machazit hashekel- redistribute the gushu

24 adar 5781

recently, cwyn wrote a very poignant and well written post on her blog. this post brought out all my personal puer anxieties. cwyn's post is emphasizing that drinking the best puer you can should be your ideal goal. she gave a $200 minimum as a rough estimate for the cost for this category of excellent tea. $200 (the exact number isn’t what’s important) for tea is a lot of money for my income. she also emphasizes that puer is only going to get more expensive (especially because of climate change and how that affects yields). i don’t disagree with her and that’s what stresses me out. 

i approach everything through a political lens. i am a political person. me and cwyn come from different places. she is retired after a long successful career. she is using her retirement and the money she’s saved to drink very good tea. i do not have a lot of money and who knows what social security will look like when i retire…

 

i think about everything in my life in terms of access (who has access to what? why do these people but those people don’t? is it because of systemic inequality? etc etc). that is not what cwyn’s blog focuses. this political perspective is one i value and is something i write about frequently. i don’t want money to be a barrier to people being able to enjoy good tea. but no matter what, money is a big barrier.

 

i have only been drinking tea seriously for a little over a year. currently, i am still very much in the beginning phases of learning. i am still learning how different storage conditions affect different teas, what kind of teas i like, what teas fit with my body, etc. and all this learning can only happen through drinking tea.

 

a big part of this learning for me is understanding my expectations. if a tea is x amount of years old and was stored in x, what can i expect from it. also, if a tea costs x amount of dollars, what should i expect from it. so far, i have been focusing on the lower rung because i do not want to spend a lot of money while i am just learning. 

 

to understand what puer is and why some cost more than others, i have to try it at all price ranges (within a certain limit of what i can afford of course). i need to start trying some expensive teas. is it worth it? is the qi that life changing? and if it is, how will that influence my drinking habits?

something that maps onto puer and capitalist culture as a whole is the idea of ‘hoarding.’ hoarding is people accumulating and holding onto a certain item in an amount that is far beyond subsistence. the reason it’s an issue is because our choices affect other people. when a certain amount of rich people buy up a large amount of puer for the sake of either collecting or holding onto it as an investment for resale, this affects puer pricing over all. rich people can use their money to buy up a lot of x which results in artificial scarcity thus raising prices on x which disproportionately affects poor people (a very reductionist and amateur look at this matter. i am not economist). this happens during natural disasters where store owners jack up the price of bottled water. there are certain laws against price gouging and they vary by state (for some very recent examples here are some sources referencing the recent winter disaster in Texas: gouging & laws).

 

from what i hear, part of tea culture is people sharing some of their most exquisite teas with each other. ‘come over and we’ll drink this crazy 10,000 year old gushu i have from the 1980’s (…BCE).’ this is a beautiful thing. it is the beauty of sharing, hospitality, and generosity. i aim to do that one day. within my means, i do this with some of my coworkers who i’m friends with. maybe one day i can participate more in this when i am older and have more money. 

 

the world is unfair, i know this. capitalism is unfair, that’s an inherent part of it’s essence. capitalism is built on competition and in a competition there have to be losers so there can be winners. it’s unfair and i try in my own mini ways to counter this as much as i can. this is what we need more of. while i wait around for the graduated puer income tax, i will hope to make more tea friends so we can employ the best method i know in how to combat capitalism- solidarity and mutual aid.

 

xoxo,

atzei besamim