One never knows how to read the NY Times when it comes to their reporting on the lifestyles of the one-percenters, but not far into a recent cringe-worthy NY Times article about a tea ceremony being held in California I began to suspect that the author was not on the same side as her subjects.

Ms. Elspeth is one of Los Angeles’s early tea ceremony adopters in certain and predominantly white wellness circles. She was introduced to it after what she calls an “amazing chain of serendipitous events”: Her neighbors in Venice Beach had gone traveling and they found themselves detoured in Bali, unable to travel to Japan because the Tōhoku earthquake had just hit, killing many thousands.

But someone in Thailand had shared a book with them called “The Way of Tea,” written by an American man named Aaron Fisher, who lived in Taiwan and had taken the name Wu De.

This then started her on a journey which eventually took her to Taiwan, where “she was given the tea name Tien Wu, which she was told means ‘heavenly dance.'” Nothing wrong with that I suppose, even though most Chinese with the surname “Tian” would use the character 田 for field or farmland, not 天 for heaven. Still, if getting a name is part of someone’s spiritual journey that ‘serendipitously’ started because a disaster killed thousands of people, who are we to judge?

What interests me here is not so much the obvious orientalism of those in “predominantly white wellness circles” who have taken an interest in this ritual, but the fact that the ritual itself is actually an amalgam of no less than three different nation-building processes: Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese. In other words, the orientalism itself starts in East Asia. The true history of the “Chinese” way of tea 茶道 is not well known, but is nicely detailed in Lawrence Zhang’s 2016 article: “A Foreign Infusion: The Forgotten Legacy of Japanese Chadō on Modern Chinese Tea Arts.” (An un-paywalled version can be found here.)

Central to Zhang’s article is the argument that the way of tea is the product of “nation-work,” or a “process through which the abstract concept of the nation is made tangible through practice.”

In this case, the tradition itself is at least partially invented, with a regional custom appropriated, foreign practices borrowed, and then, after mixing, inserted into a narrative of national tradition with deep historical roots.

The regional custom at the heart of this practice involves making tea by brewing whole leaves in clay teapots. As someone who brews tea this way pretty much every day I can confirm that it produces a very delicious and satisfying cup of hot liquid. (I also recommend cold-brewing tea in the summer by placing whole leaves in a pitcher of water and putting the whole thing in the fridge over night.) This practice was first recorded in print by Qing dynasty scholars around the 18th century. They remarked on it as an unusual method of brewing tea peculiar to the coastal regions of southern China. At that time most Chinese tea was made by whisking a powder into hot water, not unlike how Japanese matcha 抹茶 is still prepared today. There is no mention of any special rituals surrounding the preparation of this drink. That is because this is a thoroughly modern adaptation, one which Zhang traces to a small group of Taiwanese tea shop merchants in the 1970s.

In the 1970s a new generation of middle class consumers was beginning to emerge in Taiwan, but tea was then associated with the “gambling, smoking, and prostitution” which went on in traditional tea houses. Tea merchants actively sought to change that in order to attract new middle class customers for their product.

It took years of public advertisements and various promotional campaigns to change public perception of these new institutions. They also consciously presented their own offering as distinctly cultural and modern; in contrast, the older teahouses were backward and something to be discarded

To create a “new style of tea brewing that gave it an aesthetic value” the proprietors of the new tea houses turned to the Japanese tea ceremony. The term “the way of tea” used in the article was actually taken from the Japanese tradition of chadō. This Japanese tradition dates back to the sixteenth century, but is itself the product of a long history of “mixing history, aesthetics, and Zen Buddhism into a complex ceremony” that continues today. It is also a product of nation-work, “supported by an elaborate institution of formal schools and lineages, and actively promoted by the Japanese government as something quintessentially Japanese.”

Having been a Japanese colony for fifty years, Taiwanese tea merchants were well acquainted with this Japanese tradition and so it was natural for them to turn to it when they sought to reinvent the practice of Taiwanese tea drinking in the 1970s. They initially called this practice Zhonghua chayi 中華茶藝, or “Chinese tea arts.” This was at a time when Taiwan’s Nationalist Party still sought to portray the country as the true home of Chinese traditional culture and the legitimate government of all of China. Thus a practice that had helped to define the Japanese nation was being appropriated as something “distinctly Chinese,” something that Taiwan was “trying to revive and promote while China was abandoning traditional ways.” As China opened up to Taiwanese businesses, this practice soon came to be embraced there as well. Today, a visitor to China will likely be told that this ceremony is the “the fruit of a process of over a thousand years of accumulation, dissemination, and development” within China, completely erasing the role of Japan or Taiwan from that history.

The term most commonly used is not “the way of tea” but gongfucha 工夫茶. I suppose “making tea with effort/skill” doesn’t sound sufficiently orientalist for the New York Times or the wealthy Californians they write about. I think the term gongfucha better captures the rather utilitarian origins of this custom, even if it already implies a more refined and aesthetic pracitce than how most people drink tea today. As I wrote in 2014, most young Taiwanese today are more likely to drink some form of cold sweetened milk tea bought from a street-side vendor than to take the time to brew hot tea in a clay pot. Still, I love Taiwan’s high mountain teas and am glad to know more people are learning how to drink them, even if I like mine without sugar, or orientalism.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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In early March 2018 the influential Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut gave a series of readings in Seattle. Unlike in years past when Uyghur celebrities had come to the city, only a handful of Uyghurs—Turkic Muslims native to what has become Northwest China—came to hear Tahir speak. This was not because they did not know he was in town or because they did not care, it was because they were afraid to be seen in public with a man who had been framed as a dissident by the Chinese state. They were afraid because since the beginning of 2017 Chinese authorities have sent more than 500,000 Uyghurs to fortified “re-education” camps in the Uyghur homeland of Northwest China. Most of the Uyghurs that have disappeared in these prison camps without trials or legal representation have been accused of studying unauthorized or “foreign” forms of Islam or cultivating Uyghur ethno-nationalism. Since the beginning of the “People’s War on Terror” in 2014 both of these forms of “illegal” activity have been framed as “terrorism” by the Chinese state. As a result of these conflations many Uyghurs have been detained simply because they have a relative that has traveled abroad and been exposed to Uyghur ethno-nationalism or they have listened to digital recordings from Islamic teachers based in Turkey. Because the Uyghur community is watched even outside of China, most Uyghurs are deeply concerned that what they do in public will result in the imprisonment of their family members. This is why Uyghurs in the Pacific Northwest stayed home when Tahir came to visit.

Tahir was one of the last Uyghurs of influence to leave China as the mass detentions of Uyghur leaders and “terror” suspects began. When he arrived in August 2017 he provided the Wall Street Journal with evidence of the camps and the policing technologies that were used to send more than five percent of the Uyghur population into detention. Because he spoke publicly about what was happening to his fellow urban poets in Ürümchi and rural farmers from his hometown near the city of Kashgar, Tahir’s younger brother and his wife’s three brothers were arrested. Tahir’s poetry collections were seized as evidence of his betrayal of the Chinese state.

The fear among the Uyghur community in the diaspora is symptomatic of the long reach of the Chinese security apparatus. Many Chinese Muslims, particularly if they are Uyghur, and at times if they are Kazakh or Hui, have told me that since the beginning of the “People’s War,” the overseas Chinese community has begun to treat them with suspicion. This is particularly the case if one of their family members has been detained by the state.

The case of a young international college student in the Pacific Northwest is instructive in this regard. During her junior year, the student—a young woman who did not self-identify as Muslim but who was officially identified by the state as a Chinese Muslim minority—returned to China to visit her boyfriend. Soon after she arrived she was detained and sent to a reeducation camp under suspicion of being involved in “terrorist” activities. The police said she had used a VPN to circumvent the “Great Firewall” that prevents access to unauthorized Internet sites outside of China. The student said she was simply trying to upload her homework to the Canvas server of her college back in North America.

Back in the Pacific Northwest the student’s mother did all she could to attempt to get the release of her daughter. She contacted her friends in the Chinese American community, many of whom had connections with the Chinese embassy. At first they seemed willing to help her. But after a week of reaching out to them, they began to refuse to answer her calls. It was as if they believed that her daughter was indeed guilty of “terrorist” activities.

As Junaid Rana and others have shown, since the US initiated the global “War on Terror” Islamophobia has been given new currency throughout the world. China is no exception to this new form of racialization. Chinese state media representations of Islamic “terrorism” as a kind of incurable disease that must be quarantined and eradicated is very rarely countered by Chinese language counternarratives that describe the way Uyghur autonomy has been blocked and Islamic education circumscribed. The forms of dispossession and structural racism that confront Muslim minorities in China are disregarded as unintended casualties in China’s rise as a world power and the technological sophistication of its immense internal security apparatus.

Over the past year I have seen deepening isolation and alienation among Chinese Muslim minority colleagues and students across North America. As with many stateless peoples, often they struggle to articulate the trauma that arises when processes of social elimination are directed at those they love. It is hard for their voices to be heard when they explain how extreme the mass incarceration system has become for friends and family back in China. Many well-meaning China-based or China-focused scholars in the humanities and social sciences feel compelled to rationalize the state violence that is being directed toward Chinese Muslims, as though the state’s claims regarding the Uyghur terror threat are not wildly inaccurate. This failure to listen to and amplify the voices of the oppressed has resulted in a lack of effective solidarity with Uyghurs and other Chinese Muslims.

In addition to this misrecognition, indifference and suspicion among their peers and mentors, many Chinese Muslim faculty members and students in North America and Europe feel guilty for being the direct cause of the detention of their parents. After all it is because they have traveled abroad and thus have had access to unauthorized forms of religious and political thought that their relatives have been taken. These students and researchers need allies and accomplices in their struggle.

Now is the time for anthropologists, particularly those of us who work in China or with the Asian diaspora, to reach out to Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui colleagues and students and show them that we care.

Darren Byler is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, where he studies the way the ideas and infrastructures of global terrorism and global urbanism affect the lives and representations of Uyghurs and Han migrants in Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). In addition, he has published Uyghur-English literary co-translations in Guernica, Paper Republic and Banango Street. He also curates the art and politics repository The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia.

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