Matcha
In 2020, I lived in a certain city famous for neon lights and yellow umbrellas. I'd stumble across photos online of my neighborhood edited with heavy vignettes and the saturation cranked to 200%, with the comments cooing about how "cyberpunk" it all was.
This city also wanted to be another certain city famous for neon lights and a "cyberpunk" aesthetic. As a result, I had easy access to everything Japanese in the supermarkets and department stores in the city.
I don't need to tell you what happened in 2020, you and I know that so well. But what I do need to tell you was that I was living in a 13 square meter subdivided flat, working at a job that asked for 100 ideas of mine and used none, and was watching the city fall apart in teargas, bricks and umbrellas.
With my energy levels drained, I needed something to get me through the day. Milk tea wasn't doing it for my energy levels (or my wallet), and I couldn't stand the bitter taste of coffee nor the roar of the office coffee machine in the morning. So one day, after a night of internet rabbit-holing, on an indulgent grocery trip to one of the more fancy supermarkets in town, I bought a tiny tin of green matcha.
Matcha is green tea, but green tea isn't necessarily matcha. The tea plant is grown under shade, so it has a high amount of antioxidants and a substance called l-theanine, supposedly good for anxiety, stress and insomnia. The leaves are harvested, steamed, dried and ground to a fine powder, so you end up consuming whole leaves instead of water flavoured from them, which gives you much more of that antioxidant goodness and the l-theanine I felt I needed.
The bamboo whisk was easy enough to get. There were lots of dollar stores around in the city, selling all sorts of cheap, cutesy Japanese products promising to improve your life in some small but efficient way, and I guess in my case, the whisk was no different (though it wasn't as cheap as the others) For the sieve, I was already making kefir (in another bid to improve my energy levels at work) so I had no problem getting myself a little metal sieve as well, which I could also use to filter out my little probiotic-laden kefir grains at home.
I brought the whisk, the sieve, the matcha tin and a bowl to the office early one morning. Poured hot water from the tap into the bowl and fought with the plastic packaging of the whisk. The tines slowly unfurled in the hot water and I gave it a good rinse until I couldn't smell the bamboo anymore, and dumped the water. Then, I opened the matcha tin.
A little puff of green went poof into the air, and it smelled... earthy. Like the smell after rain. A hint of floral, but nothing like a grass or seaweed aroma that I was cautioned about online. Scrambled to find a teaspoon, scrambled to avoid the creepy guy at the coffee machine, then sifted a careful teaspoon into the sieve and dried, empty bowl. Added some water, then started whisking in the "W" motion I learned from the videos I watched online.
It felt like I was a kid again, mixing "potions" out of muddy water and sticks. With the vibrant green and the foamy bubbles forming on top, if only my grey Ikea bowl was a small black cauldron instead, the witchy aesthetic would have been complete (note to self: ask pottery friend if she can make a matcha bowl that resembles a cauldron).
I drank it straight from the bowl. Years later when I was at a matcha tasting in Kyoto, I would scoff at the white man telling his other friends to "hold it lower, you need to get the right angle". It was honestly not the best thing I've ever tasted. But it was interesting. I still find it hard to describe. It didn't taste like grass like what the internet says - then again, I have not eaten grass before - it was its own earthy, floral, slightly bittersweet thing. That day, when I looked at the clock for my daily 2PM crash, I was surprised to see it at 5PM instead.
This turned into a daily ritual at the office. Me happily in my corner whisking soft green bubbles while people queued up for the cranky old coffee machine. Once or twice I'd answer curious questions on what I was doing and why, once or twice I had to shake off a couple of racist assumptions instead (no surprise, creepy guy was one of them).
I slowly grew in this new hobby/lifestyle of mine. Learned that storing matcha in my office drawer wasn't a good idea when I opened my second tin to see how much greener it was compared to the yellow, oxidized old one. Kept a bamboo tray in my office drawer so I could more easily transport my hodgepodge matcha kit from my desk to the kitchen. Went to my first pottery class with friends and tried making my own matcha bowl which shrunk in the kiln. Bought a beautiful, more professionally crafted matcha bowl secondhand for 6 bucks. Tried matcha lattes outside but hated them - too sweet and they never tasted like the pure earthy goodness I could make at home.
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Things shifted in my life there. The kefir thing died out after my first trip back home after 1.5 years. But I managed to bring my precious matcha and whisked in hotel rooms using a plastic ramen bowl and a fork. Things improved, and I found myself one day, soon to leave the city for good, sitting at a Japanese omakase restaurant with my best friends.
Delicious didn't even begin to cover the food. The chef, waitress and my friends laughed and chatted about life in the city as he introduced and prepared all sorts of amazing dishes for us. When I heard there would be a matcha tasting after dinner, my ears perked right up, much to the amusement of my friends. They gleefully told the chef how much I loved matcha and I confessed how I'd indulge in it every day, whisk and bowl and everything. For a couple of matcha lattes outside you could buy a whole tin of matcha and make it yourself, and it'd be tastier and healthier, I declared. Both the chef and waitress were very amused by this and he offered to let us all whisk our own matcha (cue my friends whipping their heads towards me). I freaked - I had no idea if the method I was doing was authentic or not. No one taught me and I wasn't Japanese in the first place, cueing more laughter and ribbing from my Japanese friend there. If there was anyone qualified in that room about matcha, it was definitely the chef and not me! I begged him to teach me, and all of us, and he happily obliged.
Three bowls of bubbly, frothy matcha and three full stomachs later, we were ready to head out and bid goodbye to the chef and waitress. There was so much food, we didn't get to finish all of it - so the chef had made onigiri out of the leftovers and given them to us in little paper gift bags to take home. I was juggling bags at the elevator and passed one to my friend to hold while I sorted my jacket out - when a waiter ran out and said "miss, the bags are not the same, that one is for you."
Nestled next to the onigiri, there was a little packet of Japanese matcha sitting in my bag, with big bold letters proclaiming it was from the same town as our chef. My friend told me that making matcha was a very special thing to do, even for Japanese people, so the fact I did it every day made it even more special, and that's probably why he gave me that bag.
Years later, I've finished that packet. I've gone through tins and tins of both cheap and expensive matcha, a couple of bamboo whisks. Had the best matcha latte of my life from an award-winning barista in Xi'An, been to the Ippodo tea house in Kyoto and had wagashi together with my first koicha.
But to this day, that little bag of matcha was the best matcha I've ever tasted.
(and so was the onigiri!)