The Power of Tea

The ritual of drinking tea can connect people to one another and their ancestral past. Author Ann Tashi Slater will talk about the essential role of tea in her Tibetan family’s life—historically, spiritually, and socially. Her great-grandfather owned a Darjeeling tea estate, her grandmother drank butter tea with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama in Lhasa, and generations of her family have forged bonds over tea in their ancestral home in Darjeeling. Slater will share family stories and images related to the power of tea and will read from “Teatime in Darjeeling,” her essay about reconnecting with her Tibetan roots.

Following Slater’s reading, she will be joined by writer Tenzin Dickie for a conversation and Q&A. Audience members can share their own tea stories and will receive a copy of “Teatime in Darjeeling” to take home.

Tea generously donated by Cusa Tea

About the Speakers

Ann Tashi Slater’s work has been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Tin House, AGNI, and Huffington Post, among others. Her writing also appears in American Dragons: Twenty-Five Asian American Voices (HarperCollins) and Women in Clothes (Penguin). She is currently working on a memoir about a mother-daughter pilgrimage to her ancestral homeland that explores identity and family legacy, dialogue across generations and borders, and the responsibility of individual and collective memory. A longtime resident of Tokyo, she teaches at a Japanese university.

Tenzin Dickie is a writer and translator. Her edited anthology Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet was published in 2017. She’s a 2018–2019 Fulbright fellow in Kathmandu. She is currently an editor at The Treasury of Lives biographical encyclopedia.