FROM TEA TO COFFEE BY CHENG WANG
“Actual lives flow more like a gentle stream, as opposed to the torrent experienced for two hours sitting in a theater.”
This quietly potent line from Cheng Wang’s quietly potent memoir, From Tea to Coffee, expresses something quite true about human life. An autobiography is better sipped quietly in later years than drunk boastfully when young. The challenge, however, is to recover that peculiar intensity felt within each prior moment, and to recapture the essence of one’s personal perspective at the time. Cheng Wang – a Chinese youth during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, yet a profoundly insightful observer of his own conditioning, later an accomplished participant in American culture – excels at both. The result is a fascinating piece of literature exploring the vast similarities and differences between peoples divided by more than just an ocean.
Uniquely qualified, Cheng Wang offers penetrating insights and visceral appreciation for two distinctive cultural alternatives. He has lived and imbibed completely the flavors of both. From Tea to Coffee introduces readers to the rarely glimpsed and mostly misunderstood social phenomenon known as The Cultural Revolution – when intellectual grooming was forsaken for the ideals of agrarian inculturation. Contrary to intrinsic Western indoctrination, such grounding was not just a despot’s attempt at political control, but also a profoundly enlightening and practical experience for the young. Perhaps imbalanced, and therefore needing future societal adjustment, the historical transformation did produce individuals like Cheng Wang, who now invests our own understanding of societal imbalance with lessons learned by one who knows. Just so, we become immersed in our own life-altering streams.
C. WANG
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