60 Scott Writer
that he acquired in practice a sense of how the steps related to one another and to the
materiality of the tea. Only with experience was he able to learn how to guide each
batch of tea toward its optimal taste. Tea making thus hinges on the cultivation of
forms of “bodily resonance” that bind the tea maker and each tea. These resonances
are both thoroughly corporeal and yet defiantly abstract, or perhaps abstract precisely
because of their stubborn corporeality (Hsu 2008; Yu 2008).^11
In conversation, producers of Oriental Beauty acknowledged the complexity of
tea production most typically by gesturing toward the ineffability of experience.
Their attempts to explain to me the corporeal, sensory, and affective encounters
by which the taste of their tea came about marked precisely the point at which
technical explanations foundered and gave way instead to appeals to tacit,
embodied ways of knowing that they had built up through years of experience at
the tea farm and factory. For example, Mr. Zhang cautioned me that
really to make tea encompasses temperature, humidity, and includes your
own state of mind, your degree of sensitivity, so it is really abstract. If you ask
me for a set answer, I’ll tell you there isn’t one... How would you explain
the moment when you’ve eradicated the grassy taste [of the raw tea leaves]?... I can describe it, but how would you write it, how could you do it?..
. I think you’re better off just describing the process, because to grasp the
internals (裡面的掌控 limian de zhangkong), that’s just too abstract.
Zhang’s emphasis here on the abstraction he sees as inherent to tea making
highlights how each tea’s materiality is distinguished by the producer’s direct
experience of the unique sensations and affects produced by the tea as it transforms
from raw leaves to a finished tea. Here my informant echoes Hsueh’s (2003, pp. 156–
7) suggestion that for tea farmers, once one has grasped the rudiments of zhuoyan and
basic tea-processing procedures, making tea became instead about “observing the
tea as you make it” (看茶製茶 kan cha zhi cha) while at the same time “observing
heaven as you make tea” (看天製茶 kan tian zhi cha). That is, the “abstract” (抽
象 chouxiang) element in tea production is the tea maker’s attunement to the tea’s
materiality, an attachment that allows them to follow and respond to the material and
environmental contingencies that impinge upon each tea’s taste-trajectory. These
responses draw upon acquired dispositions and endowed sensitivities as much as
conscious deliberation (Ingold 2000, p. 197; Hinchcliffe 2010). In this sense, the
labor of tea making is a way of actualizing a particular relation between the human
and non-human (or “heaven,” “earth,” and “human”), the affective affinity between
the tea maker and his or her tea represented or indexed by the tea’s taste, fragrance,
and other material signatures. To “follow the material” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
p. 409) in this fashion is to eschew the recipe in favor of open-ended practice: a
way of thinking and working within the envelope of contingencies inherent to each
material. To figure tea making in this way both opens this account of tea production
to the agential capacities of things and materials and equally allows us to appreciate
the way in which tea makers are caught up in the “situationality” of life experienced
as “an ongoing process that includes agency within it” (Ames 1998, p. 227).^12