A Tea Reader (25 page)

A Thousand Cups of Tea

BY
S
TEFANI
H
ITE

One cup of tea led to another...and another...and before we knew it, our lives would always be different.

I grew up in places all over the world and have always loved traveling. But becoming a teacher and having a kid ties you down a bit. So when my husband suggested we think about running a student exchange program, I was both intrigued and horrified. It would be great to travel again, even to countries I had visited as a child. But with middle school students? I mean...really?

Nevertheless, we established an e-mail relationship with a School Head in Winchester, England. With some back and forth, we managed to settle on some dates and advertised for students. Twenty-five hearty 7
^th
and 8
^th
graders took the plunge. We booked tickets, organized trips, exchanged e-mail addresses, and were off and running.

The British visit to the U.S. went extremely well. There were a few bumps and bruised egos, but we organized visits to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Kids had parties and parents arranged sleepovers. Before we knew it, they were leaving for the airport to fly home. Kids were crying all over our yard while we frantically loaded suitcases onto the bus and wondered how it was going to turn around on our street.

Phew. We collapsed after a job well done—but that was just the half of it. Our turn to visit England was only a few months away. This would not be luxury travel or tourist sightseeing; we were going to live with families and experience the “every day” of their lives.

Our trip was exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting. (We lost a record of five passports between security and the gate, leading me to insist on travel wallets thereafter.) We arrived at the school, greeted by balloons and cries of delight as the students were reunited with their partners. One by one they drove off and we finally left for the tiny cottage that would be home for two weeks.

“You must be shattered!” Julia greeted us as we cautiously entered the kitchen. “Sit down and I'll make you a cup of tea.”

And so we drank the first of many....

First we had to learn the difference between the teas offered. “I like English Breakfast,” Joseph declared. “I can't abide that wussy, flowery Earl Grey my wife drinks.” Then there was the issue of milk and/or sugar. “You really want to drink it black?” Julia marveled at my request. Turns out, my little family would require three different preparations: black for me, black with (a large amount of) sugar for my husband Gary, and our seven-year-old daughter, Cory, requested milk and sugar—with a smidgen of tea.

We grabbed the variety of chipped, flowered mugs and sat down in the garden, relaxing in the warm English sunshine, sipping our cups of tea. Thus began an outstanding experience we felt compelled to repeat over and over.

The student exchange program couldn't have been any more spectacular. We visited historic sites, sat in on lessons in our host school, and were invited to dinners by the students' families. Whether we were chatting in the teachers' lounge at school, or enjoying a high cream tea at the local manor, we requested our personal preferences and drank a cuppa with gusto. We downed dreadful British Rail tea traveling on the trains. We drank delicious tea in a bakery on the Winchester High Street. We huddled over Styrofoam cups of tea in the driving rain in Portsmouth. We slurped exotic tea while giggling at our “busking” students in Bath. We took high tea at Fortnum and Mason in London (with scones and clotted cream, of course.) And we enjoyed a cup at the end of a long day, visiting with our new friends.

During our exchanges over the past several years, we've matched up hundreds of students. Our first “alumni” group is now attending college and the students report that the opportunity to become immersed in a non-American culture had a profound effect on their lives. Families have continued to maintain contact and some visit each other each year.

Was it all perfect? Of course not. During one visit to England, I insisted on dragging our group to see “Richard III” performed at the Globe Theatre. This was not everyone's cup of tea, especially a 13-year-old American teenager. During the third act, I noticed Dustin looking particularly agonized. I moved next to him and said, “I know you're not really appreciating this now, but just think...one day, you'll be in college, and you'll be talking to a pretty girl who's majoring in English Lit. When you tell her that you saw ‘Richard III' at the Globe, you will definitely get a date with her!” Dustin simply rolled his eyes and asked if he could wait in the lobby.

Fast forward six years later. Gary and I were sitting in a Starbucks drinking tea (of course). Dustin walked in—now a college sophomore. He greeted us enthusiastically and filled us in on his life in college, his plans, and that he's still in contact with his English partner from the first exchange. As we stood up to leave, Dustin turned to me and casually asked, “Do you remember what you said to me about ‘Richard III' and how I'd get a date because of seeing that play?”

“Yes!” I replied, anxiously awaiting the punch line, sure he was going to announce that he now has a fabulous English Lit-majoring girlfriend.

“Yeah...It hasn't happened.” Dustin grinned, and we all laughed.

Our lives now are too busy, our daughter off and running in too many directions. Running another exchange seems out of the question. But I think back to all the cups of tea we drank on our exchanges...each one representing a connection with kids and families far away. Perhaps there are more cups of tea in our future....

Miyanoshita

BY
S
IR
E
DWIN
A
RNOLD

Excerpted from
Japan as Seen and Described by Famous Authors
,
1909.
¹

About fifty miles away from Yokohama, along the seashore, and then by a sharp turn into the highlands which are grouped around Fuji-San, lies embosomed the lovely and salubrious Japanese health resort, whence I am writing this. Fifteen hundred feet above the Pacific and the hot plains, we have escaped hither, for a time, shunning the now somewhat sultry weather of the capital and its ubiquitous mosquitoes, which are more bloodthirsty and importunate in Tokyo than anywhere. The
ka,
bred in the rice-fields and ditches of Nippon, is truly a most relentless and insatiable little pest, against which natives and foreigners equally defend themselves with
kaya
or nets of green muslin, made either large enough to cover a European four-poster, or small enough to place over a sleeping baby. At this season of the year you may indeed see hundreds of tiny brown Japanese infants sleeping, stark naked, beneath what looks like a green meat-safe, where the flies and mosquitoes cannot get at them. Not only the babies, moreover, but their fathers, mothers, “sisters, cousins, and aunts,” and the Japanese world in general, largely discard clothing as the July heats come on; and, in the country especially, one sees at this time more of the people—in a very literal sense—than during the cooler weather. One result is to disclose the really splendid illustrations with which a great many of the men are adorned by the tattooer. The
jinriki-sha
pullers in particular are oft-times gorgeously pictorial from nape to heel, and you may study for an hour the volutes, arabesques, flowers, gods, dragons, and poetical inscriptions on the back of your coolie as you bowl along, without exhausting the wealth of design and coloring upon the saffron surface of his skin.

The journey hither from Yokohama leads by railway through interminable rice fields lying between the hills and the sea, all the spare patches now “green as grass” with the sprouting roots of the
ine
.
²
Last year Inaré, the deity of the rice plant gave Japan a bad harvest, and the poor are greatly suffering in consequence. But this year all looks well for a bumper crop, and the purple and silver of the iris and lily-clumps—everywhere at present blossoming—fringe verdant squares of exuberant promised plenty, where the great dragon-flies buzz, and the frogs croak all day long. A run of two hours brings you past Kamakura, the region of the old glories of the warlike house—which ruled Japan from
A.D.
1192, to the middle of the fifteenth century—past Enoshima, the ever beautiful “Isle of Dragons,” to Kodzu, where you take a tramcar, and bump through the town of Odawara to Yumoto village, whence the ascent to Miyanoshita commences. The ladies and the luggage ride up the three miles of hilly road in
kuruma
drawn by
no-nim-biki
.
³
The gentlemen, glad of a little rural walk after the hot streets of Tokyo, contend with the ascent on foot. We reach Miyanoshita just as the lights begin to twinkle in the windows of the two hotels which receive the innumerable visitors to this green and pleasant glen. A hot spring, slightly mineral, has created Miyanoshita, affording perpetual and pleasant bathing; and the air, whether it breathes from the sea below or from the thickly-wooded hills above, is always fresh and pleasant.

To inhale that air, and to bathe in the soft waters heated for you in the subterranean furnaces, are the main business of life in this hill village. The only industry of the place, apart from guides, teahouses, and waiting
musumёs,
is the manufacture of all kinds of small articles from the wood of the various timber trees growing on the hills around. Some of these are of incredible ingenuity in construction and neatness of finish, making the most elaborate work of Tunbridge Wells
⁴
utterly commonplace. Many of the woods employed, such as the camphor, the ivy, the
kaki, kari
and
sendan
,
⁵
are of great beauty, and there seems to be almost nothing that a Japan turner cannot produce from them. He sells you, for a few
sen,
a box of ivy-wood delicately grained and polished, containing a dozen lovely little saucers of the same material; or a lunch-box which folds into next to nothing until you want it, and then expands into a complete and handsome table service. Sellers of photographs are also numerous, and softly importunate, for the Japanese have become very skillful with the camera. When you have purchased all the photographs and wooden knickknacks which you desire, the next thing is to organize excursions into the wild and beautiful wilderness of mountains everywhere surrounding you. These must be performed either on foot or on chairs lashed on bamboo poles, and carried upon the shoulders of four of the sturdy hill men of the district. The paths are very steep and narrow, and the foothold very often merely the loose stones of a mountain stream. Yet the sturdy
ninsoku
⁶
trudge along, up hill and down dale, in their sandals of rope, apparently insensible to fatigue, or sufficiently refreshed from time to time by a cup of pale tea and a sugar biscuit, and willingly accepting fifty
sen,
or about eighteen pence, for a tremendous day's work. With a thin blue calico coat, a blue handkerchief tied around the close-cropped head, and their small brass tobacco pipes stuck in their girdles, they chatter gaily as they trot along under the bamboo poles, shifting these every now and then from shoulder to shoulder with a little harmonious murmur of “
go-issho
,
” which means “at the same honorable time,” i.e., “all together, boys.” Arrived at the teahouse, they patiently pick from their legs the leeches which have fastened there in the wet and narrow forest paths, wipe the profuse perspiration from their brown necks, smoke a pipe or two, and slowly sip a cup of the “honorable hot tea,” and are then ready to trudge on again for another
ri
⁷
under their heavy burdens.

Charming and instructive beyond description are some of the expeditions which may thus be undertaken from Miyanoshita as a center, the hills containing all sorts of natural wonders, as well as being of wonderful beauty in regard of scenery. We made two out of many favorite explorations yesterday and the day before; on the first occasion to the mountain lake of Hakoné, on the second to no less formidably-named a spot than “the Great Hell”—O Jigoku. The general character of the country being the same, I will make one description serve for the impressions of the two journeys.

The Hakoné Mountains are for the most part intensely green in aspect, “darkly, deeply, beautifully green”—of a green to make an artist despair, it is so magnificently monotonous, and beyond imitation by the palette. This results principally from the long bamboo grass everywhere growing over the highland country, which, though it rises to the height of eight or ten feet, presents the appearance of an unbroken verdant mantle of herbage rolling in light waves before the wind. The trees—chiefly beech, fir of various kinds, and oak—grow at one time sparsely, at another in extensive groves, from the jungle of the dwarf bamboo; intermixed with which are a few inconspicuous wild flowers—white andromedas and spiræs, yellow lilies, wild hydrangea, dog roses, and the Canterbury bell. Little or no animal life is to be seen; the cover seems too dense for four-footed creatures, but on the less-wooded mountains the fox and badger exist, and there are deer, wild boar, and monkeys of a single species, to be found not far off. A lark—almost exactly identical with the English species—sings the familiar carol as we pass, and an oriole, which flutes very sweetly, is seen and heard; but the general silence of the mountains is remarkable and almost unbroken, except by the noise of streams everywhere descending. Some of these smoke in the cool hillside air, and discolor the stones with sulphurous or mineral deposits, notably at Ko-ji-go-ku, near to Ashino-yu, where some of us enjoyed the luxury of hot sulphur baths, and found them immensely refreshing in the middle of a long walk. The central spot, however, for witnessing this kind of phenomenon is at the “Great Hell” itself, near to the pass of O Tomi Toge, from which a glorious view is obtained of the ever wonderful Fuji-San. There was nothing to indicate that we were approaching a spot to justify the name given to this place, except the sudden appearance of many large dead trees, which had been killed by the fatal breath emanating from the
solfataras
⁸
near. The hillside at large spreads on either hand as fair and green as before, with waving bamboo grass and silvery flowers of the
deutzia
,
⁹
and white bells of the Japan anemone. The earliest intimation was by the nostrils, which become abruptly aware of odors distinctly infernal; and on reaching a solitary farmhouse you come in sight of a torrent, running over black and speckled rocks, on a bed yellow as the rind of an orange. The ladies must now leave their chairs and toil by a steep ascent round a shoulder of the valley, from which issues this Japanese Styx; and by a perilous and broken path, winding now through the thickets, now along the brink of a crumbling precipice, we come suddenly in sight of a gully, destitute of every shred of vegetation, and hideous with all the Cocytian colors associated with flame and smoke, death and desolation, ruin and ravage. It is a corner of the world abandoned to despair—a mountain hearth on fire—which one beholds; a nook of nature whence everything lovely and living has been banished to give vent to the secret forces of the under world. The earth all around is poisoned and parti-colored with livid blotches and gangrenes; the rocks are crusted with a leprous tetter; pimples and ulcers of purple and black and yellow break out from the level spaces. Some of these are alive with an evil activity, and hiss and fume and bubble, emitting jets of fat yellow and green smoke, with now and then a crackling noise when the crust sinks in, to open by and by at another black and yellow gash in the diseased ground. It is not safe even to stand near the melancholy amphitheater where reek these caldrons of Acheron.
¹⁰
To pass along the black edge of the stream itself and into this ghastly corry would be rash in the extreme, for no one knows where the surface may not yield, and suddenly plunge the foot or limb into a bath of boiling sulphur. A lady of our acquaintance was severely burned here some time ago, and a Russian officer lost his life in the treacherous morass of flame.

I am requested by an amiable and charming young lady of our party to inscribe upon her bamboo staff the Japanese name of the place—which she will certainly never visit again—together with some suitable record. Sitting out of reach of the winds from Hades, under a great cryptomeria, blasted by its neighborhood, I carve on the Japanese alpenstock a verse which she means to preserve:

“Staff, which to O Jigoku went,

Good news to Sinners tell;

Demons may climb to Paradise,

Now angels walk to Hell.”

And yet, just over the ridge, spreads a scene as beautiful as that just quitted is forbidding. On the slopes of the O Tomi Pass box-trees and the milky-blossomed
asemi
,
¹¹
with the pines and bamboos, the azaleas and lilies, make the mountain fair and glad again; and Fuji-San is seen towering up in perfect beauty at the end of a vast valley. The snow is almost gone from the Lady of Mountains. Just here and there are visible, if I might quote my own new poem, the “Light of the World”:

“Dark hollows where sad winter hides away

From summer, with the snow still in her lap.”

By another path the matchless mount may be seen looking down upon the deep waters of Hakoné—a great lake of unknown depth, and perpetual coldness, lying two thousand feet above the sea. Hakoné Lake has for its Japanese name
Yoshi-no-Midzu-Umi,
or the “water of the reeds,” and is a very beautiful highland sea, the abode, it is said, of supernatural beings, till a Buddhist priest penetrated these recesses and gave to the world knowledge and possession of lovely and cool Hakoné. We drink to the pious memory of Mangwan Shónin as we sit in the upper gallery of the teahouse looking over the rolling blue wavelets of the lake. Close by Japanese woodmen are cutting fir-trees into thin boards, to make
ori
,
the boxes in which sweetmeats and cakes are presented. We return in drenching rain, but well rewarded for this and for all our exertions by the splendid scenery and the countless objects of interest on the road. Perhaps it would not have rained if we had remembered to put some stones in the lap of the great rock image of Jizo, whom we passed in accomplishing the ascent. He is the god of travelers and the protector of children, and the correct thing is to pay him the little attention alluded to. As we wend homewards through the picturesque village of Kiga, we stop to look again at the wonderful fish in the gardens of a teahouse near at hand. Swimming about in a pool under a little waterfall there are exhibited some hundreds of variegated carp—the Japanese
koi
—
which are of every imaginable brilliancy of color—purple, russet, citron, saffron, orange, rose-red, gold and silver. They are tamer than any pigeons, and come voraciously to the bank to be fed, scrambling for slices of bean cake, and putting their gold and brown noses high out of the water in their struggles to secure the morsel. When a piece of cake falls on the dry rock, near the water, they try to throw themselves on shore, and even use their fins for legs in their eagerness to obtain the prize. The fish in the opening story of the
Arabian Nights,
who were colored blue, yellow, white, and red, and who talked in the frying-pan, could not have been more marvelous in hue, and certainly not more intelligent.