an Afternoon on LSD.
Earlier this year, I decided to bring the rite of afternoon tea into my 1250 square foot apartment in the Gold Coast. At the time, the wounds of walking out of my home in the burbs and the ex-husband who lived there were still fresh and barely cauterized. I was spending far too many hours hiding underneath my desk, feeling sorry for myself while I bit down on my fingers to stifle my patheticism (i.e., I didn’t want my brother fretting over his older sister coming apart at the seams). Hosting guests inside the confines of my apartment within the built-in structure of a traditional tea offered a social exercise that even my own fragile psyche could undertake.
By my side, of course, was my sister-in-law. She helped me to navigate the sometimes inscrutable swells of social etiquette (“Unni, you can only invite four people, but you cannot NOT invite [insert name of girl] if you invite [insert name of other girl].”) and made sure the place was otherwise presentable (“Unni, you need to clean your room and we need the flowers for the tea party — maybe some hydrangeas?”). Mostly, I think she was there to keep me from losing my nerve altogether, to prevent me from closing up shop and shutting the doors to my home and heart prematurely.
YJ has always known, instinctively, how much women need other women.
Perhaps this is why she is so choosey with whom she shares herself. Lucky for me, I am her “unni” and thus I’m sort of grandfathered into her “inner circle.” Other women are not so fortunate; though she is incapable of being cold (at least, I’ve never witnessed it), she employs whatever excuse she has at her lovely long fingertips — language barrier, cultural disparities, “wife duties,” or just plain shyness — to maintain a level of detachment that is almost undetectable to the unobservant. As such, it was not surprising to me the level of attention she gave to deriving each month’s guest list.
What she could not know (or perhaps she did in that natural way of hers) was how carefully I poured over each month’s guest list myself. Of utmost importance, to me, was filling each afternoon with a group of women that my sister-in-law liked. I reminded myself that however hard it was for me to leave my home for an apartment that was roughly 30 miles away, I was living with a young woman who left her mother, father, cousins, friends and the only home she’d ever known for an apartment that was more than 10,000 miles away. However brave and beautiful she appeared to be when the sun slanted across her face during the afternoon, I could only imagine the moments of doubt and sheer loneliness that clawed at her resolve when our golden afternoons dissolved into night.
Writing this now, I think of what YJ would say — ”Unni, I was never lonely! You were lonely! The teas parties were for YOU!” There is certainly a kernel of truth to this. Part of my motivation for hosting these teas was to distract myself. It was an attempt to put one step in front of the other, only because I knew — intellectually — that stepping forward was the right thing to do. You see, I really didn’t give a fuck about making friends, being social, or building my own convoluted version of Carrie Bradshaw, et al. But I’d often read that girlfriends were a good thing to have in one’s life, so I figured I might as well give it a college try.
Sometimes, you put yourself on auto-pilot for awhile
because that’s the only kind of fuel you have left.
So, in January 2014, we invited four women into our home. We shared cake, cucumber sandwiches, white peach tea, and the kind of stories that I suspect only make an appearance when men do not. I like to believe I played the role of hostess well — my face smooth, my smile genuine, my food delicious; but, the truth is, I felt as though I were walking on a tightrope, with inertia and apathy on either side of me. How easy it would have been to slip off into some noiseless place inside my head while I watched these women walk the world without me from my safety net.
Instead, YJ and I came up with a new guest list for the following month’s tea party, with more interesting, fun, nice women. We devised a healthier menu — one that I cooked all by myself. With a few more of these under our belts, we drew up a couple cardinal rules: (a) always invite at least one new person; and (b) never re-invite anyone who fails to show. Eventually, we planned themed tea parties: a poolside tea (iced tea) during summer, a Korean tea for my birthday, a bridal tea for YJ’s bridal shower, and, most recently, an extrasensory tea for fall — we invited a psychic to read our tea leaves.
The women who came to my home remained eclectic and unique. But, most importantly, the ones who kept returning (the ones we kept inviting) knew to leave their insecurities and inhibitions at my doorstep. Girls — especially this Asian girl — can care too much about things like status and its proxies. But, we discarded our Chanel bags in favor of candid conversation. We stopped eyeing each other as women are wont to do (though they’ll die before admitting it) and started looking at each other, squarely, as we readily discussed the more joyously inane aspects of being a woman (think laser hair removal and pimple pills). The heart is a strange thing, you see. I think the thing that YJ taught me — in that charming way of hers — is that the heart wants to stay open, like a screen door in summer, the one that stays unlatched just in case your friends drop by for a bike ride or a cool breeze curls off the Lake.
This past Sunday, we hosted our psychic tea in my new apartment on Lake Shore Drive — the most well attended afternoon tea party, to date. I watched YJ over the rim of my cup of blueberry rooibos while she sipped quietly on her oolong. The ladies were discussing their readings. “My aura is rare — it means that I’m strong and blunt and don’t ever worry about anything.” “I’m going to have three children in the next five years — how is that even possible? I don’t want twins.” “How the heck did she know I was going on vacation in a few weeks??”
And just as suddenly, I realized that at some point, these women — these amazing, kind, beautiful, talented women — had turned into my safety net.
