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| Tea gentrification |
Indeed, the mall, assuming it’s a good one, is a huge hole for culture, as commodified as it may be. If it’s anything, it’s a place where consumerism not only perpetuates itself, but draws in the purist traditions, beliefs and worldviews and makes them into something marketable. Hey, baby, that’s business. Trump did it, Marx wrote about it, and we all live it.
Consumerism is nothing more than our displaced comradery projected and manifested into something Man alienated from whatever good social relationships the world used to have. It’s the phantasmagoria. What the ideal world should be like. Alas, it never really is. We’re no longer gift givers, we’re consumer fetishists. And when something as zen as tea gets thrown into that mix, I imagine myself taking that hot “Japanese” kettle off its ridiculously marketed (useless) candle holder/heater and pouring that luke warm sencha/chai/bullshit blend down whatever sales person’s throat until they choke, hearing the echoes of Marx in my head: “the bourgeoisie won’t save you now!”
If there is a food that gives us perspective; that allows us to reflect and withdraw from the rabbles of everyday life, that stands in place for everything good and pure, then tea is it. The colonialist stole it, the farmer drank it, (if not to flavour the hot water he had to boil and drink or otherwise fall ill by because of the myriads of parasites in an un-boiled pot), the samurai had it beside him while writing his last poem, doing his last war dance, before going on into battle for the very last time, and the kung-fu adherent drank it, even when he was dying of thirst. My Old Master drinks it, and so do I. Without him, I still would have touched the stuff, but I would never have appreciated it. Something, I’m sure, that comes with time and enough curious intention to enable a person to riddle through as many books and people about tea as possible. And, of course, when it’s the only thing on hand after doing 1,000 tornado kicks.
Food can shape your identity if you want it to. And it can also challenge it. Mine’s been challenged. It’s scary, comrades. 提心吊胆 同志.
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| Though grateful that I had my phone on hand, without which I would not have been able to take pictures, I couldn't help but feel like some terrible interloper. Sho ga nai. It was for the greater good of tea. |
The sale of tea in the West is not my beef. The gentrification of tea is. When something as sincere and necessary, rejuvenating and affordable as tea is recognized as marketable and exploitable for a market of new-aged fatheads, I can’t help but be a little discontented. Maybe I felt like I was part of a club, or part of a history. I knew the secret to harmony, I was privileged enough to be a part of someone’s harmony. I knew how much tea meant to the poor generations who depended on its flavour because they couldn’t have anything else. It stood for working hard, climbing mountains, 吃苦。Or so my Old Master taught me. I eeked out know-it-alls, risked being called 鬼佬, being hit on the back by old women from Laos only to learn whatever subtleties I could so that someday, maybe I could be a part of something. Now all that seems terribly compromised. My city’s no longer subtle. The teashops have been compromised. Those women in sweaters with cat prints have been compromised, threatened by the sophisticated yuppies that head to the mall, not the “smelly Chinese store.” Don’t get me wrong, sophistication’s good. If it comes with humility. Otherwise it’s just arrogance. If that’s the case, sophistication seems more reserved for coffee, not tea. It seems wrong. If there were such a thing as immortals, they might agree. But I still stand by it.
Tea is for the hardworking body, not the complacent, sedentary consumer that needs to impress his girlfriend. When a girl says she loves tea, I don’t believe her. When a guy in a mall’s giant (chain) tea shop comes up to me, decked out in Gucci shirt and shitty (shitty being the pejorative here for unnecessary designer) pants and claims it will help me lose weight, I laugh. What employer grilled him with that? How much more was he forced to know? How long did it take him to know it? And when the same guy convinces a young Chinese girl to buy the shittiest blend of dust for 11.95 my heart breaks. (Probably because he couldn’t have been older than 17, and she believed him.) Where’s her grandmother, is all I can ask myself. And why isn’t she saying anything about the glamourized, post-colonial photos of migrant workers hunched over tea bushes with huge sacks on their backs on display over the shelves of metallic tin cans and assembly line tea pots? Why, when I enter these places, do I feel like the only one who thinks something’s wrong?
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| glamourized, post-colonial photos of migrant workers hunched over tea bushes with huge sacks on their backs. |
A cup that says “guru” won’t make you a tea aficionado, but I know that’s what they want people to think. And those flashy electric scales that measure your grams in neon blue digital numbers may make things more precise, but they won’t make things taste better. Another effect of the technological fetish we all seem to be a part of.
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Let’s not forget the cherry on the cake of a fabulous store. The 3 foot tall Buddha sitting cross-legged, with what looks like a bowl in his hands filled with pennies from passersby. If that’s not an allegory for the marketability of spirituality, I don’t know what is. Joke’s on them. They gave their income to an entity that doesn’t even need it. He reached Nirvana a long time ago. Maybe next time I see a crucifix, I’ll leave some money at Jesus’s feet. Maybe he’ll give me long life and double happiness.
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| The Buddha doesn't need your money. He reached Nirvana a long time ago. Judging by your spending habits, neither do you. |
There was something delightfully satirical and post-modern about the whole thing. Tea discovered, taken, relished in, novelized, and then recycled to be new, kitschy and profitable. It’s only a matter of time before people actually assume that a monk summoned a lucky dragon to make the tea bushes grow. Although, it is a nice story. A story more or less dwarfed by the commodification that overshadows the magic and lore of tea. But I should stop here and be grateful that I still have my own tea spaces to dwell in, and that I always have. Like the saying goes, “think about the misfortune of others to be satisfied with your own lot.” I know where my tea is, and them, theirs.
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