The story behind the cup
Tea as inheritance
Growing up, the coffee table in my father’s living room was never really a coffee table — it was a tea table. While I buried myself in mathematics and physics textbooks preparing for university entrance exams, my father would sit nearby, quietly brewing tea. Every so often, a thermos of Jin Xuan Oolong (金萱) or Li Shan Alpine Oolong (梨山) would appear beside me. I drank it absentmindedly, like water, never stopping to ask what made one cup different from another.
Only years later did I realize that my education in tea had begun long before I knew its language.
As an adult, I found myself chasing flavors I could not quite name — trying to rediscover the teas that lingered in memory from childhood. That search led me to formal tea studies and eventually to earning my ITSA certification. Along the way, I discovered that I could consistently distinguish different water sources in blind tastings, and that my intuition for temperature, timing, and extraction had been quietly shaped by years of daily exposure to tea.
For my final examination, I brewed Muzha Tie Guan Yin (木柵鐵觀音) in a century-old Yixing teapot passed down from my father. As I poured the tea, I realized the teapot itself was part of the lesson. Decades of use had left a mineral-rich patina on its walls, softening the tea’s characteristic edge and revealing a gentler, deeper expression that a new vessel could never replicate.
In that moment, I understood that what my father had given me was more than a teapot — or even a taste for tea. He had passed down a way of paying attention: to water, to leaves, to time, and to the quiet rituals that bring them together. The tea I brewed that day carried not only flavor, but also a family tradition that had been steeping long before it reached my hands.
Today, I live in the United States and work as a software engineer. I enjoy many things here — fried chicken, craft beer, and the rhythm of a different life — but Taiwanese tea remains one of my strongest connections to home. Each cup carries memories of family, landscapes, and traditions that shaped me, reminding me where I come from even when I am far away.
Each tea carries something more than flavor: the season in which it was harvested, the landscape where it was grown, and the stories quietly folded into its leaves.
