As a child, the thing I hated most was going back to the tea mountains.
Other kids spent their holidays at parks and amusement grounds. I got dragged into the mountains with my father. Pulled out of bed before dawn, into an air that smelled bitter and fragrant at once — tea leaf scorching in the wok. My father would stand before the iron pan, hands flying in the searing heat, sweat falling off his brow and vanishing into the wok with a hiss.
Back then I thought tea-making was the slowest, most hopeless trade on earth.
Other fathers wore suits to offices in the city. Mine had calloused hands and fingernails that never quite came clean of tea stains. He couldn't help with homework, couldn't make pretty speeches, never once said "I love you." All he did, whenever I left home, was stuff the suitcase with bag after bag of tea leaves and say: "Drink it yourself. Don't give it away."
I'd think: who wants your tea.
一 · My father began making tea at sixteen
The village opened a tea factory, and he was the youngest there — and the quickest to learn. The others left, tired of the bitterness and the ache. He stayed. That stay has lasted fifty years.
He has one habit: each spring he picks only those few days of buds. Not a day more. I asked him why. He said: "Tea is like people. Before its time, you can't rush it. Past its time, you can't call it back."
At the time I rolled my eyes. Isn't that just procrastination?
Only later did I learn: to wait for that "time", he climbed the mountain at four in the morning to check the dew, felt the soil's warmth with his hand, even tasted the juice of a fresh leaf before deciding whether the day's work would start. People at the factory called him slow. He never argued; he just crouched by the stove and quietly lit the fire.
Buyers fought over his tea every year. But he never raised his prices, never made more. Someone offered good money for him to replace his hands with a machine. He refused: "A machine has no warmth of hand. The tea knows."
I thought he was stubborn. Now I understand — he wasn't being stubborn. He was waiting for the tea to speak.
二 · It took a book to understand my father
Last winter, on a sleepless night, I opened The Last Quarter of the Moon. In it, a ninety-year-old Evenki woman sits by the fire and tells her life. Her husband goes hunting in the mountains, sometimes gone three days. She doesn't urge him home. She sits by the fire and waits. As long as the fire stays lit, the person is still there.
Reading that line, I suddenly thought of my father.
He is that kind of man. When he fires the tea, the flame can't go out and the man can't leave — one wok of leaf turned by hand thousands of times, from deep night to near dawn. He never rushed the tea, and he never rushed anyone. Every exam I failed, every job that wore me down, every time I quit and started over — he never once said "why are you so slow."
He would simply brew a cup of tea when I came home, and set it in front of me.
That cup always scalded. It always asked for waiting. And by the time it was cool enough to drink, I no longer wanted to cry.
The woman in the book says: "I am a woman of the mountains; my road is on the mountain." I thought — my father is a man of the mountains too. His road is in the wok, in the fire, in those few days of spring buds each year. He spent fifty years on one thing, a thing with no shortcut and no express lane. Only waiting.
And it took me forty years to learn to wait.
三 · Slowness is time given back to yourself
Later I began to drink tea deliberately.
Not the kind of drinking with ceremony and thermometers — the simplest kind: a pinch of my father's tea in a glass, hot water poured on, and I watch the leaves sink slowly, unfurl, and stain the water amber.
The process takes three minutes.
In those three minutes I don't look at my phone and I don't answer messages. I just watch the leaves settle one by one. Like watching a very slow film.
I started reading again too — not for exams, not for work, not for social media. Just a few pages in the time a cup of tea takes. Su Shi wrote, "with new fire I try the new tea; poetry and wine while the years are young." He was exiled again and again, each post farther than the last — and in every new place he looked first for tea, for good food, for friends. A person who will still brew a cup of tea at the bottom of their luck probably can't be beaten by anything.
Slowness is not wasted time. Slowness is time given back to yourself.
Our generation is too hurried. A new video every three seconds, dinner in thirty minutes, a new skill in "seven days". We stuff every minute full, and then ask ourselves at midnight: what exactly am I busy for?
My father never asks. He knows what he's doing — one wok of tea takes three days from picking to finished leaf. For those three days he does that one thing, unhurried. When it's done he brews a cup, drinks it, and next year he does it again.
That, I suppose, is what "slow living" looks like at its plainest.
四 · So I started this
Not to teach anyone how to drink tea, and not to become a "book influencer". I only wanted to write down the slow things — the tea in my father's hands, the books read deep into the night, the three minutes on the balcony waiting for the kettle.
Each week you'll find here:
A good book worth reading slowly — not the bestseller list, only the stories that genuinely moved me;
A family tea with a story — the tea my father has made for fifty years, and the silent hours behind it;
An unhurried way of living — a corner where you can sit down, in a world that's running out of breath.
I won't promise daily posts, and I won't chase trends. Good things are all slow. Tea must wait; books must be savored; days must be lived one at a time.
If you're tired sometimes too — sit down, brew a cup, open a book.
Slowly is how you arrive faster.
My father is sixty-six now, and still fires the tea. His hands are steadier than when he was young, and his words fewer. I asked him how long he'd keep at it. He said: "When I can't anymore, I'll stop."
I hope that day comes late.
茶 · 書 · 慢
Tea · Books · Slow