I grew up in Fujian, a tea province on the southeast coast of China, where tea is a lifestyle. My corner of the world contributes Wuyi black tea, Fuding white tea, and the jasmine tea that once sailed through the Maritime Silk Road, bound for people who would learn to call tea “Chinese.” My father owns more teapots than he does mugs. I was raised with the scent of tea.
Grassy and faintly scorched, the steam lifted off his pot before anyone could pour, bitter at the front and sweet just behind. I could not have named a single note of this tea.
Before I Knew Its Name
Then, I grew up and moved to one country after another to study. The tea stayed home without me, but it returned on the homesick nights, the way a smell does, uninvited. Those moments made me want to wear it, to keep a little piece of home on my skin, where I could feel it.
I visited department stores, going counter to counter. A hundred scents brushed past me, but not one settled on my skin.
Bright with bergamot and bay leaf at first, Le Labo’s Thé Noir 29 darkened into fig and something earthen, a forest floor after rain, damp and shadowed and lovely to stand in. Clean to the edge of vanishing, Bvlgari’s Eau Parfumée au Thé Blanc warmed into soap and bare skin, half-there and half-gone. Jasmine-bright and threaded with smoke, By Kilian’s Imperial Tea arrived with a story printed on the box, a noble Chinese tradition, an emperor’s cup imagined from Paris. Citrus-lifted and soft, Dior’s Thé Cachemire folded its black tea into a French daydream of a Japanese tea ceremony.
Each scent was beautiful. I admired every one. But not one of them was the tea I remembered, bitter at the front and sweet just behind, waiting for me to discover it.
Tê
Last summer, I went home to China. In Shanghai, I walked into a store I had only seen online, a Chinese house called To Summer. Everything inside the store was perfectly curated, a concept of the East styled for the pages of Wallpaper Magazine. Pale stone, warm wood, a single branch in a vase, the lighting low and even like a gallery. The staff spoke of the fragrances the way sommeliers speak of wine. I loved the experience, but still, I didn’t trust it.
I picked up a random perfume bottle and sprayed it onto the back of my han, expecting nothing.
Bitter first. Then slowly, the scent turned sweet.
I stood with my hand near my face and didn’t move for a while, drinking it all in.
Triple Tea. That was its name.
How Triple Tea Reminds Me of Home
When I discovered Triple Tea, I felt as if I were in a tea garden deep in the mountains, where the greenery appeared soft and hazy in the mist. The house behind Triple Tea claims that its founder walked the tea mountains of Yunnan for years. The Triple Tea scent was created to hold the bitterness of Chinese tea, the bitterness that turns to richness with a moment’s patience. This is what sets it apart from the sweet tea of the Western imagination.
The word tea left my province a long time ago, (tê, as carried out on the tongues of Fujianese sailors), and every language it touched kept a little bit of my culture without asking. The tea in this bottle had travelled the world and come back, but the house sold it to me as if tea had never left. I bought it anyway. Some nights, you’d rather be sold a home than have none within reach.
I wear Triple Tea on the days when the distance gets loud. I smell the bitterness first, then the sweetness, and suddenly, my father is pouring, and the steam is lifting off the pot, and I am small again and standing near his elbow, watching as the tea takes its time.
The word tê left home long before I did. I know that the bitterness I smell is a curated choice, not a natural aroma. But still, whenever I lift my wrist, I return home.
Featured Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash.
