Tea culture, like the classical literature, is shared by China, Japan, and Korea. I remember pacing the floor of our third story walkup flat on Kaifeng Street in Taipei in the early sixties, vacuum cup of wulong tea in hand, discussing the Chinese translation of American slang with my friend Lao Zhang. He would be sitting in his wicker lounge chair, also with a large flask of tea, asking about problems that arose from the portions of American movie scripts that he translated for his magazine Screen. Occasionally, as he got toward the bottom of the cup, he would chew on a leaf and then spit it onto the cement floor, a wonderful habit I, at age 20, immediately made my own. He would pull on his Shuangxi fag and consult a well-worn copy of Sanseido’s English-Japanese dictionary because that was the closest he could get to an up-to-date English-Chinese dictionary. And Lao Zhang actually knew Japanese, to some extent, thanks to two years study in Japan. He would avail himself of every opportunity to inflict it on our landlady who still spoke Japanese better than Mandarin. The Japanese occupation of Taiwan was, after all, less than twenty years past. But it was the kanji in the definitions that really helped him read the dictionary, a technique which I, too,  would use for the next thirty years until, finally, extensive and up-to-date Chinese-Chinese and Chinese-French, and Chinese-English dictionaries became available. For me, as foreign to China as to Japan or Korea, tea and kanji were marks of a shared culture, sometimes called ‘kanji culture’, whereas Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans that I knew, generally tended to emphasize the differences, and to champion their own approach over the others. No one could deny that the wulong tea that Zhang and I made directly in our huge cups, and the green tea made in small pots throughout Japan were quite different, in taste and drinking style, but both were based on the ubiquitous presence of tea and both played a similar social role. (This was long before coffee had become popular in Taiwan, and even in Japan it had still not taken over.)

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