The weight of the leaf
Tea is just tea unless it’s something else
Christopher Cathcart, Staff
In Milorad Pavic’s exuberantly baroque masterpiece, Landscape Painted with Tea, Atanas Svilar, the architect, tongue coiled like a wise serpent in his smiling left cheek, carries with him three notebooks into which he pours “a mixture of his epic and lyric hatreds. . . . He filled them in the shallow stillness of evening, dragging his New York shadow behind him, or in the barren mornings, when he would awaken from the chill in his mouth, holding last night’s smile in his teeth like a captured prey.”
Beyond the first few pages, which contain detailed notes about various teas as well as lists of famous Russian samovar makers, his notebooks record the dense mythological history of the Riznich sisters — the youngest, Vitacha, unlinked arms with her sisters just long enough to unlink Svilar’s arms from his wife’s — and the rest was devoted to architectural drawings. These two subjects that Svilar visits with while alone are not simply a mixture of private interest and professional practice; they are in fact the two universally recognized pillars of the mid- and late-life crisis: Svilar had never ended up with Vitacha, nor was he really an architect.
Though he was born for it, trained for it in university and at the very core of his being truly was an architect, somehow he lost his footing, misstepped, and ended up bewildered on the other side of his first love as a raging success with the company ABC Engineering & Pharmaceuticals. His notebooks preserved a record of his failures, his secret unattainable desires, his life’s purpose that slipped out of his hands like a river eel he might have tried to catch with his bare hands as a young boy.
For a man versed in the bitter-floral lessons of the teacup, such failures do not necessarily signify defeat, only transience and the ridiculous absurdity of living in the world. The phantom buildings housing lost loves that Svilar returns to on shallow evenings and barren mornings are contained securely between two thoughtfully designed covers, those depicting landscapes painted in his own hand with tea.
Whether the first leaves fell serendipitously into Emperor Shen Nung’s bowl of water, sprouted from the eyelids of Bodhidharma that he cut off for preventing him from staying awake during meditation, or were discovered through persistent and careful consideration of the medicinal properties of various plants, the practice of drinking tea has for most of its history been woven into the fabric worn by sages, monks, and intellectuals, who found that the imperfect world could be contained within their cup.
“It is hygiene,” writes Kakuzo Okakura in The Book of Tea, “for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.” Okakura is speaking here about the practice of teaism, which elevated tea out of its medicinal past into a spiritual art form.
The design of a Japanese tearoom provides a concrete representation of the posture necessary for appreciation of fine tea. What may seem barren to Western architectural sensibility is actually the result of profound artistic forethought, says Okakura. The tearoom “is an abode of fancy inasmuch as it is an ephemeral structure built to house a poetic impulse. It is an abode of vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an abode of the unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated to the worship of the imperfect, purposely leaving something unfinished for the play of the imagination to complete.”
Though the tearoom may look like an indicator of frugal-yet-ordered poverty, it is generally designed with the finest materials by highly skilled hands. In Japan there is a class of builders that only construct tearooms and they are considered to be extremely fine craftsmen. And so it is also with tea.
The highest grades, the most sought after and prized teas, are in fact most often those with profoundly delicate, subtle, and complex flavours. Purposely refined sensitivity and attentiveness is necessary to appreciate the significance of a fine tea. To the uninitiated, the taste of a high-quality FTGFOP#1 first flush Darjeeling will be a weak, boring cup, prompting one to wonder what in what special way so-called tea masters had gone a little crazy. But for those interested in taking the time, tea can be experienced as it was for Wang Yuan Chih, “flooding his soul like a direct appeal, that its delicate bitterness reminded him of the after-taste of a good counsel.”
In Japan, the practice and philosophy of tea drinking had become so internalized in the culture and daily life of the people that at the time Okakura was writing human nature was even discussed in terms of tea:
“We speak of the man ‘with no tea’ in him, when he is insusceptible to the seriocomic interests of the personal drama. Again we stigmatize the untamed aesthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot in the springtide of emancipated emotions, as one ‘with too much tea’ in him.” For Okakura, a person who has internalized the spirit and temperament of a tea-drinker would be a person who has internalized a sense of balance.
It would be a socio-cultural anachronism to suggest that the ideals of human nature from early-20th-century Japan represent the standard of balance for the modern world. However, this idea about the relation of tea-drinkers and balance is not totally misplaced in Western popular culture. In a 2005 Hollywood romantic comedy called Hitch, the protagonist, a dating instructor for men, makes a very successful living by studying and judging human behaviour. When he himself begins dating a woman, he goes out to pick up breakfast and returns with a selection of beverages for her to choose from; one a chai tea and the others coffee-based. When she chooses the chai tea he smiles and says, “Good, I hoped you were going to say that.” A seemingly insignificant detail, yet it would not have been included in the movie if the producers were not confident that millions of North American moviegoers would understand her choice reflecting something integral about her character: that she is less volatile, more level-headed, easygoing, and consistent than someone who needs to shoot out of the gate with a powerful dose of caffeine in the morning.
It might seem that I’ve been fawning too much over the idea of tea drinking as a form of elitism, which could very well be true. For some perspective, I went to Hazel’s Magic Kitchen, a tea shop in Winnipeg, to talk to the owner, Dennis, about connoisseurship. “Connoisseurs,” Dennis said, “spend a lot of time looking down. And it’s not that I don’t look down, especially on bad tea; I don’t want to drink it. But I don’t want to tell anybody how to drink their tea. I’ll give them instructions on how to prepare it properly but I won’t get on their case about it. The whole point is enjoyment.”
According to Dennis, fine tea shops only represent about 10 per cent of the world’s tea, which is being consumed by maybe one per cent of the world’s tea-drinkers. “The bulk of people are shopping at the grocery store and buying tea bags, and it is literally in the cup, steep it, ‘Oops if it went too long but so what, I’m in a rush.’”
Seeing as 3.15 million tons of tea leaves are produced annually and are responsible for the highest rate of consumption worldwide for any beverage second to water, it would be foolish to argue that people are not really appreciating their tea unless they are floating cross-legged on a cloud above a mountain top sipping Ti Kuan Yin from a jade cup. The only objectively measurable difference between someone who prepares their tea properly and someone who does not is the degree to which his or her body will be able to receive the full health benefits of tea.
The three most common preparation mistakes — in terms of extracting the health promoting chemicals found in tea — are insufficient water temperature, under-steeping, and over-steeping.
For black tea, if the water poured into the pot or cup is not 90 degrees C or above, some of tea’s most vital chemicals will remain locked inside the leaf, no matter how long it is steeped. For green tea, boiling water will actually destroy part of the leaf. The water should be brought to a boil then taken off the element for a few minutes before being poured into the pot or cup.
Apart from water temperature, it is absolutely vital to steep tea for a period of three to five minutes depending on type, grade, and desired strength. The 15-second dipper is not getting tea, she is getting hot water with mild flavouring. Dennis said that he does have a few customers that are 15-second dippers, who say the tea is otherwise too strong. “I say to them that they should put less tea in it then because you’re not getting anything out of it, anyway. You don’t get the chemicals out if you don’t infuse it for long enough, and too long will damage them.” Other than the instant beverage powdered tea that can be purchased in some grocery stores, tea is not an instant beverage and will not infuse like one simply because a person wants it to.
Over-steeping the tea (above five minutes) will release dense amounts of acidic compounds called tannins, which break down the molecular structure of the good chemicals in tea. Inadequate temperature, under- or over-steeping may still produce a tasty cup, but the healthful benefits will be nullified.
What are these good chemicals I keep non-specifically mentioning? There are many, so I looked to Wikipedia.com to clear up this chemical confusion for me. The most important are these: theanine, caffeine and theobromine, and catechins.
Theanine has psychoactive properties. It helps to reduce mental and physical stress by promoting alpha wave production.
Caffeine and theobromine are mentioned together because they are from the same category of chemical and they perform the same function of inhibiting adenosine, a neurotransmitter that plays a significant role in promoting sleep and suppressing arousal. By inhibiting adenosine, the body responds with increased activity of the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate. Dopamine does what it sounds like it does, and glutamate is involved in two important functions: increasing the cognitive abilities of learning and memory and also stimulating the fifth sense of taste called umami, otherwise known as the ability to detect savouriness.
Catechins are anti-oxidants, which boost the production of an enzyme called glutathione S-transferase (GST). An article on the website Sciencedaily.com titled “Green Tea Boosts Production of Detox Enzymes, Rendering Cancerous Chemicals Harmless” cited the recent research of Sherry Chow from the University of Arizona. She found that GST enzymes “modify the cancer-causing molecules that would otherwise damage cellular DNA, thus rendering them inert.” Chow also noted that the people in her study that began with very low levels of GST enzymes and then systematically drank large quantities of green tea on a consistent basis had a GST enzyme production boost of 80 per cent.
Apart from the taste, aroma, and warmth of a nice cup of tea, the chemicals produced by tea leaves through proper preparation are absolutely vital for the physiological and psychological reception of what tea has to offer. Before tea emerged as an analog for spiritual and artistic ideals in China, tea was already regarded reverently for “possessing the virtues of relieving fatigue, delighting the soul, strengthening the will, and repairing the eyesight.” Understanding the powerful effects that tea is capable of producing in the human body might explain why the Chinese and Japanese tea masters spoke of tea’s virtues as lifting them to spiritual and aesthetic heights.
Elitism is certainly a highly satisfying practice for those who consider themselves to be in the know, but it’s not necessary, especially if it functions to separate people instead of bring them together. On the contrary, one of the most profound benefits of drinking tea is its efficacy for promoting openness and dialogue while sharing a cup with another person.
On a narrow road in Kathmandu a few years ago, visibly shaken from an intense confrontation I had just escaped from, a jewelry shop owner called out to me from his doorstep and invited me in for tea to talk about our different countries. I gladly accepted the offer and went in. Sitting in Rajiv’s office at the back of the store, a steaming cup of milk tea loosening my limbs, he asked why I had looked so upset out on the street.
One road over, I told him, a clothing shop owner had blocked me from exiting his store; he was very agitated, yelling and trying to force me to pay him 1,000 rupees as a “looking charge” before he’d let me leave. A 10-minute stand-off in which the disingenuous word “tourist” crumbled around me ended only when the owner’s brother showed up, realized was happening, and quickly ushered me out of the building.
Rajiv was embarrassed by the incident. He apologized for the way I had been treated but wanted me to understand why it happened. The economic reality of an average Nepalese family is quite different from a Canadian’s, and the reason why that shop owner had acted out so desperately was very likely because he was desperate. Shops like his can only stay open if tourists are buying his merchandise, so from his perspective, if a foreigner can fly across the globe, then he can afford to spend enough money in a little shop to enable the owner to buy his family food for the week. Before talking with Rajiv over tea, the only thing I cared to feel was angry that someone threatened my personal safety. Afterward, I felt quite differently about the matter and ended up going back to the clothing shop a few days later, bought a sweater, and reconciled with the owner.
If it seems as though I’ve vested far too much faith and interest in the so-called life-altering possibilities inherent in a simple drink, so be it. On the subject, Okakura offers this rejoinder to the uninterested and skeptic alike: “When we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the teacup.”
