If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are too heated, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are excited, it will calm you.

~William Ewart Gladstone

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To my birth family,

For as long as I can remember my parents both drank tea. Usually it’s black tea, sometimes Earl grey, jasmine, or green.

When I was younger tea was too bitter for my liking. It was only later when my British relatives reintroduced tea to me when I started to appreciate the bitter flavours.

Unsurprisingly, my Canadian family has a lot of British heritage, and Great Britain has a long history of tea drinking. They first imported tea from China, and later India until its independence in 1947.

Yes, there’s some messy history between my adoptive family’s ancestral country and my birth family’s ancestral country. But it’s safe to say that both my birth family and my adoptive family love their tea.

For me, that’s big.

Tea became a commonality that I knew I could rely on to make me feel connected to both cultures and histories. When I drink tea now I use my tea cozy to feel like a Brit, and my asian teapot to feel Chinese.

I made the mistake of telling people back in high school about this little connection. They thought it was weird, since 1) they thought I was overthinking something that should be really simple, and 2) they were all white.

In their minds, tea was tea, something you get at the coffee shop or fast food chain. It wasn’t very important to history other than the Boston Tea Party. They thought I was creating a connection that suited my desire to be both Brit and Chinese, when I was clearly neither.

The one who told me people thought said it in the nicest possible way. You know, with an apologetic tone to soften the message that everyone thought I was being ridiculous.

It takes time to get over people calling you stupid. I know I can overthink a lot of things, but tea still holds a lot of meaning for me.

Being neither Chinese nor British makes me feel like I don’t have a solid base. There’s no one culture of Canada, so all my high school friends had influences from their parent’s heritage in their upbringing.

They were British, Portugese, German, Italian, basically Eurasian immigrants. Most aren’t first or second generation, so they know who they are and they’re content with it. They don’t need to question or reconcile their cultural identities.

I guess that’s the fun part about being adopted cross-culturally adopted. I don’t blame anyone for thinking I’m stupid since they’re not in my shoes, but it sucks that they just wrote off the meaning I gave to tea as overthought wishes. If I could meet them again I wish they’d hear me out this time and try to understand things from my perspective, what it’s like to have a compromised identity.

Tea was something both my Canadian family and my Chinese family might enjoy together should they ever meet. It could reconcile two fundamentally different halves of my life.

Of course, there are times when it’s like my high school friends said: tea is just tea. When I’m not thinking about deeper meanings I’m simply enjoying the rich flavours of my warm drink. I never said tea couldn’t just be tea.

So why can’t tea be both a drink and something important to me? Why can’t I be raised by British descendants while learning Chinese culture?

How’s that for food for thought?

Sincerely,

Lillian