Indian Take Out Summary

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As I walked into the tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I felt a sense of excitement. I sat down and ordered my favorite tea, tieguanyin. Tieguanyin is the variety of Chinese oolong tea that I drank a lot as a child in China. The waiter came by with my drink and I took my first sip, full of expectations. The sense of excitement I felt walking into the shop quickly turned into sorrow. Not only did it not taste the same, I did not feel the same fondness that I felt drinking the tea in China. Growing up, I would visit China every summer because for most of my childhood my dad lived in China, apart from me and my mom. My dad and I had a tradition of visiting tea shops and brewing our own tea at home basically everyday. While most of the adults …show more content…

Whenever I see tieguanyin tea on the menu of these shops, I order it just because it is afterall, my favorite tea. The tea is far from bad, but I don’t get the same the feeling of joy and comfort as I did in China. The author of “Indian Take Out”, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about a similar experience she had about food from her home country. She felt closer to the spices her and her family purchased from India in contrast to the spices available at her local supermarket. She never explicitly explains why she feels that way, but from my experience, I can say that a big portion of eating is the experience. For the author, Lahiri, there was this excitement her and her family had while in India. She was able to eat foods that her parents grew up eating. There was also a sense of thrill as they smuggled spices over to the states. She lost all those feelings when her family stopped that tradition and resorted to buying traditional Indian foods from the supermarket. I understand why Lahiri left her last paragraph kind of ambiguous. When I first read her last paragraph, I questioned why she felt sad. I get it now. There are many reasons and a lot of it is hard to say. When I drink tea from tea shops in San Francisco, I feel empty. There’s a part of me that longs to be in the environment that I was in when I fell in love with this

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