She Was Not Born a Hero

For Volume One, MULAN JOURNAL decided not to write about celebrities. The three people in this piece are entirely ordinary: a tea maker, a restaurateur, a restorer of objects. They share exactly one thing — they have made "uncertainty" their daily life.

The Woman Who Has Made Tea for Ten Years

She entered the tea trade at thirty-four, having worked before in export documentation. In her first year she drank roughly eight hundred infusions, "half of them bad." That, she says, is how judgement is accumulated: you have to know what is bad before you can know what is good.

The turn came in her third year. That spring, she went to the tea mountains herself for the first time and stayed forty days, watching how the pickers picked and how the masters fired. When she came back she made a decision: no blending, only single-origin.

The cost of that decision was two full years with her income cut in half. She tells it calmly: "What I was thinking about was not whether I could earn. It was that if I kept blending, I would never again be able to say where this cup came from."

Today she works with six stable tea gardens and sells only four or five teas a year, each in small quantity. When customers ask why she does not make a few more, she says: "One more tea means a little less time on the mountain."

The Woman on Her Third Restaurant

Her first restaurant took three years to turn a profit. When she opened the second, she thought she understood the business — and it lost money harder than the first. Before the third, she did something counterintuitive: she cut the entire menu in half.

"I realised that what I took for our signatures were simply the dishes I liked to eat. The three most ordered by customers were three others — and I had never taken those three seriously."

• Her first ruleDo not ask a customer whether the food is good. Ask whether they would order it again. The first is politeness; the second is data.
• Her second ruleIn a meeting, raise only three things, then end it. More than three, and not one of them lands.
• Her third ruleClose for one month every year and let everyone go off and do something else, unpaid. That month, she says, is "letting the restaurant breathe."

On the day the third restaurant opened, she taped a sheet of paper to the door with a single line on it: No guests today. See you tomorrow.

From Accountant to Restorer of Objects

She spent twelve years as an accountant. The change began with a move: a lidded bowl she had used for years shattered inside a box. She could not bear to throw it away, so she searched online for someone who could repair it. What she found was that the craftspeople who do this work average over sixty years old.

She spent two years learning "kintsugi" — joining with raw lacquer, then covering the seams with gold powder. The hardest part, she says, is not the skill but the patience: "A bowl takes a month to repair, because every coat of lacquer has to dry before the next. You cannot hurry it. Whatever you hurry is ruined."

Her commissions now run eight months out. Most people who come to her are not repairing something valuable but something with memory: a soup bowl left by a grandmother, a cup received at a wedding, a piggy bank a child smashed.

She told one small story. A customer brought in a teacup broken into eleven pieces, and when it was done and she was paying, she cried. Asked why, the customer said: "It is not the cup I am sorry for. It is the years inside it."

I was not naturally gifted.
I simply had no way back.

Four Things They Have in Common

• One: start movingNone of the three thinks for long before beginning. Their accounts are remarkably alike: if you cannot think it clear, make a first version and then see what is wrong with it.
• Two: hold the long termEach has taken on something that requires a long wait: waiting for tea, for a restaurant, for lacquer to dry. Their patience is not temperament; it is a choice.
• Three: dare to cutEach has cut away something she was most reluctant to lose. Without cutting, no direction can grow.
• Four: say it aloudAll three articulate well. They can turn their judgement into a sentence someone else remembers — which is itself a capability.

A Last Note

"Mulan" is a name used a great deal today. In our editorial meetings we argued one question over and over: what is a contemporary Mulan?

In the end we gave up the grand definitions. Ten years in tea without leaving the mountain; a sheet of paper on the door of a third restaurant; a month spent on a cup broken into eleven pieces — all of these are. Mulan is not an image. It is a way of finishing a thing.

To finish something you have thought through, something you decided to do, that needs time to be done. That is all. And that is far harder than it sounds.

• Modern Mulan
• Hangzhou
• Tea Making
• Opening a Shop
• Kintsugi
• Perseverance