Culture

Jasmine is one of the teas I order most at dim sum. The pot lands on the table, the lid comes off, and out comes the smell of flowers, sweet and heavy, like a warm summer night. Peek inside, though, and it’s all leaves. Not one flower. Nobody stole them. In jasmine tea, the flowers

Chances are your jar of five spice came home for one recipe. A teaspoon went into the marinade, the jar went to the back of the cupboard, and now you’re holding it again, wondering what’s actually in there and what else it could do. Turn it around and read the back. Yours might list six

Walk past a breakfast shop in China early in the morning and you’ll see it before you smell it: bamboo steamers stacked taller than the cook, clouds rolling off the top every time someone lifts a lid. Then the smell hits. Soft bao, plain mantou (馒头, steamed buns), and something savory you can’t quite name

When I was a kid, xiangqi was one of those games my cousin and I pulled out when we were bored. If we got tired of Chinese checkers, or there were only two of us, we switched to xiangqi. I liked that it wasn’t just about knowing how the pieces moved; once you got into

The door opens, and before you’ve finished saying hello, there’s a pair of slippers on the floor in front of you. Your host is already wearing some. A neat row of outdoor shoes sits by the door, and that row is the line between outside and in. For a lot of Western guests, it’s the

If you make a mug of tea each morning, almost any reliable electric kettle will do. But if you switch between delicate green tea and a roasted oolong, a kettle that lets you choose the water temperature becomes much more useful. The other question is how you pour. Filling a mug is easy with a

Tea storage is really two different problems. With tea bags, the problem is usually clutter. You have six half-empty cardboard boxes, can’t see what’s behind them, and somehow keep buying chamomile even though there are already twenty bags hiding at the back of the cupboard. Loose leaf tea is different. Once the pouch is open,

Spend ten minutes on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, or Xiaohongshu, a mix of Instagram and Pinterest, and China’s post-00s show up already labeled. They want emotional value from everything, including their jobs. They refuse neihao, a word for the mental energy you burn replaying an awkward email or a boss’s odd comment, until you’re

Tea was part of the table at home. The adults drank several kinds of oolong — Tieguanyin and Dongding among them — and as a child I knew the whole group as oolong. Loose leaves sat in a big cup, hot water was topped up through the afternoon, and I was curious enough to steal