Easy to Remember This Day.

 Septembers, Remembered.

Over the past week, Miami has endured a stretch of relentless rain and electrified thunder, the kind of weather I don’t recall seeing in years. I am grateful it is not a hurricane. Still, the deluge lingers longer than welcome.

The weight of this weather, together with the state of America, another anniversary of 9/11 of and the quiet start to the season, draws my mind back to travels I am still processing.

Exactly one year ago this week, I was navigating a challenging yet expansive visit to Hanoi during one of the biggest storms in recent history to hit Vietnam, Typhoon Yagi.

The days after that followed left Hanoi soaked in storm mess and water. Streets shimmered with reflections, scooters cut slow wakes through deep puddles while the dead branches and trees lined the roads. The whole city seemed to exhale under the weight of the storm.

Hanoi had a rare, graceful quietness. It was not the chaos of disaster, but the reckoning that comes after. There was the stillness of a city integrating what it had just endured.

In that quiet, it was my tea associate, Hong, who first guided me to Hien Minh. A leader in the Vietnamese tea industry, she carries both strength and humility, with a rare gift for making tea a bridge between people. Through her invitation, I made my way to a tea house that would deepen my understanding of transformation through the lens of the lotus. The lotus has always held deep meaning for me, and it is also one of the most extraordinary facets of Vietnamese tea culture I want to explore.

Inside Hien Minh Tea, the world felt different. The house itself is a sanctuary founded by past Tea Master Cup winner Hung and his wife, Yen, with the vision of honoring Vietnam’s ancient tea trees while creating a living culture around them. They are, to me, the very image of modern tea culture; artisans rooted in lineage yet unafraid to experiment, building bridges between past and future through every harvest.

Hung and Yen also produce some of the best lotus-scented tea in Vietnam, and I was honored to share it with them at their table. Over the course of two visits, I was drawn deeper into the quiet rhythm of their practice, and their life. The space they created was magical. Stunning, strong yet soft, and eternally deep. Yet what makes my visits there unforgettable is not the walls, or the rain creating a symphony through the space, not even the tea, but what stays in my memory, are the people who gathered there.

There was the entrepreneurial young man from Singapore, who had come to dive deeper into tea with the family. He planned to stay a while in Hà Giang, helping and learning how to produce tea. His passion was palpable, and I felt excited for the journey ahead of him. He had crossed borders not only in search of knowledge and understanding, but with the sense that here, something important was being created.

Hong also arranged a visit with a commodity tea broker, generous enough to share samples for my father’s and my review. With my father’s history in the coffee trade, and his past visit to Vietnam, it felt quietly full-circle to carry Vietnamese tea back to him. The broker was knowledgeable and so kind in spirit.

At one point, Yen’s father arrived and joined us, sitting in silence. He hardly spoke, yet his presence carried weight. Each sip of tea seemed to hold decades of patience, a reminder that some truths are transmitted not through words but through being. His stillness anchored the table the way old roots anchor a tree through storm and flood.

There were also other members of the family stopping by, moving through these days of storms with a kind of practiced grace. The children were at once rambunctious and shy, adapting to the weather like seasoned professionals, as if storms were simply another rhythm of life. Their laughter and curiosity softened the weight of the rain, a reminder that family, like tea, weaves resilience into next generations.

And there was Yen herself, delicate yet strong, guiding conversation with the gentleness of someone who knows tea is not taught but revealed. Hung, her husband, spoke with the precision of a craftsman and the heart of a philosopher. Together they spoke of their business and their life, but what lingers with me most is their description of their lotus tea: a marriage of mountain-grown snow shan tea leaves and lotus blossoms from their own ponds. Hung explained how meditation is woven into its creation, the balance between flower and leaf found not in formula, but in mindful practice, breath by breath.

Yen shared stories of bringing visitors into the lotus ponds, recalling how they were transformed through the act of wading into the muck to harvest something beautiful. It is a breaking-through of fear, a surrender to the unseen depths, until what emerges is nothing less than a jewel of evolution.

Outside, Hanoi remained soaked. Inside, cups of tea circled the table, conversations flowed, silences deepened, and something began to shift in me. I realized that what made this place powerful was not the performance of ceremony, but the presence of it.

No mud, no lotus. No storm, no bloom.

The storm outside was not separate from the tea, it was part of it. Just as the floods tested the city, they also revealed the resilience of its people. At Hien Minh, tea was not an escape from hardship but a way of meeting it, transforming it, and carrying it forward.

When I stepped back into the rain that evening, heading back to my temporary apartment in Ba Dinh, I carried more than the taste of tea. I carried the strength of silence, the curiosity of a traveler, the devotion of a family, the patience of a parent, the resilience of a city.

That is what tea does. It transforms, not through the leaf alone, but through the people who gather around it.