Summer 2020 - Teh C
Teh C - Hot Black Milk Tea, Unsweetened
Black Tea Leaves/Tea Bag
Full Cream Evaporated Milk
An early memory I have of tea is my mom's habit of making milk tea for my parents in the evening after dinner.
A simple affair: water on boil, teabag in mug, brew, a dash of milk, some sugar, stir.
At that point in my life, what made the tea alluring was what looked to be a complex process of putting together the drink. What fascinated me most, however, was the snap of her wrist as she stirred everything together. I aspired to the speed of that wrist snap, the sound of a metal teaspoon clinking rhythmically against the cup wall.
As I got a little older, I would be allowed to add the milk and sugar for her, and then eventually, make weak versions of it for myself to drink.
I don’t remember when I moved to steeping full-bodied milk tea brews. Over time, the tea bag stayed in the water a little longer, the liqueur would grow darker, a stronger milk would be added, less sugar.
Over time, creeping into my regular order at hawker centres - Teh C. Milk tea. Unsweetened.
I identify as a tea person: 茶人.
I practice a personal 茶道 chadao largely influenced and impacted by a Chinese tradition, and hover back and forth between the formal terms of “tea practitioner” or “tea sommelier”. I am moving toward those capacities structurally through courses, research and practice, and reading.
The term chadao is most commonly introduced to non-tea folks through the formal Japanese Chado, which has a history and life of its own. Chinese chadao, in contrast, is a tradition fraught with essentialisms, histories and survival - wrapped up in its mythological opacities as part of “Chinese” origin story and development, destroyed and restored in various ways through the tumultuous events of Chinese nation-state formation.
Documentations of this history are patchy, scattered and inconsistent.
This ragged assemblage suits my sensibilities - but more on this in future weeks.
As much I love the formality, culture and abundance of all things in tea culture, I am drawn to tea in the intimate beats of its existence in various seasons of my life. Before the formality of tea practice was established as a meditative ritual for me, tea was already flush in bags at the dining table, poured with familiar carelessness into chipped glass mugs at a noisy hawker centre.
Teh - the local term in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for general tea beverages, arriving in various formats to the region through multidirectional waves of trading histories.
To this day, milk tea brewed from a pre-packed tea bag is a familiar and comfortable taste to me, even though my tongue, having developed basic sommelier sensibilities, can now taste the age of its papers interacting with water temperature, washed into the tea brew, floating beneath the flavours of cream and sugar.
The August Tinyletters are about tea.
By this I mean tea. teh. cha.
The way I come to relationship with my hands in the practices of tea brew.
The way I ground in the routines and rituals required of tea brew.
How I come to trace my lineages—the many—through the tea trades.
The innocuity of tea leaf scattered carelessly across a countertop and the fraught weight of its being.
Tea is an intimate relational ritual for me, entwined with many aspects of my life.
As an adult, sometimes I still become self-aware in the moment of the stir, watching my own mature wrist snap comfortably in habit, metal against ceramic wall. Having comfortably arrived into this practice through the very banal process of literally growing older, this moment of self-consciousness puts into perspective the gap between my wide-eyed memory at age eight of my mother’s hand, and my own, 20 years later, thoughtlessly grasping a spoon.
What are the things of this gap, that got me to this grasp?
If July was spent mulling over the evolving shape of language in my life, August opens up space for me to contemplate other forms of communication and meaning-making with myself.
Of the 21 tea principles, four
清而不丰则薄， The clear but not full is thin,
丰而不清则浊， The full but unclear is muddy,
透而不敛则艳， The unclouded but not gathered is vibrant,
敛而不透则晦。 The gathered but clouded is dark.