A Note from the Editor: Issue 41

Welcome to the TEA issue!

We came up with this theme because tea is an ordinary, everyday aspect in many of our lives –– a source of comfort and warmth, a store of memory, and for many, as you’ll see in several of our pieces, a consistent lighthouse amid the seas of childhood and growing up.

But tea carries a heavy history, marred by roiling political and economic turmoil. It still holds the stains of colonialism and is, at the end of the day, a commodity. How often do we even think about where tea comes from? Countless studies worldwide, to this day, report on the dangers and less than ideal realities of tea plantation workers. Tea, while often effervescently lit through nostalgic lenses, is also ugly.

In slang, we’ve also developed a colloquial use for it: spilling the tea. Gossip. Scandal. Interesting personal developments traded in the group chat. And here our theme opens up; we’ve broadened the interpretations of what tea could mean beyond the physical.

In this issue, there are powerful, intimate portraits of familial relationships punctuated by the rituals of tea drinking. There is a photographic ethnography of a teahouse in China, where tea is merely a setting, a backdrop, for the theater of social interaction and activities. Elsewhere, tea is nothing but a metaphor, a colored-glass lens to look at everything from a school shooting to depression to seduction.

Tea is political, light and heavy, problematic, beautiful and a host of other contradictory adjectives because tea is ultimately, culture. And culture, an amorphous thing that dictates and governs so much of our lives, is a thing to both embrace and wrestle with.

We hope you enjoy the menu of what’s on offer, for our last issue of 2021. We can’t wait to return with more in the new year.

Until then, with love,
Vamika