dried leaves on the teapot filter, even more so when I slowly pour the water into the leaves and hear the crisp noise of water touching the ceramics and the itchy sound of the water kissing the leaves. I watch the color change and then quickly take out the leaves and slowly pour them into the little cups, waiting for the moment to raise the cup to my lips. For my health, I prayed and took a sip. As the translucent clear brown liquid touched my palate, I felt a shudder, soon a relief as if someone lifted me from an abyss. A warm tear dropped to the table. Is that silhouette in the cup the contour of Mama? This taste so familiar, rooted so deep in the fundamentals of my existence, called out something buried within, something I had not dared to touch since the outbreak of the pandemic. That memory of pure happiness of the satisfaction of being loved, and the joy of being safe I tried to suppress in my lonesome journey in the foreign country, scared to lose my courage to go on.

But that moment, as that tea warmed my lips, all my attempts to block out the homesickness collapsed, and those long-suppressed tears ran down freely. The image of my Mama with her skillful hand preparing tea for our afternoon teatime appeared vividly in my mind. I tried to learn and repeat every step of hers, but she was always more elegant, and I was still the clumsy apprentice. Days gone by when I soullessly repeated her movement and drank my tea without thinking. But that day, maybe it was because my sick body craved that hot, curing liquid, or maybe because I put more thoughts into the process, or that I thought of home – the taste lingered just as Mama had made them for me and I realized that perhaps the one element I lacked was the full attention mama gave to each detail of the movement in the delightful anticipation to share tea with her loved ones.

This is how Proust’s writing in Remembrance of Things Past resonates with me with a fond recognition of my own, how tasting a madeleine pastry with tea triggered his involuntary memory of childhood at Combray, as he said that the past is “somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect and its field of operations, in some material object…” Walter Benjamin comments on such involuntary recollection in his essay “Motif in Baudelaire,” that ritual and ceremonies could “[remain] available to memory throughout people’s lives” and “where there is an experience [Erfahrung]… certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory [Gedächtnis] with material from the collective past.” The intangible source of memory in our unconscious is attached to some tangible objects or practices that ceaselessly bring us into reminiscence. Through those triggered moments of recollection, we relive the memory once more as if no time has passed. Time is distorted, compressed, and evasive. Scent and sensory could break the boundary of time and reify it; as Benjamin suggested, “scent may drown entire years in the remembered order it evokes.”

There, memory reemerges in the forms of the exact fragrance of white tea, “Winter Blossom Fragrant,” and dried tangerine. From the beginning days when Mama had just started to make Gongfu tea for us, we still lived in that tiny, cramped apartment where Father called it “just a dorm” in a contempt tone. The only place for us to have tea was the tiny old kitchen that felt like a sauna during the peak of summer heat. We didn’t have a formal tea table and a complete set of tea items then. Only a small bamboo tea tray and old cups from Grandpa’s collection shelf (博古架), plus a purple clay teapot that leaked water from the lid. I was around ten years old. But those were the happiest moments of childhood I treasured when Mama came back from work early and made tea for Grandma and me. We sat around the little kitchen table where we usually had our daily meals. Beads of sweat roll down my forehead in the blinding sun steaming our entire kitchen; my sweaty thighs glued to the black leathered chair.

         In later years Mama sometimes spoke of the olden times, amused at how I would always sniff the tea like a little thirsty deer and slowly drank it as if it was some dew from heaven. I let the fragrance lingered in every corner of my mouth and smiled. Like the taste of paradise, I used to exclaim.

         Another anecdote my grandma always tells is about the Yunnan group trip with Mama’s colleagues, which we went on when I was six years old. On a tea terrace in the mountains, the entire group was treated to Pu’er tea tasting, a local fermented dark tea. The other children on the trip disliked the earthy taste, while I drank that small cup in one sip. In the end, all the other children gave their portion to me. A colleague of Mama commented to Grandma, “Your granddaughter is surely an old soul.” Then they all laughed. Those happy memories of group travels would never return. 

         Indeed, it was like paradise when Mama was home and fully present in the moment with us, not concerned with work, temporarily. Sometimes I would hide away her phone so she couldn’t hear the work calls that never ceased, so no one could take her away from us. When could the external world stop demanding from her? Why couldn’t those people give her a minute of peace during her only vacation week? Sometimes, I felt that she couldn’t really see me anymore or she would be rushing out to her office again. I also tried to stop her at the front door and asked, “When will you come back mama?”. My grandma would then drag me away and scold me for keeping Mama from work. 

        Mama put Teresa Teng’s “Just like of your Tenderness” as her ringtone, which used to be my favorite song, but then ceased to be, as it would give my body shutter and frightened feeling when I hear it. I couldn’t enjoy the song as it is anymore – it is the ringtone, the horn of war, the invasion of the external society.

         I didn’t know whether Mama realized then how much those moments of tea time meant for my young yearning heart when she read to me pages of poetry and prose of writers she liked: Tagore, Su Shi, Liang Shiqiu and Wang Zengqi; when she told me her story growing up and how she left Hanzhong for Beijing, how she said goodbye to the glowing performing stage and turned to study Chinese literature and literary trends; how she eased me from my aggrievances and taught me a wise and all-encompassing way of seeing the world despite all those sorrow and injustice she went through; how she would light up incense and speak about Buddhist and Daoist worldviews; how she would sing a Chinese folk song in her beautiful nightingale-like voice. Oh, Mama, may those precious times always be with us – your tea is like the communication of the soul, the rejoicing in spiritual communion as if you are pouring something deep from your mind and heart that words could not convey, and when my tongue touches the sacred water, a translucent understanding between generations was reached. You passed down your passion, life experience, thoughts, and wisdom of living to me, and I drank with thirst.

         Tea is just like Mama herself: mild, fragrant, and gentle. The smell and taste of tea are not as strong as attention-grabbing coffee, nor is it like juice, which is sweet only from a first taste, and then you have a sour tongue and sticky throat. Tea might taste plain or sometimes bitter (when sipped in hot water for too long), but the return to your palate is a mild sweetness that is crisp and everlasting (回甘). That is Mama for me. Her presence is like the warm glow of tea that warms everyone but might strike someone as aloof at first glance. But if you really get to know her, she is the kindest, intelligent, and most loving person to talk to. I wish one day I could be like her, as I often prayed as a young girl. If only I could be as gentle as Mama, who has such a huge heart to love and forgive those who mistreat her, to care and to understand, to smile at hardship and embrace it; if only could I have that tranquility of her mind when life circumstance is adverse and hostile if only I could see injustice without the burning fire in my chest… So, Mama’s tea could cure me and slowly quench that fire that burns my antagonism to the external world.

       One day, I remember, I was eager to be the one who served tea for the family. Mama laughed and taught me what temperature to use for each kind of tea, how many tea leaves to put, how long I should let the tea sit, how to pour water, how to manage the hot, covered bowl (盖碗) without burning my fingers, how much tea to pour from the fair mug (公道杯) to each cup… So much detail and attention are given in each movement. And most of all, one needs to be patient. Oh, Patience, how hard a quality that is to cultivate in recent days when all people want is efficiency and productivity, to get two degrees in the shortest amount of time, to take as many majors as possible. Doing one thing at a time is no longer enough and life is always in a hurry. We are so used to getting an answer directly, and if we soil something, we need an immediate reward. Otherwise, we call it a waste of time. If Google and ChatGPT can provide us answers in a blink, why bother to sit in a library all day to get one’s mind sip in the reading and memorization? The process of preparing and waiting is lost, just like they put tea dust into a tea bag and sip into a big coffee mug to get a drink at once. You can take the cup to go, and you might not take a second to think about what taste it has. The tea is reduced to only a part of a routine and ceases to be tea at all.

         The process of making Gongfu tea is my counter to the rapid lifestyle. It is not easy. Being at a place like Harvard means that someone is always doing more, multiple things at the same time, taking that extra course and taking up a leadership post in the clubs; you are always not doing enough.  

      Being fully present in the moment becomes a luxury these days as the speed of the modern world with media of information and technology tears us into different directions every minute and detaches us from the visuals and blurbs of texts. Proust not only suggested that smell and taste are the key triggers of memory, but also the subtle experience that signifies change in the pace of life.

         I find beauty in the process of waiting for the tea to be brewed, to pay attention to each detail of movement as being fully present in the moment –like a meditation. Tea making becomes a ritual where I remind myself of the importance of slowing down, to not rush a second of my precious life, but to live it to its fullest extent.

         But I wonder, why do I cling on to those moments of time so much, the moments when I am fully in the present? While steeping myself in the present moment of making tea, I am not worrying about the future and the uncertainty of life. Instead, I was grounded in the ritual that was rooted in a strong stable sense of home.

         The Gongfu tea ceremony is a classic Chinese tradition popularized during the Ming dynasty, starting from possibly the Fujian and Guangdong regions. Making Chinese tea abroad became a practice to preserve a part of my culture that is close to my heart. This has been my sixth year living in America. In the age of sudden changes and uncertainties as a Chinese student in the U.S. during the outburst of the pandemic, I have encountered situations of xenophobic comments about my Chinese appearance. More than ever, I became conscious about my skin and hair, my label as a Chinese that never came much to my attention before, apart from being a human being just like everyone else.

         In James Wood’s essay “On Not Going Home” for the London Review of Books, he described a “secular homelessness” that is temporary and fluid in regards to departure and returns:

Exile is acute, massive, transformative, but secular homelessness because it moves along its axis of departure and return, can be banal, welcome, necessary, continuous. There is the movement of the provincial to the metropolis or the journey out of one social class into another.

         For a while, I did not know how to address the paradox and confusion in my mind in response to identity. I was the child who grew up steeped in traditional Chinese culture and arts while always bearing a strong curiosity toward Western literature and civilizations. As a tradition-loving child who had a deep affection for the culture and the soil, I was one of the youngest in my surroundings to leave home by myself for my intellectual pursuit in America. Even though I fit right into the intellectual and artistic offerings in the classrooms and extracurriculars, there was always an invisible barrier I felt in my social life. I saw how some Chinese students could change their way of life and the way they spoke and dressed to assimilate into the culture, whereas I focused my attention on how to remain an authentic self in the small practices like making Chinese tea, writing, reading, singing, and painting.

         But even so, as years went by, when I returned to China, I could no longer feel at home in the social environment beyond the household. I felt more out of place at the performing “work dinners” (饭局) with the adults, which I was forced to attend since I was a child. My manners became too simplistic; my words failed to buy into the system of discourse expected on the roundtable. Too often, I’m between two cultures, multiple ones, in between being an insider and an outsider.

         One day I burst into tears when I could no longer feel belonging anywhere anymore. When people here ask, too often, “So where will you settle in the end?” I think about the future that has yet to be revealed to me, with a grey mist that I could not foresee. That dread of having to pick one side sounds so daunting and I am yet to have an answer.

         I felt there are different fragments of myself that belong to different places: parts of me are found in the musical theatre culture of America, its intellectual freedom to explore and think critically; some parts found their resonance in the German philosophy laden with contemplation of time, selfhood, history and its classical music and operas and my German friends who would have the deepest and most soul-comforting conversations with me; other parts in the Irish theatre with its earthy texture, folklore and national pride; but most of all, with the countryside in China to the desolate yellow plain, the people with their daily lives and a history told live by my grandparents, the melodies sang by Mama that flood in my blood, grandpa’s handmade noodles with grandma’s soup…

         When I think about it, my creative writings were displaced from the first place. The first fiction story I wrote when I was nine had all the characters in English names translated into Chinese, like Jessica and Helene. Just by reading the story, there is nothing “Chinese” about it despite the language itself. The (unfinished) fiction I wrote when I was in middle school was called out as sounding Irish. As I started to write in English in high school, my first-person narrated poems and fiction felt “cultureless” or, in other words, universal. The “I” could have been someone from any nation, though the narrative style embedded in the English writing itself cast the tone in a certain way that one would assume the protagonist to be Anglo-American. I once received criticism that my writing had nothing “Chinese” in it and that it was outside of cultural boundaries and context. Indeed, don’t famous Asian American writers write stories about their status of being immigrants while being clear about their context? And yet my characters are faceless.

         But despite my frustration in finding a place to call Heimat, as in German, I am lucky to have deep connections with friends who could understand me. And oftentimes, they have experienced the same confusion as I do now or have lived in a foreign place before. Just as James Wood wrote, secular homelessness “might be the inevitable ordinary state.” What I found is a sense of cosmopolitanism within a fundamental rootedness.

         Now, as I write poetry in English, Chinese, and German and translate between those languages in order for my family and friends from different places to read, I found a new revelation in the act of translation. When something is lost in translation, something else is gained. In a time when different parts of the world simultaneously coil into provincialism, it is those who belong everywhere and nowhere who put effort into understanding different cultures and history and communicate in between the interconnected lands that try to isolate themselves.

         Now, whenever I brew a cup of tea, I think about Mama and how much attention she puts into making tea for us so we have a beautiful afternoon and are being cared for. I do the same when I’m staying in Germany and America, with the tea leaves containing so much memory, history, and identity I collected from different Chinese provinces, sharing with those I deeply care about – the enjoyment of the slow motion of life and deep human connections from a cup of Gongfu tea.