My father sold tea from a cart in Chengdu for forty years. Same corner, same kettle, same three folding stools. When I told him, at fifty-two, that I was moving to Europe — my daughter had settled in Lisbon and wanted me near — he didn't argue. He poured two cups and we drank in silence. Then he said: "You can carry the leaves anywhere. The water is always local."
I thought it was a warning. I spent my first two years in Lisbon proving him right in the worst way. I imported jasmine tea at ridiculous cost. I cooked only Sichuan food and complained that the peppercorns had lost their numbness in transit. I was trying to rebuild my old life leaf for leaf, and everything I rebuilt tasted slightly wrong — which is worse than tasting foreign.
The third winter, my neighbor knocked with a box of oranges from her son's farm and stayed for tea. I had nothing "proper" to serve, so I put out pastéis de nata from the corner café. She drank my father's jasmine tea, I ate her oranges, and it was the first meal in Lisbon that tasted right.
Now I brew Chinese tea with Lisbon water and have stopped measuring the difference. My father died two springs ago. At the funeral my brother gave me a bag of leaves from the old cart supplier. I drink it on Sundays. It doesn't taste like home. It tastes like him — which I've learned is a different thing, and enough.