Do you remember how love tasted? A bitter, grainy tea. Leaves would always find their way down into the water, slipping, with great effort, through even the tiniest holes in the strainer.
I remember this taste from the days spent with my mother, when she would try and fine-tune my tongue, so that it would appreciate these littler things. Warm, dark tea. Pu’erh, in fact, expensive. Very expensive. She went out that day to find it. When I was seven I would spit it out, and she would grimace, as though I had done her great injury. As I grew older, I grew wiser, more diplomatic, and I would swallow the tea, my mouth trained well in the endurance of tastes I never enjoyed. Still, there would be some involuntary movement of the lips as I took the tea in, and for just half a heartbeat my face always became hard, honest. (If you look closely enough, anyone is bad at keeping a secret.) My mother’s eyes fell to the ground every time she prepared her tea, but she said nothing. I wonder if she was ever touched by how faithful I was to this lie, which stretched taut between us like a string on its last fibre.
Tradi-s-ional, she would say, always struggling with the sh noises. When you step into our house, note that some English sounds must be left outside.
She was more tender as a tea-maker than she ever was as a mother. When we had run out of bread one morning, and her paycheck had not yet arrived, she still kneeled by the coffee table with one of her many four-piece tea-sets, pouring boiling water over a terracotta clay teapot, and then waiting, before filling small, small teacups—no larger than shot glasses. Then she would open the top of the old teapot, and pour the finished tea back in, to brew it all again. I screamed and cried. I wanted food. She poured me a cup and I refused to drink it. She left the table and disappeared, for a while, into the kitchen. When she came out, fifteen minutes had passed, and the tea grew cold. She held out a biscuit, thin and wrapped in plastic. I ate it as she poured everything away, and began again.
Meticulous, perfect. Still, there were leaves at the bottom. At eight, I asked her why. She said I was too young, and I there were many things I do not understand. At eighteen, I asked again. She said the same thing. One afternoon, I returned from class holding a cardboard cup while she was ironing clothes in the corner. I sat in front of the television and took out my textbooks. She stopped, head tilted up. She walked over and sat across from me, eyes wide.
“Matcha?”
She asked me this in a frenetic whisper. Her sense of smell had always been frighteningly keen. She smelled the steak on me when I returned from my friend’s house sometimes. Then, and always, I could not tell if she was angry.
“Yes. Everyone’s drinking it now.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She said this with a sense of dejectedness that I had never heard it before. Not when she was laid off her first janitorial job. Not even when the restaurant she had worked at afterward teetered on the thin knife edge of bankruptcy.
When I returned the next day, she knelt once more at the coffee table. She looked at me with a toothy grin and beckoned me with her hand. In the last year, this hand had aged dramatically. It was spotted, and near translucent. Veins protruded under wrinkled skin. A year more, and bones, too. I sat across from her. She turned the television off. We waited in silence for the kettle to let out its low hiss. She poured it slowly over the teapot. I was impatient, because I had work to do, and the world was too quick now for home brewed tea. I hid pre-mixed English Breakfast tea bags in my room I had it with sugar and milk. I wonder now if she had known about this secretly. I hope not. It would have felt, to her, like the greatest of betrayals.
I looked at her again. “Can you hurry up?”
Though she said nothing, her eyes darted around the room, desperate to look at something other than me. Her lip trembled, her fingers curled.
My mother often expressed her pain subtly, so that only I could hear it.
She knew that I spent my life clinging to her fingertips, reluctant to let go, like an old jade ring that has become hard to remove. Any small tremor, even one so simple as a shift in gaze or pursed lip, and the earth would convulse beneath me, conspiring to knock me over.
I kept quiet, looking down at her hands. These hands, dotted with small sun-spots, were beginning to shake softly. I noticed this every time my mother lifted the teapot, even if it was empty and light. This would only worsen in the years to come.
I wanted to say something then, but I did not. It was easier to slip into silence, as we were so accustomed to doing.
Between every parent and their child there is a chasm where understanding fails. In truth, I found it hard to speak to her, because her history so greatly overwhelmed my own, and I could never know it in full.
Who was she, before me? This was not for me to learn.
Maybe a part of every parent dies with the birth of their first child, to make space for new life.
I looked at her as she picked up the teapot with the kind of care which can only be taught by a lifetime of practice. She frowned, lines burrowing deeper into her flesh as she exerted herself.
When she poured the tea, it was no longer the deep, earthy brown to which I had grown ever-accustomed. It was a light shade of yellow, bordering on green. “Is green tea. You like matcha. I buy green tea.”
I did not believe it, at the start. My mother had always been stubborn. Never had she bought me the toys I wanted, nor the clothes. She chose how my hair was cut, straight, no layering. She never let me touch it with curling irons, nor did she allow me to pierce my ears. When I looked into that cup of green tea, small and with a familiar gathering of leaves at the bottom, I was lost for words.
This compromise, though may have appeared to others small, was immeasurable in our household, where we tip-toed continually in the shallow waters of polite restraint, and where I learned early to stop asking for what I wanted. Outside, the wind blew softly, and a tree branch knocked persistently on the window. “Quick, drink,” she said. She sounded nervous.
I raised the cup to my lips. It felt heavy, as though it carried the weight of everything unspoken between us.
Then, I took a sip.
At first, I did not enjoy the taste as much as I did that sweetened barely-authentic Matcha stuff, which I still sometimes visit shops to buy.
But, for the first time, there was no grimace. The flavour was not heavy, or so incomprehensibly complex as her more prized blends.
It was simple and light. I smiled at my mother, and asked for more.
“Cooling,” she said, “good for fevers.”
That night, I hugged my mother before going to sleep. As I got under the covers I could have sworn that the four walls around me began to emanate the subtle aroma of fermented leaves, boiling in water.
In the coming weeks and months, she took to serving teas in all sorts of colours. This was only in part due to her success with the green tea. Rather, it happened because she would consistently forget which tea she had bought last.
She stumbled into the store with a blend in mind, and left with a different one entirely. Sometimes, she came home empty handed, confused and on the verge of tears. On those occasions, I would tell her to wait, as I paid trips to the Chinese grocery store nearby to buy teas with attractive, vibrant hues.
One day, she called me, frantic, saying she did not know where she was. Wo bu zhi dao wo zai na li. Having grown up unskilled in my mother tongue, the only way I could respond was by swiftly starting my car and driving to the shop. I knew she visited there every Thursday. “It’s okay,” I said on the phone. Wo bu zhi dao. Wo bu zhi dao.
When I arrived, I saw her standing at the register, staring blankly at the part-timer working the desk. Only a teenager. Dui bu qi.
When we arrived at home, she said nothing at all. Instead, she sat on the couch, and brought her knees up to her chest, humming old tunes. After a while, she walked to the kitchen and brought the tea set out.
As always, she put the tea in the pot, and turned the kettle on. Only, this time, her hands shook so much as she poured the water, that she burned her finger. I insisted that I could make the tea, but she was stubborn, relentless. “Don’t be silly,” she said to me. She covered her finger with a tissue paper and a piece of cellotape, before continuing to pour.
This had, by then, become a ritual. Our only ritual. It took place every day, while the light faded.
With every passing month, it grew clumsier. She poured wrongly. She put too few leaves in. Once she forgot the leaves altogether.
Still, I would sit with her with her, watching. In those moments, we would belatedly chip away at the wall which had always stood between us, the unbroken barrier. Teacup after teacup, until I had to roll her around on a wheelchair, and she had to ask me who I was each time I came to her room to wake her.
Even then, she sometimes asked to sit by the windowsill, where I had left an old tea-set to gather dust. She would stay there for hours, tilting the empty clay teapot. She forgot my name before forgetting how to pour.
—
Several years have passed since I decided that I could no longer take care of her on my own. She lives in a small care home ten minutes from me, and I try to visit as frequently as my schedule allows.
Still, when I think about my old life with my mother, I cannot help but remember that first cup of green tea. It was hot enough that we watched the steam rise from the brims of our small porcelain cups as we sat across from one another, saying very little.
Now, I sit in a waiting room. The walls are cream, and inane paintings decorate them, low-skill depictions of boats and bridges. The air smells like disinfectant and old skin. Family friends recommended this care home, but I have so far been unimpressed. Don’t worry, they told me. She is not in a state to mind the ugly décor. I lean back, stretching my arms out.
“Ms. Lee?”
The nurse stands by the reception desk. I rise quickly, and she gestures me closer. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say.
She leads me to the fifth room down the corridor. “I’m so sorry about yesterday, we’ve been trying our best to keep her in.”
“It’s okay,” I respond, avoiding her eyes. “I’m glad she was found.”
“She keeps getting past us, somehow. We’ll be more careful,” she says. “Do you know why she might have gone there?”
I nod quietly, feeling a very familiar sadness. I do know why, I think. I recall the big wooden shelf where teas of all varieties sat waiting to be bought, and the messy counter littered with handwritten notes. But the store had long been shuttered. It is decrepit now, and the building it occupied is slated for demolition. When my mother escaped from the home yesterday, she stood completely still by the old structure, until somebody came by.
He saw her wandering, dressed in her patient’s gown. He made a few phone calls. Within forty-five minutes, she was being driven back by the police, and yelling indistinctly in the backseat like a defiant fugitive.
“Yes,” I tell the nurse. “We used to shop there.”
“I’ll note it for the future.”
She makes a few markings on her clipboard before opening the door to the room. She tells me to let her know if I needed any help, before walking back down the corridor. I close the door behind me.
I walk toward my mother’s bed and set down my handbag. “Hi, Ma.”
She looks at me with wide, blank eyes. “Oh. Hi,” she responds, with a voice that trembles as her hands did in the last few days we sat across from each other at the old pinewood coffee-table, which we inherited from the former tenants.
I am silent, but I hold her hand. She looks confused by this gesture, and by my presence.
“I’ve brought something,” I say. I lift out of my bag a new tea-set. I cannot ever bear to touch hers, so I bought my own. As I lay it out on the small plastic table by her bedside, she no longer stares at me. Instead, a stain on the wall behind me catches her interest.
This suits me well. I am hardly an expert at pouring tea, and prefer to be left alone as I did it. I fill the kettle in the sink at the corner of the room.
I brew it now the way she used to, with extra care, to refill the teapot thrice. I pour two cups, and pick them up, blowing on their surface to cool them. “Ma,” I say, and she looks at me. I hand one to her, and she picks it up gingerly, drawing it to her lips. She takes a sip. I look down at my own cup. Leaves at the bottom.
When I look back at her, her cup is empty. I finish mine quickly and set both the cups down.
“It’s me,” I say. “I am here.”
She says nothing in return, and I sense no recognition in her gaze.
When I stand to clean the table, she grabs on to my arm. Her fingers clasp around me. It is a strong vice grip. I look down at her, and she weeps.