The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(108)
5. I presume one reason you approached me to be your adviser is that I’m Chinese. As such, I hope you’ll consider adding a third area to your thesis even though it’s not within the “hard science” realm: How do we reconcile the poetry and philosophy of tea with the practicalities of growing and processing the product? I grew up hearing ancient beliefs about tea from my immigrant parents: Every hour spent drinking tea is a distillation of all the tea hours that have ever been spent; and Truly you can find the universal through the particular of tea. Personally, I see a real disconnect between a sentiment like Tea is the cup of humanity and the hardscrabble life of tea farmers. If you can incorporate these humanistic aspects in your materials and methods, I believe the awards committee will take notice, and your thesis will rise above others.
I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you.
Professor Annabeth Ho
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Professor Ho,
Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. I realize now I should have given you a little more background. Let me try to do that, as well as answer your queries.
Last summer, I went to the World Tea Expo, which happened to be in Southern California, where I’m from. I sampled teas from Thailand, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Uganda—seemingly everywhere. A whole section of the expo was devoted to the teas of Yunnan, especially to Pu’er, which is extremely rare in China, and even rarer in the world. People at the expo were gambling that tea will be the next big thing here in the United States, where sales of loose, bagged, and ready-to-drink teas have steadily risen over the last two decades. This year, the estimated wholesale value of the U.S. tea industry is $11.5 billion. The clincher, it seems to me, is Starbucks’s purchase of Teavana in 2012. It also doesn’t take a genius to notice the similarities between tea and wine connoisseurs; they both talk about vintage, harvest seasons, varietals, geographic source, the effects of light, soil, weather, and, of course, age on taste. Even the language to describe flavor is similar: “acidic, followed by notes of orchid and plum.”
At the expo, I also met a whole set of people I never expected to see: scientists and doctors. Yunnan is known as a Global Biodiversity Hotspot. The province is said to have “as much flowering plant diversity as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere combined,” which gives it a lushness found nowhere else in the world. The province makes up only 4 percent of China’s landmass, yet it’s home to more than half its mammal and bird species as well as twenty-five of China’s fifty-five ethnic minorities. All this got me thinking about global warming and its effect on the quality and intensity of light, which, in turn, will change the final product—whether wine or tea. Plants with medicinal qualities are coming out of the Amazon rainforest. Couldn’t something come out of the tropical forests of Yunnan? And just as in the Amazon, the tea mountains of Yunnan are being encroached on by development and pollution, particularly air pollution, which I know is of particular interest to you.
Lastly, at the fair I met a man named Sean Wong. I showed him a tea cake that I have. He encouraged me to take it—what he called “an ideal specimen”—to the place of origin, as so many connoisseurs and collectors do. This was not the first time someone has suggested this to me. He said I could travel with him. I’m jumping at the opportunity.
I hope that’s a help,
Haley
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Haley,
I need you to dig deeper and answer my very specific questions. I’m here to challenge you. I hope you understand that. And please don’t take this the wrong way, but I also need to inquire about your relationship with the person who invited you to travel with him. What do you know about him? Is he actually going to help you with your research? What is his motive to take a young woman to such a remote area? I’m sure you understand where I’m going with this, and it makes me very uncomfortable even to bring it up.
You have a promising academic career ahead of you. With that comes great opportunities and responsibilities. I suspect you’ll be offended when you read this, but if I ultimately agree to be your adviser, I have a duty to know you’ll be safe—on behalf of your parents, the university, and my own peace of mind.
Professor Annabeth Ho
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Professor Ho,
To answer your questions:
1. My interest in this subject is very much tied to my upbringing. My father is an arborist. As a child, I rode along as he worked, managing orchards and visiting sick trees. He showed me how to mix compounds to feed or spray them for different needs. He once told me, “You’re learning at my side,” and I was, because I listened to every word he said and I absorbed them into my body like the trees absorbed their medicines and nutrients. Thanks to my father, I’ve had a front-row seat to observe the devastating effects of California’s drought on our trees, which, in their weakened state, have been preyed upon by pests and parasites. Unlike most Stanford students and, indeed, most scientists, I’ve witnessed the suffocating deaths of countless trees brought about by what we can only conclude is global climate change. My mother, Constance Davis, is a biologist. Perhaps you’ve heard of her? I’m a product of both of them, and that’s where my interest in my thesis topic comes from.
2. Yes, I plan to go to Yunnan. I don’t need outside funding. My family will provide it. I’ll take my first trip over spring break, which corresponds to Yunnan’s tea-picking season. I agree that joining another study would be opportune. Tufts Institute of the Environment in cooperation with the Ethnobiology Department of the Chinese Ministry of Education and sponsored by the National Science Foundation is currently doing a multidisciplinary study (the team includes a chemical ecologist, cultural anthropologist, soil and crop scientist, agricultural economist, and others) on the effects of extreme climate events on terrace tea and wild tea crop yields in Yunnan. I’ve been in contact with the study’s leader, Dr. Joan Barry, and she’s agreed to my participation in the project—much of which I can do on my laptop in my dorm room and by analyzing tea samples in the lab here on campus. The current plan is for me to travel in the tea mountains for a week by myself to enlist informants and gather tea samples for my project. Then I’ll join the Tufts team for the second week. Dr. Barry says she looks forward to seeing the results of my research.