The Cupertino Courier

Community

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Wife and husband Janice Sung and Chiung Chih Lin are, respectively, the president and director of the American Tea Culture Association. Members of the association meet to learn about the history of tea and how to properly prepare it.

Couple is devoted to promoting tea culture

By Crystal Lu

It's Wednesday morning. A man and nine women sit at a rectangular dining table, listening to a woman wearing a mandarin-collared, embroidered red silk jacket.

"The word tea sounds very similar in different languages because it originated from a dialect of southern China," says Fea-Eng Yang, who has been a tea instructor since 2006.

Yang was once a student in a tea class held in the same Cupertino house owned by Chiung Chih Lin and his wife Janice Sung. The couple, who emigrated from Taiwan in 1996, have more than 100 kinds of tea in their home and founded the nonprofit American Tea Culture Association in 2002. Since then they have regularly offered tea classes in their dining room.

Currently, there is a Saturday afternoon class for working professionals and a Wednesday morning class for homemakers or retirees.

"My wife and I signed up because we wanted to find out more about tea, to select quality tea and learn proper ways to prepare it," says Ken Campbell, a retired employee of AT&T and the only male student in the Wednesday class.

The Campbells first learned about the American Tea Culture Association when they watched representatives of the nonprofit group perform a tea ceremony at Moon Festival in Cupertino Memorial Park.

"Many Westerners only associate tea ceremonies with Japan," says Lin. "We would like to introduce Chinese tea culture to them."

According to Lin, the biggest difference between Chinese tea and Japanese tea is in their production. The Japanese steam tea leaves because their ancestors copied the steaming techniques from China during Tang Dynasty in the eighth century. The Chinese, however, discarded the steaming tradition in the late 13th century.

After the Mongolians were expelled in the 14th century, a new way of producing tea emerged in China. Lin explains that's why Chinese tea leaves now are all stir-fried.

"Steamed tea leaves keep their color better, so Japanese tea looks greener," Lin says. "But stir-fried tea leaves make the tea more aromatic."

Lin and Sung both took tea classes in their native Taiwan and passed tests there to be certified tea instructors.

Tea-making has become such a science that experts set the best length of time for making each kind of tea.

When the couple first opened tea classes, Lin was the only instructor and Sung his assistant. Later they decided to help some outstanding students become instructors in order to open more classes and further spread the knowledge of tea.

For more information about the American Tea Culture Association, visit www.atcasf.org.