Subject to Change: Nowing, Wowing & Bao Bowing
A Tightrope Tumble Retrospective of a Month Lodging at The Great Academy of Unlearning
Bao Bao is not just my preferred line of bags. Nor are the words used exclusively to described a pair of steamed buns in the style Eddie Huang made Amerifamous in New York. It is also a name for a bundled Sheng Pu’erh tea from the borderlands of Vietnam procured by the new homie Antonio of Čaj Chai, a tienda de té in Barcelona’s gothic quarter.
I have not had the good fortune of sipping in the shop’s Prague-inspired quarters but through a conversation about tea and the glories and pitfalls of music journalism amidst the Pyrenees mountains last month, I got a sense of how Antonio rolls and the tea he offered proceeds in a similar spirit.
I’m enjoying it now on an overcast October Sunday in Kamakura. It’s been nearly a month since my last dispatch and much has transpired. Lots of tea. Lots of Dweez. Lots of lots. Instead of allowing these lots to overwhelm, let’s bao bao.
Rocked in the interior jacket pockets of tea farmers and vendors in Vietnam like a selection of dubiously acquired watches, I was told this tea rarely finds its way out of the region where its grown. Tied both casually and with great care like a mini bundle of firewood, it’s what the locals drink. Antonio had the bundles in a bag and looking at the them all lumped together like little presents made me feel he was a kind of early-arriving tea Santa Claus. I bought a bundle for me, a bundle for a Ahdom and the wider Tea at Shiloh world, and I am glad I did.
Much is nestled inside the bundle. Bao bao’s liquor rides the ridge between the hearty, rugged tea you see on its tightly bound exterior and an soothing array of complex aromas, flavors, and sensations as you drink it down. Let me call it balmy and brash, bounding and bouncy—but also, quite long in the tongue—to sip it is to follow a trail without a definitive end in sight guided by a mythical bird. I’m only a few steeps (or steps?) in now and I have no idea where it will lead me, but damned if I’m not grateful to be roaming with it cuddling my guts and crocheting my core need for courage. You knew by looking at it that there’d be a lot in it. A trip you take with a question mark at the end of its promise. Tea where all that is foregone is the opened-ended conclusion.
In that spirit, as I heat up the water for another steep of Big Tony’s Barcelona Bao Bao, here are some snapshots of the past month as I get back to regularly weekly sessions on this Substack:
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In the back of a bus leaving Barcelona Airport for a 5-ish hour drive to the Pyrenees mountains and a small village called Vío, a Latvian homie hands me a bowl with tea leaves, they curl about in a way that makes me unable to tell if they are monsters or mates. I try to get ready for a week of silence by nonstop talking with infinitely fascinating characters who I find myself riding with toward Casa Cuadrau, dreaming of the then soon-to-open Boulder Tea Hut.
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I learn how to hold a tea bowl in a new ways, based on old traditions. Some of the parts of me ready for war. There are those who want to get it right and those who want to get it wrong on purpose. There are those who don’t want to get it at all and curse me for isolating myself in such a way in such a place. The tea bowls have black teas, purples teas, pu’erh teas. I’ve read Global Tea Hut for years, contributed recently to the magazine but had only ever drank tea in their tradition twice, once at Ojai Tea Hut and once at Village Tea Hut late last year. Now, the hard hutting begins.
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I salvage hope for myself amidst the rebellion by taking refuge in my senchas, which I start to brew at 5:40 AM before the morning Zazen sessions. I can’t sit for an hour with my eyes open and no mantras without fidgeting for the first half of the retreat. I begin to wonder if I will hate both meditation and tea after this time in the mountains—the two ports that helped me survive so many recent storms—but these casual cups taste like home. With them, I pull a string that becomes a rope attached to a trunk.
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I find new ways to sit thanks to a black walnut tree, a river and a dramatic mountain range. The war wages on but I’m no longer fighting it. I hear discourses and bristle and bawl and find forgiveness for more than I ever thought possible. It ends one morning in a room full of empty meditation cushions and me, alone, my face a waterfall I don’t know how to turn off. Voices rumble downstairs, the muzzle time having been lifted, but when I first look for words I cannot find them. I just feel my mother’s fingers running through my hair and echoes of loving words of my father.
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By the end it becomes easy to sit with my eyes open with no mantras and no reservations. By the end I’m willing to be led. By the end I can’t stop Bowing, Wowing, and Nowing. But by the end, I still can’t find my words—I am looking for them among the piles of newly fallen Kamakura autumn leaves even now. No dice, not the kind I’m familiar with anyway. I first drink Bao Bao in a bowl with a new homie from Florida named Andre who gifted the 38 of us joy in abundance. I thank the German roaming bell tower who provided the only music I heard in 10 days. I verbally meet many others, at last. I tell everyone that I hope they come to Kamakura for tea & I mean it.
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It feels like the next thing I know, I am in a basement in Malmo realizing my biggest fears might not even belong to me. Then, I’m in a basement in Paris at Ogata drinking the same teas I have in Tokyo for 10 times the price but with salted butter in the wagashi that makes it (nearly) 10 times as delicious. A collection of seed pods twist to make a kind of dry-fountain ambient background song. I get to share tea with the brave author I’m working with, then Marielle, the server of my debut bowl of Kagoshima Matcha, is kind enough to introduce me to other tea rooms around Paris and to Miki San—who grew up in Kamakura—and who I get to thank for making incredible wagashi. Her dog Lola is a delight beyond words and I promise myself that Hoji will get the chance to run alongside her on Kamakura’s beaches someday.
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One minute, I have half-sugar Jasmine cheese foam boba on the Seine as Notre Dame gets repaired across the way. The next, the contents of my belly—smoked salmon, chives, soft scrambled eggs, jams, grapefruit juice—is buried beneath an industrial-sized laundry load of croissant folds. I’m like, “No more bread,” but here comes the bread. Then its all dainty cups and saucers under a brick-laid archway at a nearly 100-year-old restaurant. My mom always wanted to come to Paris and I’m thrilled to hang out with others Moms who are thrilled about being here—the whizz of fashion week all around us. Crazed Irish Rugby fans nearly collide with them 10,000 times.
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It all ends where it began—in Taiwan—but in Paris. But in Spain I was in Taiwan, really. But my oldest exposures to Chinese culture are from my dear friend from Taiwan, at whose restaurant I sipped the first real teas. But I am learning from teachers based in Taiwan and here I am at Wistaria Paris, a Taiwanese tea house, with dear friends, the warmest hosts I know, of my most recently beloved tea house in Downtown Los Angeles. I hop into the stream of tea and Paris with Shiloh and Ahdom and we are taken wherever it wants us to go. To new oolongs and old pu’erhs. To galleries of our dreams, crepes, and covid and Monaco! But actually to Taiwan, where all roads seem to lead.
In a haze of illness and jet lag, I’m back home in Japan, trying to figure out how to put it all together. But I’ve learned that you can’t beat a story with a story. You probably can’t beat it at all but if you could, a paradox would probably be your best weapon. Or your best medicine. Whichever approach you prefer. Try both.
I bow to you, my dear readers, with your infinite patience and understanding even amidst the many misunderstandings I cobbled together on these and other sheets of digital parchment. I bow to this approach of reverent irreverence. I bow to the laughs and to the forlorn stares. I bow to the twists, turns, and, finally, to the silence.
If tea could stand in front of a mirror all day, it might come up with a new word for wow, but for now that’s the best we’ve got — see you soon, this time—until then, I’ll be out here bowing or laughing, and hopefully, at least sometimes, both at once.