U.S.A.
December 21, 2015
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 11
The power of tea
By Ivy Ashe
Hawai’i Tribune-Herald
ILO, Hawai’i (AP) — On the
second-story
porch
of
his
Papaikou home, Mike Longo
poured steaming tea from a small glass
pitcher into a set of cylindrical porcelain
cups painted pale yellow.
“You don’t want to waste a good oolong,”
Longo said, passing the cups — called
aroma cups — around the table. Each was
capped with what looked like a miniature
bowl flared like a bell: a tasting cup. All at
the table held their aroma-and-tasting-
cup combination between their thumb and
middle finger, and flipped it upside down
with a wrist flick.
It was the third time the oolong had been
poured out, and after everyone carefully
separated their two cups so the liquid
spilled into the tasting portion, Rob
Nunally took note of the scents lingering in
the aroma cup. It was stronger than the
previous two pours, he said. Cinnamon
tones, with a little peppermint. A Christ-
mas tea.
People lifted their tasting cups, and
sipped the perfectly-brewed oolong, which
tasted not like spice but flowers.
Tea, the second-most popular beverage
in the world after water, is a showcase for
the possibility contained in the shiny,
serrated leaves of Camellia sinensis, part
of the evergreen tree family. White tea,
black tea, green tea, oolong tea: it all comes
from the same source.
This is one of the first things Longo and
Nunally point out to guests who visit their
1.5-acre certified organic tea farm,
Onomea Tea Company, and one they say
consistently blows visitors away.
“When people say tea, at least in the
U.S., they have kind of a generic under-
standing of it ... something that’s brewed
with hot water,” Nunally said. “But really,
tea should be just from Camellia sinensis,
not herbal (plants) like chamomile, mint.”
And even after 12 years of farming, of
experimenting with Camellia sinensis
seedlings and cuttings from around the
world, trying to find the plants that will
yield a smooth drink both flavorful and
aromatic, Longo and Nunally themselves
are still impressed by the power of the tea
plant.
They began growing in 2003, four years
after buying a stunning expanse of former
sugarcane land above Onomea Bay. The
original property deed hangs in their
living room, beneath a framed black-and-
white photo of the old sugar flume passing
high over the land.
At first, the plan was to grow daylilies,
building on Longo’s success as a daylily
hybridizer on the mainland. They brought
800 different varieties to Hawai’i upon
returning to the Big Island.
The elevation did not agree with the
flowers.
“Ninety-nine percent of them didn’t
bloom, or bloomed very sporadically,”
Longo said.
But they wanted to grow something. The
land was zoned for agriculture, and, being
along the Hamakua coast, had an estab-
lished heritage the men wanted to pro-
mote. Longo, whose father was a nursery
man, had a background in organic garden-
ing. Nearly all of the pieces were there.
Neither knew anything about tea —
Nunally used to work in technology sales
and Longo is a semi-retired chiropractor —
other than that they liked to drink it. But
one day while drinking Earl Grey, Nunally
became curious about what tea plants
actually look like. A Google search turned
up Camellia sinensis, and the intriguing
fact that it was a subtropical plant.
The same week, Longo and Nunally
heard that United States Department of
Agriculture scientist Francis Zee, who was
H
OVERCOMING ANEURYSM. Maile Yamanaka sings and plays the ukulele while teaching hula at the
Shipman House Bed & Breakfast in Hilo, Hawai’i. Yamanaka, 65, studied under the late kumu hula Margaret
Maiki Souza Aiu Lake. She’s taught hula all around the Big Island. She’s taught programs on Oahu, including
one at Halawa Correctional Facility. (Hollyn Johnson/Hawai’i Tribune-Herald via AP)
A love of hula: Kumu overcomes
aneurysm to continue teaching
By Ivy Ashe
Hawai’i Tribune-Herald
ILO, Hawai’i (AP) — Late
afternoon light was fading to
pastel when the class began. The
wide front porch of the Shipman House
Bed & Breakfast looks out over a green
canopy of trees, with Hilo Bay barely
visible through the foliage.
“So. Let’s do hula,” Maile Yamanaka
said. She stood braced by a walker,
swaying back and forth as she began to
chant in a powerful, sonorous voice that
carried far beyond the porch.
Yamanaka, 65, was trained by the late
Margaret Maiki Souza Aiu Lake (Aunty
Maiki) alongside kumu such as Robert
Cazimero. She’s taught hula all around the
Big Island. She’s taught programs on
Oahu, including one at Halawa
Correctional Facility.
“It was an experience, let me tell you,”
Yamanaka said. “I was really impressed
with the guys.”
For more than 10 years, she’s also been
kumu hula at the Shipman House. But for
the past several classes, one thing has
been different.
Yamanaka walked the small group —
just three people — through a couple of
turns, then began to settle herself onto a
blue cushion, a simple task made more
difficult by the immobile prosthetic she
wore on her right leg.
“It’s not flexible,” Yamanaka said as she
removed the prosthetic entirely, putting it
to the side and sitting cross-legged. She
picked up an ipu heke and began to sing
again.
Last New Year’s Eve, Yamanaka went to
the hospital with a burst aortic aneurysm
and was misdiagnosed with sciatica. She
remembers being told to see her doctor the
next day.
But Yamanaka went back to the
hospital, where the severity of the matter
was at last recognized. She was flown to
Honolulu, where she stayed until Labor
Day.
“Just last month, the surgeon says life
expectancy for a burst aortic aneurysm: six
hours,” she said. “And I didn’t make it to
Honolulu for 16 hours.” She folded her
hands in front of her.
“I am blessed,” Yamanaka said. “I am
lucky, I am most fortunate.” Her right leg
had to be amputated just above the ankle.
There was no circulation to the area, she
said; instead, there was gangrene, and
maggots.
An Air Force veteran, Yamanaka
qualifies for certain health benefits with
the United States Department of Veterans
Affairs, but her prosthesis is, she says, a
“preliminary, temporary foot.”
Even with the preliminary foot, which is
shorter than a real foot but still capable of
H
bearing weight, she returned to Shipman
to teach hula. There’s no fee for classes,
just donations dropped into a woven
lauhala basket. It was for love of hula that
Yamanaka came back.
It is, she often tells Shipman House
owner Barbara Anderson, the highlight of
the week. Yamanaka lives at HOPE
Services Hilo and doesn’t drive anymore,
not with her temporary foot.
Ideally, she said, she’d like a “hula foot.”
“I cannot dance,” Yamanaka said. But,
she added, “I’m really good at the tell-story
stuff, the talk-story stuff, so I compen-
sate.” That harkens back to her early days
when she returned to hula as a young
woman. She started as a child, but when
her teacher moved away, there were no
more classes.
“Hula was my enjoyment,” she said. “I
didn’t have hula (again) until college.”
Yamanaka attended Grinnell College in
Iowa for two years.
“I had to learn how to wear shoes,” she
said.
During a fundraiser put on by the
Hawai’i Club, she was asked to perform
hula, but couldn’t remember auana or
hapa haole. All she could remember were
the chants.
She took that as a sign that she should
go back to Hawai’i and begin her hula edu-
cation again. Yamanaka looked for some-
one to teach her kahiko, and eventually
was connected with Aunty Maiki.
“I was 19, 20, yeah?” Yamanaka said.
“And all the ladies were 50-plus; I was the
youngest of them all. I got chairs to the
tutus, food to the tutus, made all their lei,
made all their costumes. Aunty Maiki
called it Gracious Ladies.”
“They knew all their words, all the
songs, they can write the songs for all the
musicians, but the thing is, yeah, these
ladies couldn’t dance because they were
not flexible,” Yamanaka said. “The most
important thing is talk story, what comes
from your experience. that’s how I learned
hula. Gracious Lady style, tutu style.”
When Aunty Maiki began to teach the
next generation of kumu hula, kahiko
classes were $100 per month. Yamanaka
knew she had to take the class, and worked
three jobs to afford the lessons.
The hula community was like family,
she said.
Yamanaka remembered competitions
and performances, and working to master
the chants so she wouldn’t be asked to
leave the classes she loved.
When she started teaching, it was
“casual this and casual that,” she said.
Anderson, W.H. Shipman’s great-grand-
daughter, owns the B&B with her hus-
band, Gary, and began offering hula clas-
ses at the historic house in the late 1990s.
Her great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth
Continued on page 13
AWARD-WINNING TEA. Rob Nunally holds
a tea leaf at the Onomea Tea Company farm in
Papaikou, Hawai’i. Tea, the second-most popular
beverage in the world after water, is a showcase for
the possibility contained in the shiny, serrated leaves
of Camellia sinensis, part of the evergreen tree family.
White tea, black tea, green tea, oolong tea: it all co-
mes from the same source. (Hollyn Johnson/Hawai’i
Tribune-Herald via AP)
leading an effort to diversify Hawai’i’s
agricultural economy, would soon give
cuttings and seeds to anyone who wanted
to try growing tea.
“So, OK, this is a sign,” Longo said. “And
we discovered they grew very well here.”
Attempts were made to develop Hawai’i
tea beginning in the late 1800s, but those
focused on creating a commodity market
that ultimately could not compete against
the global tea powerhouses of China,
Japan, and India.
“Not until the interest in specialty tea
came about did it make sense to be able to
produce tea in Hawai’i,” Nunally said.
“You really have to specialize. Hawai’i
should have a reputation of high-quality
clean agricultural products.”
With help from Zee and Kang Fang, a
Taiwanese tea man who visited the farm
several times and helped Longo and
Nunally get the right processing equip-
ment, Onomea Tea Company was on its
way.
Fang’s visits, as well as a trip made to
Taiwan in 2009, were instrumental in
solidifying the tea routine, from picking to
processing to packaging.
The middle step is crucial. It’s there that
Camellia sinensis becomes green, black, or
oolong depending on whether it’s cooked,
left to wither longer, or tossed so that the
leaves bruise. Nunally and Longo prepare
almost all of their tea orthodox style,
meaning the whole, unbroken leaves are
used.
“We could do it, but (Fang) helped us
fine-tune our process,” Longo said. Still,
the first two years came with a steep
learning curve because of the variability
inherent to tea plants.
“Tea grows differently in every terroir,”
Nunally said.
Like wine, tea is heavily influenced by
regional characteristics. Part of Hawai’i’s
terroir comes from the volcanoes — tea
loves to grow in acidic soils.
“There’s a similarity in many of the teas
grown here,” Longo said. “The black teas
have a certain similarity no matter where
they’re grown, volcano or here. There is a
Hawai’i note, and that’s what we’re trying
to establish with all the tea growers here.”
In November, during the first-ever Teas
of the United States (TOTUS) tasting
competition, the Onomea-grown entries
picked up awards in six of the nine
categories they entered, including a
first-place green tea.
The competition, organized by volcano
tea grower Eva Lee, featured blind tast-
ings and was intended as a showcase of the
developing market for American-grown
tea. TOTUS entrants came from ten
states.
Hawai’i earned the most awards.
“Hawai’i is a great place for tea,” Longo
said. “We’d like to see a lot more small
farms, not conglomerates. Hawai’i can be a
viable place for this.”
Continued on page 13