Early on, the faculty liaison officer that welcomed me to Hang Gong Hang Tian Da Xue (Shenyang Aerospace University) transliterated my name to "Hemi", which was the sound she heard when I pronounced my name; she then had me identified as such in the teaching assignment schedule list.  Not long after, my students started calling me "Hemingwei" since most of them read Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in High School.  They remember the Zhongwen translation rather than the English they were supposed to learn but since passing tests is what school courses are designed for, actually learning the language did not matter, as long as they memorized the terms used by the teacher. 

 

The old man in Hemingway's story is Santiago whose name is St. James in Castilian,  "Jaime" in the Basque country that straddles France and Spain, the name my father received from Spanish name givers, of which I am a junior.  Hemingwei fell smoothly into my personal nomenclature, so I did not hesitate to appropriate the name.  Nor did my students.

 

In Hemingway's story, Santiago the fisherman goes for 84 days without catching anything, and his young apprentice Manolin is ordered by his family to leave the old man to join other fishermen who might be more productive.  Still faithful to the aging fisherman, Manolin helps haul his net at the end of the day, and keeps him company in his shack while the young lad talks of his favorite baseball player Joe DiMaggio.   Santiago in turn continually threatens to sail far out into the Gulf Stream, promising to catch a big one the next day.

 

He does take his skiff far out the following day and by mid-morning, gets a bite from a big one.  The marlin at the other end of the line puts up a valiant act of resistance, and ends up pulling the skiff out into the Stream.  Santiago uses all his strength and his fragile body to counter the tug of war.  In the process, Santiago develops a quiet respect over his adversary, and even calls it his brother.  Of the marlin's integrity, Santiago concludes that no one is worthy enough to eat the fish.

 

It takes two nights and three days before the marlin circles the boat indicating tiredness, at which point, Santiago hauls it in, harpoons the tenacious fish, straps it against his skiff and sails home.  A mako shark attracted by the fresh blood of the marlin attacks and in the fight, Santiago loses his harpoon.  For a makeshift harpoon, he attaches his knife to his oar to ward another five sharks attracted to his fish.  By the time he hits shore, however, other sharks reduced the marlin into a carcass and a head.  The fish measured 16 ft. long!

 

The old man immediately hits the sack in his shack where Manolin gladly ministers to his needs.  The struggle with the marlin invigorates the old man and he dreams of his youth and lions in an African safari.

 

We have obviously come to be identified with the "old man" in our class and in our mind.  We disambiguate on the title: our cup of tea is not with the Tea Party.  China's tea is our sea - vast, invigorating, and when fermented, a soulful nectar of the divine!  Students, mostly in for a quick ride towards a diploma, are our marlin surprised when dished out an unexpected journey into their lives. 

 

But first, we had not come to China to catch anyone in a qi pao.  We leave the enterprise of the chase to the swift-footed young.  Charged by my siblings to be a bit on the effete side, I stand accused of having been on occasion the one easily caught!  We have, in fact, in today's single ladies elegy, "if you like it, you should have put a ring on it", been guilty on putting one too many more than what we should have done "on it"!  An SF colleague suggests I learn to bow towards Mecca so I can legally ring four!

 

Our tea is pedagogy - instructive and educative.  In our current stage of scholarship, our method is imaginal.  Our assumption:  Everyone operates out images.  We create images from words and metaphors, pictures and numbers that we use to describe our sense experiences, express our feelings, articulate our thoughts, and formulate our deeds.  Images we create determine behavior.  When images change, behavior changes.  In science, that is called a "paradigm shift."

 

For the spread of our tea analogy, one might just consider the varied categories of white, green, yellow, black teas, and names like oolong, Darjeeling, Nepal, Assam, Nilgiri, Turkish, Ceylon, pu'er, tisanes (herbal, not technically tea), along with the many methods of preparations and ways of serving, blends and additives, to realize we are in a whole universe with its own stellar paths and flavors.  Whether one calls the ingredient te, cha, tea, chay, does not matter, but if one goes through the delicate moves of a Gongfu cha ceremony, one readily senses elegant olfactorial presence of one of the beverage wonders of the world.

 

We view our pedagogy in the same vein as we sip our tea, varied yet integrated, intentional though unconstricting, leaning unapologetically on the authority of authenticity rather than the whims of fads and the winds of fashion.  Students attend class ready to be surprised at the awe and wander of their own existence, and taking full ownership of it.  That, for the moment, in our best and most profound orchestral and facilitative repertoire, is in our cup!