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East Meets West  

    The clientele doesn't come for the food anyway. Great Leap is tucked away in an alley far enough away from the action of a touristy hutong makeover, as Setzer points out, to guarantee that "people won't just drop in here because it's handy. Tired shoppers and casual partyers are not going to be wandering the hutongs looking for us." The beer is about to find its way to the fans however. Setzer's second brew pub will be near China's best known tourist destination. The Great Leap of the Great Wall will open in the fall of 2011, equipped to produce 250-gallon batches and gleefully awaited by local eating and drinking establishments with whom the couple have cut deals.

    It is both an act of defiance and of acceptance to lounge in the Great Leap's walled garden or in its cheeky Pre-Reform China interior décor. On the surface everyone's there because they like quality beer and a taproom atmosphere, but pub culture, as a version of "slow culture," is reason enough. Even in winter customers pick their way through the snow and along the narrow alleys to hunker down in the Great Leap. "The government has made living in this area fairly comfortable, the water, the natural gas, the electricity are all subsidized, because for the most part residents here are property rich, cash poor," Setzer points out. But there are elements intent on total modernization, including those who would replace real hutongs with convenience-bolstered replicas or worse: opposing them are many different international and local groups desperately promoting preservation, and a handful of local politicians who have a different version of progress. "It's an exciting place to be and an exciting time to be here," the brewer admits, "but that's the biggest risk."

    Charlene Wang is another American brewster who beat her organizational dependency, in this case for the pursuit of the perfect leaf. Her new company's opening pitch, "distractingly good teas," is actually the core of her story, and, like Carl Setzer, the writing was on the wall before she quit her day job. She admits while working at the American embassy in Beijing, "In the middle of a Foreign Affairs Dept. meeting all I could think about was, gee, this is really great tea." Wang had studied international development at all-female Wellesley College, and after graduation joined the US Foreign Service. Her career eventually brought her to China's capital, but by 2005 she already knew that all bureaucracies dampen creativity and dynamism. One last hurrah came in 2009 when she took a dream job she'd worked hard to get with the State Dept. in Washington. She is grateful for all she learned with her employer, but lasted only eight months before realizing she wanted to be back in Beijing, and on her own terms. The 30 year old actually has a trinity of motives for being an entrepreneur; it's the tea, her social enterprise ambitions, and that greatest of plan-spoilers, love.

    An extremely early convert to the beverage, she admits to being nerdy enough by age 10 to subscribe to Victoria magazine, a glossy for the 40-something demographic in the grip of high nostalgia. Her Chinese-American parents accustomed her to other aspects of Chinese food culture. Personal travel and professional development in tea culture consisted of fact-finding trips to tea-producing regions of Sri Lanka and India, and master classes at the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas. "Tea is about where it is grown, how it is prepared, how it's consumed," says Wang who today has a characteristically Chinese tutoring arrangement – unstructured but intense – with a local tea master.

    When she tasted some of the best teas China had to offer, the questions were obvious: why are all the famous gourmet teas French, British, Japanese and German, when none of these are tea-growing regions? Why do Chinese hotels offer low-end foreign teas in the suites? Kudos to the Starwood Hotel chain (think Westin) for carrying good Jing brand teas, but why a British brand in their Chinese properties? Wang had her China mission cut out for her: build a company that would showcase Chinese teas. Wang has hunted down teas and producers of quality: a white for its subtle sweetness and storage practices; an organic green for the fidelity of the producer's definition, a fall-harvest oolong, a black for its richness and depth, and a Pu'er for the wild 700-year-old trees that yield it.

    Tranquil Tuesdays is her business and she buys, packages, brands and sells these exquisite teas for the foreign gift, corporate gift, and custom-labeled markets, and carries related ceramic ware. Like Setzer, she has embraced an ancient beverage for its slow culture qualities. Kung Fu Cha, using the same descriptor as the martial arts school, means "focused" tea drinking; a whole afternoon may spent over a bottomless teapot, in boundless conversation. And like Great Leap, the private showroom and offices are in a hutong setting with the same perennial challenges: Wang buys bottled water in winter to get around the old neighborhood's frozen pipes.

    Before moving here with the State Dept. her experience of China consisted of a summer interning at the Legislative Council in Hong Kong the year the 2008 Olympic bid was won, and volunteer English teaching in a minority village in Guangxi. Wellesley alumna Wang was sensitized to women's issues, and had an interest in "social enterprise" before it got the clever title. But she had become disillusioned with the regular channels of bringing relief: grant writing for funds and report writing to justify how you spent them gobbled up eternities. However, work in remote areas of China re-awakened her interest. She hopes the tea and teaware business will become a revenue source for an entity that trains and employs rural women to develop their own potential. Wang has started by hiring a rural woman who came to Beijing to work as a casual domestic, and the new hire was soon handling orders and shipments when Wang was out of town, and has integrated afternoon English language classes into her duties.

    Women's empowerment issues have left room for romance in the life of the tea maven. "Tea is also about the places it brings you," she says, and that was back to China and her boyfriend – now fiancé – Tony Chen, an independent tour operator whom she had met only months before that last big job offer from Washington. "I realized I wanted to be with Tony," she smiles, "and I had made friends here when I worked with the embassy; China is where I wanted to be if I was taking a big risk."

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VOL.59 NO.12 December 2010 Advertise on Site Contact Us