Jul 14, 2021
Taking History Personally: Tea, Selfhood, and the Story of Empire
Tea plants—and the drinks we make from them—carry so many meanings.
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of two books of nature writing: Turning (2017) and Two Trees Make a Forest (2019), shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Jessica has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review. She is a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
Tea plants—and the drinks we make from them—carry so many meanings.
Through myth-making and symbolism, the natural world comes to stand in for potent human ideals.
Mangoes—revered and prized by almost every culture in which they are cultivated—are a migrant fruit.
It took me years before I realized that I’d built my notions of beauty from the stories of a distant land.
I added it to the list of things off-limits: questions about the past, the wars, why my grandparents had fled China for Taiwan. Why eventually they left that place too.
