Currently, we are a husband wife operated and owned business, but we didn’t start that way.
Over twenty years ago, I went to Taiwan for kung fu. I stayed for tea.
That's not the whole story, but it's the true part, and it's where everything that matters begins.
The Now or Never
I was twenty-four years old, working two jobs in Seattle, and I couldn't picture my future. Everyone around me had an answer ready — a title, a plan, a ten-year trajectory. I had nothing. Just a blank picture that wouldn't develop, and the growing certainty that I was running out of time to do something about it.
I'd spent a year in Taiwan as a student, studying Mandarin, and something had stuck with me from that year. A way of living. A different frequency. I didn't understand it, but I'd felt it — the way you feel a warm current in a cold lake. And some part of me had filed the location away.
So I did the math. If I went back to Taiwan to train seriously — to really throw myself at it, with no job and no plan — I could give it a good number of years before responsibility and inertia caught up with me. By twenty-eight, I'd have to come home and be an adult. So it was now, at twenty-four, or it was never. The window wasn't going to stay open politely.
Now or never. I've never trusted a thought so completely.
I bought a ticket. I packed my possessions into a van, sold what was left at a garage sale, and moved to Tainan with a suitcase full of used cowboy boots. I had no idea what I was looking for, only that I had to look.
The Discovery
I found a kung fu school — that was the original mission. But within weeks of arriving, something else started happening. A teacher I'd met introduced me to tea. Not tea as a beverage, but tea as a philosophy. A way of seeing.
I remember the first time we drove up into the mountains to meet a tea farmer. My teacher had given me one instruction: eat something substantial first, because we're going to drink a lot of tea. At the farm, we tasted his collection. My teacher said nothing, gave no reaction. Then the farmer, reading that he had a serious buyer, brought out a batch he'd been saving — something close to thirty pounds of premium oolong. My teacher's eyes lit up. He bought the entire batch.
I was shocked. I asked him why.
"This tea will never exist again," he said. "Not this one. You could chase it forever and never reproduce it, because the conditions that made it are already gone. Better to secure it now."
He explained that the great teas are not commodities. They're events. Knowing one when you taste it is the entire skill.
That sentence has stayed with me for more than twenty years. It's the philosophy that everything I've built since has rested on.
The Education
After that, I found my way to a teahouse in the heart of Tainan. The owner ran a corner table where tea people gathered — masters, collectors, serious drinkers. At first, I was an outsider. But I kept showing up, kept asking to learn, and over years, something shifted.
He let me sit at his table. He let me watch him brew. And most importantly, he let me stay.
What I learned at that corner table couldn't have been taught in any formal way. It was absorbed. He brewed in a style that left no room for error — a shallow tray of pale sand from his home islands, arranged like a garden, arranged so that a single spill would announce itself immediately to everyone at the table. He never spilled. I spilled constantly. I remember the wet stain spreading across that carefully composed sand, the session stopping, knowing that everything that looked simple was not simple.
It took years of practice to learn to pour without destroying the composition.
But the real lesson was different. He rarely taught anything directly. When I'd ask what tea we were drinking, he'd say: "Test tea. It's a test." He never gave me the answer. He made me taste without a name, without a label to hang on the experience. He taught me that learning tea wasn't about accumulating answers — it was about chasing the thing itself, endlessly, never quite landing on it.
And he taught me about community. In the kung fu world, there had been hierarchy, rank, seriousness. Here there was humor, ease, the kind of people who made me feel like myself. At some point I made a choice: I stopped trying to belong to the world that didn't fit and gave my time to the people who were good to be around.
That was the straight line. Not a destination, but a direction. And I had finally found the people walking it.
Why This Matters
The tea world taught me that the things worth doing require time. Real understanding requires repetition, failure, humility. It taught me that community matters more than credentials. That taste — real taste — is built by paying attention, by refusing easy answers, by sitting with the thing until it reveals itself.
And it taught me that tea is never just tea. It's a conversation between a farmer who knows his mountain, a producer who respects the leaf, and a drinker willing to pay attention. It's history, geography, season, intention — all of it held in a single cup.
When I moved back to Oregon and started J-TEA, it was because I wanted to bring that understanding home. To give people access not just to remarkable tea, but to the story behind it. To the relationships. To the philosophy that makes tea matter.
That's what the Tea Club is. It's not a transaction. It's an invitation into that corner table I found in Tainan — into the conversation between the mountains and you, mediated by people who've spent decades learning to listen.
