There is a thing that happens in gongfu tea that I have never been able to explain to someone who has only ever had tea from a bag. The first infusion of a good oolong is too sharp. The leaves have only just woken; they give the water something bright and a little aggressive, all edges. The second is fuller but still finding itself. And then the third infusion arrives, and the tea is suddenly, quietly, right — neither thin nor harsh, the leaves having finally given themselves to the water properly. Tea drinkers will tell you, with the seriousness of people discussing something that matters, that the third pour is often the best one. Not the first. The third.
I have thought about this a great deal, because I am the third infusion of my own family — though it took me a while to work out exactly which family, and which pour.
My father is Hokkien. His father — my grandfather — left China for Malaysia, and my father was born and raised there before coming to Britain. So on that side the line runs long and slow: China to Malaysia to here, three generations and two countries, grandfather to father to me. From my father's side I am, quite literally, the third infusion.
My mother is Hakka. She was born and raised in Hong Kong and came to Britain. So on her side the pour was quicker — one move, one generation, Hong Kong to London, mother to me. They met in this country, and I was born in it, which means I am not really one clean infusion at all. I am the place where two of them meet: one long and slow, carried across an ocean and a peninsula over three generations; one short and direct, a single crossing. Two pours of the same leaves, different strengths, combining in the same cup.
The assumption, when people meet someone like me, is that distance from the source means dilution — that each generation away from the homeland is a generation of loss, until all that reaches the bottom of the cup is a faint colour in the water. I am not sure that is true. I have started to suspect it might be the opposite. But I want to be careful about how I say this, because it is easy to say it badly.
A conversation abroad
A while ago I was on a road trip down the west coast of America with friends — other British-born Chinese, like me — driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Las Vegas. Somewhere along the way we went for dim sum, the way we always do wherever we are in the world; it is the one ritual that travels. We ordered in Cantonese, as we do, and something small and surprising happened: the waitresses were taken aback by our Cantonese. Not because it was perfect — it is not — but because they had not expected this particular group of young people, visibly from somewhere else, to speak it as well as we did. Many of the younger Chinese-Americans they served, they implied, could no longer order in the language of their own grandparents.
I have turned that small moment over many times since. Here were two diasporas meeting in a third country — a table of British-born Chinese and the Chinese-American community around us — and the supposedly more diluted ones, the ones who had traveled furthest and stayed away longest, had held onto something the others had begun to let go. It was not that we were better. It was that, somewhere along the line, our families had decided the language was worth keeping — and then, just as importantly, we had decided to keep it ourselves, into our own adulthood, far from anyone making us. It had been passed down far enough, and held tightly enough by the generation everyone assumes is losing it, that it still worked in a dim sum restaurant in California.
There is a small irony in it being Cantonese that did this. My father is Hokkien; my mother is Hakka. Cantonese is the bridge they met on, the common language of Hong Kong and of the dim sum table, the neutral ground between two people who had left two different places. It became my mother tongue precisely because it belonged to neither of them alone. The language that survived to surprise those waitresses was not the oldest or the deepest in my family. It was the one that got built in the middle, to let two halves of a family speak to each other. That, too, feels like something worth saying about inheritance.
The line is not held by staying close to the source. It is held by choosing, in each generation, to keep brewing.
That is the thing the third infusion taught me. The leaves do not give their best because they are fresh and close to the plant. They give their best after they have been steeped, and steeped again, and a third time — after time and water have done their work. But only if someone keeps pouring. A pot left alone after the first infusion gives you nothing. The tea reveals itself through repetition, through attention, through the decision to brew it again. And that decision has to be made every single time, by every generation, no matter how close to or far from the plant the leaves have travelled.
The two rings
I have been wearing jade on my hand for most of my adult life, and the story of how that came to be is, I think, the whole of what I am trying to say.
The first ring was given to me by my mother. It had been her mother's — my grandmother's. So it had already made the journey the family made: grandmother, mother, me. Three hands. I wore it for years. I will tell you something I have only recently made peace with: I am not certain it was real jade. It may have been glass, or a lesser stone, or jade of a low and cloudy grade. I was not in a position to know, and it did not occur to me to ask. It was my grandmother's, and that was the entire value of it.
Then, one day, it split. Cleanly, without my dropping it or striking it against anything — it simply gave way.
I did not know, at the time, that there is a belief about this. I have learned it since. In Chinese tradition, when a piece of jade you are wearing cracks or breaks, it is understood to have taken a blow that was meant for you — to have absorbed some misfortune, some harm, and given itself in your place. 玉碎, the jade shatters, so that you do not. A broken jade is not a loss. It is the jade having done the one thing it was there to do.
I find I cannot stop thinking about this in relation to my grandmother's ring — possibly not even real jade, worn down three generations, splitting on my hand. Whether or not the stone was genuine, the meaning was. It protected me the way an inheritance protects you: not by being valuable, but by being yours, by being kept, by being worn until the day it gave what it had to give. The first infusion. Sharp, foreign-tasting to those who do not know it, and the one that takes the hardest of the steeping.
I wear a different ring now. It was given to me by my father-in-law. It is a thumb ring — a 扳指, bānzhǐ, the ring that began its life, centuries ago, as a piece of an archer's equipment, worn on the thumb to protect it when drawing a bowstring. By the Qing dynasty it had become something else: a jade ornament worn by Manchu noblemen and by emperors, a mark of rank and of martial inheritance long after anyone wearing it had drawn a bow. The Qianlong Emperor was painted wearing his.
I did not know any of that when I received it. I took it as a generous gift, which it was, and wore it because it was beautiful and because it had come from family. It is only since — turning it over, asking questions I did not think to ask at the time — that I have started to wonder whether it carried more weight than I understood. I do not know if my father-in-law meant it the way the old tradition might read it: jade passed from an elder's hand to a younger man's, a quiet acceptance into a line. I did not know the tradition then. I am not certain he was thinking of it either. But the jade passed from his hand to mine all the same — and I have come to suspect that this is simply how these things have always worked. The meaning travels with the object, whether or not anyone names it at the time. You receive it first. You understand it later, if you are lucky, and if you choose to look.
So I have two rings, from two families. The first came down the line I was born into — grandmother, mother, me — and it gave itself and broke. The second came from the line I hope to marry into, placed in my hand by a man whose own lineage I have the blessing to join. One inheritance by blood, one by choosing and being chosen. Both jade. Both understood only afterward. And it does not seem an accident to me that a man born in London — who could not tell you, if you asked, what his great-grandparents did for a living, or the name of the village his grandfather left — now wears on his hand a ring once reserved for emperors, and stamps on everything he makes the same imperial line his family seal quietly claims. 皇帝子孫. I do not know most of where I came from. I know that I came from it, and that I am still here, and that the jade is on my hand. The third infusion is the one that finally understands what it is holding.
A thought I am still holding lightly
I want to end with something I am not yet sure enough about to state as fact. It is a suspicion I have, formed from limited travel and limited time, and I offer it as a question more than an answer.
For a long time I assumed the homeland was the safe place for the culture — that the language, the rituals, the small inherited gestures were secure there, and that it was only we, the diaspora, who were at risk of losing them. I am no longer certain. The world is more connected than it has ever been, and the same currents that pulled my family away from their roots are now running everywhere, including through the places we came from. The same phones, the same global food, the same forgetting. I have begun to wonder whether everyone is being asked, now, to choose their roots consciously — whether being rooted is becoming, for all of us and not only the diaspora, a thing you decide rather than a thing you inherit by staying put.
I do not know if this is right. I have not lived enough to be sure. But if it is even partly true, then the lesson of the third infusion is not only for people like me. It is for anyone, anywhere, who wants the tea to keep tasting like something: you have to choose to brew it again. The leaves will give what they have. But only if someone keeps pouring.
This is the third letter, and the end of the first small sequence — three essays, on a name, on a practice, and now on what it means to be a particular pour of the same leaves. Thank you for reading them.
There will be more soon — letters, and in time, objects worth keeping. Until then — 慢慢來 — slowly, slowly.
The Letter from The Descendant of the Emperor
One short letter per month, in time with the seasons. New work, the occasional essay, and first access to limited pieces. No noise.