The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(107)

I’ve gone to the Los Angeles chapter of Families with Children from China to teach a cultural class about tea. (The group, I’ve been told, is a shadow of its former self. The people who now run things—all volunteers—are new. Plus, apparently, they never kept great records to begin with.) I’ve also developed tea-tasting programs at the Huntington Library for adults and kids. And on the weekends, I visit garage sales to look for old tea cakes, because what if my daughter—or her parents—decided the tea cake I left with her wasn’t worth keeping?

None of these activities has yet brought me luck.

I check my watch. It’s 10:00, and business e-mail is arriving, but I decide to scan the human interest articles first—in China and America, in newspapers, and on a few blogs I’ve come to admire and trust—to look for pieces about adopted Chinese girls who’ve found their mothers or parents or siblings. These stories keep me optimistic and make me wonder if my daughter is searching for me too.

If my daughter were ever to post an inquiry, where would she do it?

If my daughter were ever to buy a billboard, where would it be?

If my daughter were ever to try to learn about her tea cake, where would she take it?

It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy. I see it from the opposite direction. I’m happy, but there’s an empty space inside me that will never stop suffering from the loss of Yan-yeh. After all these years, it’s a companion rather like the friend-living-with-child. It’s nourished me and forced me to breathe when it would have been so easy to give up. Suffering has brought clarity into my life. Maybe the things that have happened to me are punishment for what I did in a previous life, maybe they were fate or destiny, and maybe they’re all just part of a natural cycle—like the short but spectacular lives of cherry blossoms in spring or leaves falling away in autumn.

I will never give up searching for Yan-yeh, but now, at 11:00, I force myself to move on to business.





E-mail between Haley Davis and Professor Annabeth Ho, re: Stanford Senior Thesis. First week of October 2015

Professor Ho,

I so appreciate your agreeing to be my adviser next year for my senior thesis. When I visited during your office hours last week, you asked to see a draft of my research proposal. This is the first pass:

The Impact of Climate Change on Sensory and Medicinal Attributes of Tea (Camellia sinensis) Grown from Tea Trees in the Tropical Regions of China

This thesis will have two areas of study: 1. How are compounds that create the taste, smell, and look of tea—a combination of amino acids, catechins, theobromine, methylxanthine, and free sugars—being influenced by global climate change? 2. High levels of biodiversity in the tropical forest lead to a rich food chain, which helps to minimize insect and parasite infestations. Specifically, the compounds previously listed make up defensive agents against pathogens, predators, and oxidative stress that have arisen among tea trees growing in their biodiverse—and increasingly threatened—habitat. In numerous studies, these natural protections have also been shown to be beneficial to Homo sapiens. Of these, catechins—a group of polyphenolic flavan-3-ol monomers and their gallate derivatives—are considered to be the primary health-giving compounds in tea. The most important of these is epigallocatechin-3-gallate, which is the most bioactive and which has entered the domain of “well-being culture.” With the intensified monsoons brought about by climate change, many of these antioxidant compounds are decreasing by as much as 50 percent, while other compounds are increasing. Therefore, how are tea trees’ natural protections being affected by global climate change and what will the consequences be on the health benefits of the tea leaf? Materials and methods include farmer surveys, interviews, and the gathering and testing of tea leaves.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear your thoughts at your earliest convenience,

Haley Davis



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Haley,

This looks very ambitious, but what else can I expect from a student with two majors, Biology and Earth Sciences? You must be aiming not just to graduate with honors, as all those who choose to write a senior thesis will achieve, or even to graduate “with distinction” (assuming your GPA is high enough, which I’m sure it will be), but with the Firestone Award for social and natural science.

Before we get into the meat of your thesis, I have a few practical questions:

1. I’d like to know your personal interest in such an arcane subject. Don’t get me wrong. The winners of the Firestone Award seem to specialize in arcana, which the committee appreciates. It will behoove you to flesh out that aspect.

2. I assume you plan to go to Yunnan. Are you applying for a fellowship or some other type of funding? Would you consider an internship with a larger academic study already under way? My concern is how you’ll get to these farms, where you’ll stay, and how you’ll communicate. On behalf of the university, I can say we don’t want you to do anything that will put you in danger or outside your comfort zone.

3. This looks like a multiyear study. Do you plan to carry on with your research in graduate school?

4. Regarding the “health benefits” to which you refer: We know that green tea has high levels of polyphenols. These antioxidants fight free radicals, which many scientists believe contribute to the aging process, including damage to DNA, some types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. But apart from the University of Maryland Medical Center’s study, can you point to proven health claims? I’m not interested in marketing, anecdotal evidence, or supposition about tea that isn’t backed by fact or reason. I want to see legitimate documentation on this before you move forward.