Free A Tea Reader by Katrina Avilla Munichiello Page A

There is an equally lovely Korean tea ceremony, as well as Chinese gongfu and English afternoon tea.
    In as many countries as tea is consumed, there are ceremonies and traditions that have taken root. Within these countries and regions, household traditions have also been established.
    In a world where so much changes and feels out of our control, we cling to our traditions. We seek to perfect them, to experience them more fully, and to hand them down to future generations. It is our way of ensuring the unbroken link between the parents of our parents’ parents and the children of our children’s children. Tea can be that link.

Immersion
    BY V IRGINIA W RIGHT
    I wasn’t born into a family or a culture with any sort of tea traditions. I never felt much of a pull toward the lace doilies, pink rose-patterned cups, and delicate formality of the strictly-mannered Western tradition of afternoon tea; although I could certainly appreciate the exuberant logic-puzzle tea parties of the maddest of hatters. But my concepts of tea were mostly contaminated by awareness of the legacy of colonial oppression or written off as the silliness that little girls completely unlike my younger self served to dolls in suburban backyards.
    So, unsurprisingly, it was not a Darjeeling, sugared, milked, and delicately sipped from a Limoges tea cup that caused me to become completely enamored with tea and tea traditions. With little fore-knowledge and few preconceptions, my immersion into the tea world required falling accidentally and headlong into it through the doorway of a Chinese tea shop one bright summer Saturday a few years ago.
    I’m sure that I had passed this particular tea shop in previous wanderings through the Chinese section of Seattle’s International District, but I’d never noticed it or felt compelled to venture into it before. But on this day my friend and I had framed an indulgent day with tea drinking, starting out with an aromatic and evocative pot of jasmine pearls earlier in the day at a teahouse a short distance away. So we walked into the tea seller’s shop to see what else we could find out about tea. I liked the place right away because of its unwaveringly clear identity. The furniture, the teas, and everything else in the store had a cultural coherence to them, clearly and distinctly Chinese. We did not feel like intruders, but it was clear that we were out of our element, in a place that was not fashioned to cater to us or to other non-Chinese-Americans. This is a shop where local Chinese-Americans buy Chinese tea. I find that it is often places with this type of cultural consistency that become frequent haunts for me, whether they’re restaurants, shops, or other institutions. In the tea shop I was immediately fascinated, looking at all of the wonderful teaware, and the bricks and packages of tea arrayed on the varied and decorative shelves. It was a paradise of tools and vessels, mostly items that I had little to no familiarity with, but I was immediately captivated by their evident specificity and the range in styles and types and materials. I couldn’t guess what each item was for, but I could tell that I had entered an environment full of rules and protocols, where the accoutrements of brewing and serving tea had undergone centuries of tradition and refinement.
    Shortly after we entered, the woman running the shop asked us if we wanted to sit down and try some tea. My innate distrust of salespersons made me hesitate, but I agreed. We then sat down at the long wooden tea table and watched as she prepared tea for us in the traditional Chinese method called Gongfu Cha . “ Gongfu ” is one Anglicization of the same words as “kung fu” and “gung fu” and means the same thing: in essence, “skill” or “art.” The term’s use in reference to tea instead of a form of martial art had been previously unknown to me. Additionally, the only