Two months of Xizhou. Of amber rice fields past their point of harvest. Indigo tie-dye tablecloths blowing in the wind and firecrackers heard on the streets - wedding or funeral? I came to Xizhou straight out of undergrad, to a village of 2,500 people in Yunnan, a mountainous and primarily rural province in the Southwest of China. It takes about three different modes of transportation to arrive here from anywhere relevant and the food comes in two varieties: spicy and spicier. But I had my reasons for coming. I’ve studied China and Chinese, and previously lived in two of the biggest cities in this country. If we’ve learned anything from the 2016 US presidential election (the learning truly never stops with that one) it’s that there was a fallible impulse in all of us to read what the New York Times and Washington Post had to say about the East Coast elite and assume it represented the whole. I didn’t want to make the same mistake when it came to China. This part of Yunnan is tiny. It’s beautiful and full of color and depth. But it’s tiny. I won’t be leaving town in ten months with an idiots guide to the Chinese countryside, but I think it’s worthwhile for anyone who is interested in this country to get acquainted with the dirt and the wind that defines the life of so many of its people.
Those first few days are always difficult, but I was surprised by how hard hit I was from the transition from city to rural life. It’s not the lack of access to modern amenities like a cheap cup of coffee or the fact that I don’t have a closet in my room and have just hung up my jackets individually on nails hammered into the wall. The pace of rural life is slow. Slower than the Adderall-induced frenzy of Cornell, slower than my past lives in Beijing, New York, and Hong Kong, and slower still when you’re living alone. My instinct is to push back against the gentle ebb of rural life but that’s not what I fundamentally came here to do. There is process and there are rituals, and the one that I love the most and helps make sense of the screeching halt that is my life, is when I see Chinese people make tea.
There is an order to things when you brew a good cup of tea, not much of a surprise when you find yourself in East Asia. What is a surprise is the degree to which young people have maintained those precise and meticulous practices. One of my roommates, 24-year old QY from Hunan province, loves to brew tea. I remember it from my first day here when I walked into her teashop, all wood and ceramic tiles piled on top of each other. She took me to visit her friend from a Northwest province the other day. He was young, soft-spoken and wore a military surplus cap. We sat down on the bench of his home and he began to brew. First water is poured into your kettle and set to boil. Then you take your leaves and weigh them on an electric scale. The water should begin to bubble soon. Sprinkle your leaves into a mid-sized cup and pour in some water. Pour into each of the teacups. Each cup holds about three sips of tea. Then dump it all out. This is to wash your materials and warm your cups. Pour some water from the kettle back into the mid-sized cup. Now pour into the teacups and drink. Your tea will be refreshed every few minutes.
It was sweet and quiet. This guy silently swirling, pouring water from a distance, the motions so exact that not a drop was spilled. QY bringing the cup to her nose and murmuring, “a little bit of plum flavor”. She audibly slurps. I have to learn to slurp. Rather- I have to unlearn how not to slurp. It’s a love of process that you’d see in an older generation but that is still preserved with people in their early 20s. There’s a hipster aesthetic to it maybe, but it’s also wonderfully generous, and I think that’s what makes it authentic. I haven’t paid for tea once since I got here. I can’t think of the counterpart ritual to brewing tea that has remained intact in the United States. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone my age moving so slowly.
Two months of Xizhou; it feels like a long time. The ten months ahead of me loom longer. My friend’s boyfriend asked me the other day where I felt my home was, and I told him that I never had a chance to put down roots growing up, so my home is within me. He nodded and said, of course, 四海为家, sìhǎiwéijiā. I’d never heard it before but it means to regard the four corners of the world all as home. Yes, that is exactly how I feel.