Steeped in the Past, Living in the Present: Patricia Kelly’s Journey Home
Written as a student of Creative Nonfiction at Deerfield Academy
A tea plantation in China. Photo: Alamy
In Hangzhou, the lush, voluptuous mountains are peppered with ladies picking long jing tea. A dry zephyr traipses across their curvaceous slopes, flitting through loose peaty soil and tumbling down misty bamboo groves. Hunched over rows of leaves, women in traditional straw hats and embroidered white jackets look like tiny, puffy dolls wading in a serene sea of rolling green.
Here, Patricia Kelly is surrounded by idyllic beauty. This is one of Deerfield Academy’s Assistant Library Director’s favorite places, which she visited in 1997, on her second trip to China with orthopedic surgeon Thomas Pagedas and his wife. At summer’s peak, Kelly fell in love with Hangzhou, just as she had with Inner Mongolia nine years before, and just as she would with Xi’an five years later. With its shimmering West Lake and canals traversed by twelve thousand swan-like pagoda bridges, its perfumed courtesans and affected poet governors, Hangzhou is best compared to Venice. In the thirteenth century, Hangzhou so dazzled intrepid Italian explorer Marco Polo that he called Hangzhou “a city of heaven — the finest and most splendid city in the world.”
Today, it is easy to see how Hangzhou’s glossy ultramarine lakes, rustic mountain carvings, and scarlet pagodas atop golden dragon boats have inspired poets, musicians, and artists for over two thousand years. But to Kelly, the main attraction is not the shining lake but the tea mountains that once slaked the thirst of parched kings.
In the humid June heat, Kelly, wearing black Birkenstock clogs with caramel tights, stands at the foot of the mountains. She basks in their pristine strength, reveres their immaculate beauty. It is this image of her I see sixteen years later on a postcard on her desk, with the Chinese characters for Yangtze River, Zhong Guo Chang Jiang, in a calligraphic scrawl: a younger Kelly, with creased maps in her hands and wild dreams in her eyes. I am in her office now, surrounded by dusty tomes on Chinese culture and library studies, asking her about her seminal trip. She nestles sideways into a firm leather couch as her eyes mist with memory while she recounts standing engulfed by “the intensity of color, of green” of sinuous tea bushes. Her chestnut bob of hair nods, “The green reminded me of Ireland and Deerfield, which made me feel at home.”
Kelly told me that growing tea, a five-thousand-year-old tradition from Yan Dynasty Healer-Emperor Shen Nong, is both beautiful and precise. Legend says Shen Nong, whose name means “Divine Farmer,” was sitting under a Camellia tree drinking his daily ablution of boiled water when an errant leaf toppled in. Shen Nong so loved the refreshing hot concoction that he created one of the enduring symbols of China, and one of the seven traditional necessities of Chinese life. In fact, Tang Dynasty poet Lu Tong once wrote in “Seven Bowls of Tea” that tea, a divine elixir, made him “one with the immortal, feathered spirits.”
If Kelly’s knowledge of Chinese culture seems extraordinary, it is. With China’s twenty-first-century rise, many Americans have started speaking stiffly accented Mandarin, touring China’s neon-lit skyscrapers, and immersing themselves in bubbly Chinese pop. Over forty years ago, Kelly recognized China as a sleeping dragon. First introduced to Asian cultures while taking a course — Non-Western Cultures — at Frontier Regional High School in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, Kelly was instantly mesmerized by the East’s colorful language and ancient history, subtle nuances and peaceful religion. As she poured over Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, Kelly imagined eleventh-century Japanese court life. Flipping the pages, she pictured the delicate, fire-hearted lady-in-waiting who had penned the first novel in the world. She read periodical guides and note cards, and wrote self-initiated papers on Sri Lankan Kandyan dances to Cambodian Mahayana Buddhism. Later, Kelly divulges her teacher Robert Denesha’s pivotal role in stoking her passion: “I was a shy student, so I didn’t speak in class very often, but . . . sometimes I got onto something, and he just let me go. He allowed me to speak my mind without barricading it, and this I will always remember.”
While Kelly’s high school class was taught in English, her late mother relentlessly encouraged her to learn Chinese, as both a student of history and the world. “My parents encouraged me to think of different avenues for my college preparation, and . . . distinguish myself from others,” Kelly explains. By coincidence, Kelly’s United States History teacher George Bluh, a graduate of the Monterey School of International Studies in California, had been a Chinese language interpreter for the Army. For a year, Kelly visited Bluh’s rambling hilltop house for private lessons and, in 1988, accompanied him to China for the first time. Together, the duo traversed the nation, dancing and singing throaty folk songs of friendship and family with Guilin villagers, celebrating Fourth of July on Inner Mongolia’s rolling grasslands, and savoring Guangzhou’s national dish — gui ling gao, a bitter black jelly. Penny Robbins, Kelly’s friend and colleague at Deerfield, describes Kelly’s travels, “One of the things that makes Kelly a perceptive traveler is that she is an extraordinary listener — she truly hears — and considers what she hears. That ability is rarer than you might think. Kelly listens and remembers.”
As an army brat, Kelly absorbed a steady diet of culture and travel. She was born in Augsburg, Germany, on January 7, 1954, and moved back to America a year later, but her parents’ love for travel continued to fuel her exotic dreams. For the first ten years of her life, she, her parents, and her five siblings moved around the East Coast, from Boston to Washington, D.C. In 1964, she reached West Deerfield, which was equidistant between her parents’ families, and they bought a hillside farm to call home.
Kelly was introduced to Japan through a delicate teacup, which a military policeman and his wife had brought home from Japan. It was a relic from an untouched world, a whisper from a foreign land, which she finally answered, making her first trip to Japan in 1998. In Japan, she continued to experience the exquisite balance of old and new that had already permeated her life and travels. Her small hands float upward as she describes her trip in 2012 as a chaperone for the Toin International Exchange Student Program, “We traveled by bullet train to the ancient capitals, Kyoto and Nara, where we took a seven-storied escalator to the rooftop gardens.” Adjacent to the glassy steel hulk was Sanjūsangen-dō, the twelfth-century Hall of Lotus King Temple, sheltering a thousand Japanese cypress statues of the Thousand-Armed Guanyin, whose clasped hands radiate light in prayer. Her student and travel companion Shanisha Coram commented, “While Kelly was a chaperone on the trip, she was like a peer to us.” Although a generation older than Coram, Kelly had beautifully transcended the boundaries of age.
As a college student, Kelly pursued Chinese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and graduated in 1976. When asked what motivated her to major in Chinese, Kelly said, “I love its organization, calligraphy, and tonal language, because you have to be careful about how you say things or you will convey the wrong meaning.” She adored the simple elegance of sweeping brushstrokes and its nuance, how a shift in tone would change a word’s meaning entirely.
Two years after graduating from college, Kelly joined two hundred other staff members at Deerfield Academy. This year is her thirty-fifth here. While she continues to kindle passion for historic Asian cultures at Deerfield by collaborating with history teacher Mary Ellen Friends in her Asian Civilizations class, Kelly admits the school has nudged her toward a modern perspective. Her life at Deerfield is a mix of old and new, digital and ritual. With her oldest brother Joseph’s help, Kelly taught herself computer science, and began cataloging books and databases for students using the latest technologies. In 1991, she purchased a computer system, mapped all the server spots in the library, and pioneered Deerfield’s online catalog even before its Information and Technology Services existed. But as she explores her love for Chinese culture in Hangzhou, she is again immersed in ritual — in the ritual of tea, and in the ancient rhythms of the whispering emerald mountains.
In Hangzhou, China’s tea capital, the best long jing, or Dragon Well tea, is gathered several days before the Tomb Sweeping Festival — the fifteenth day from the Spring Equinox. In ancient times, this grade of tea was reserved for the imperial family, and prepared with a craftsman’s care. Only the most skilled ladies of Hangzhou’s tea mountains pluck thirty-thousand delicate leaves per day, which are then adeptly flattened along the vein in a hot wok, giving them their distinctive shape and roasted aroma, brewed in one-hundred- and-eighty-degree water for exactly two minutes, and served in formal tea ceremonies. In 1997, Kelly got her first taste of this delicate royal beverage that was imbued “with a tinge of sweetness.” In this era of one-hundred-and-forty-character instant messaging and ready-made French fries, the ritual of growing Dragon Well tea sharply contrasts with our harried lives. Growing tea is like reading a book in the grass. It is a sensory library — a way to steep ourselves in the past, while living in the present.
Kelly is in her office now, surrounded by all the things that she loves. She is curled up in her desk chair, staring out gray tinted windows, periodically sipping from a blue-and-white floral teacup that fits snugly in her small, map-weathered hands. There is a distant look in her eyes today, and one can see that her mind is climbing a Chinese mountaintop twelve thousand miles away. At last, she is home.
