The Little Thing That Could Change Your Life

When I travel to a new place, I don’t take a tour to get oriented. I don’t knock off a bucket list of what one is supposed to see in “36 hours in [insert city name here]”. I just wander the streets, observe and absorb the ambiance, the sounds, the smells, the markets, the people.

Hong Kong street scene — It was an ordinary shop, similar to these, on a quiet side street in Mongkok.

One day, back in 1981, at 23 years old, I was in Hong Kong for the very first time. I wandered around the backstreets of the Mongkok neighborhood and stopped by an openfront shop selling loose teas out of bins. It wasn’t a particularly attractive shop, not quaint or ornamental/oriental. It was about as exciting as a little hole in the wall business you might go to when you needed a rubber stamp made or an odd light bulb of a particular size.

A line of teapots — A spectrum of teapots in a shop

I couldn’t speak any Cantonese, but the little boy minding the family shop packed up small amounts of whatever teas I pointed at and we both enjoyed the exchange. He deftly wrapped up each little mound of tea leaves in a square of paper, and wrote the names of the teas in English for me.

Later, back in my room at the YWCA on MacDonnell Road, I tried each one in a glass of hot water, watching the leaves unfurl, seeing the colors develop, tasting the light steep, the medium steep, the long steep.

green tea leaves steeping in a cup — Green tea leaves steeping.

This was the first time I tasted lung ching (longjing), shou mei, pu-erh, ti kuan yin and shui hsien. This was the first time that I realized how varied teas could be, how aromatic, how complex, without being flavored by anything else. Like wines are varied, though they may all be made from grapes.

9 years later, I opened an Asian teahouse in Seattle, and I was in the tea business for about 20 years.