The New Yorker:

Lei Nichols, who came to the United States thirty years ago, was in the early stages of starting her own tea company. Then the costs of her products started to soar.

By Oliver Whang

In 1965, not long after Lei Nichols was born, in the city of Xi’an, China, her parents sent her to live with her grandparents and great-grandparents in a small mountain village. There was no electricity and a single well for water. From the mountain, where residents went to forage for mushrooms, you could see the ocean. In the summer, Nichols’s grandmother would boil plants from her garden in a large pot to make herbal medicine. The town had no doctor, and this was the primary treatment for a variety of ailments. As Nichols’s great-grandfather aged, he took to drinking the medicinal soup nearly every day. He lived to be more than a hundred years old. Toward the end of his life, his longevity became a source of embarrassment. “He used to say, ‘Only donkeys live this long,’ ” Nichols recalled.

Nichols returned to Xi’an when she was twelve. She went to college there and studied literature. She published poetry in regional magazines and met other artists. Later, she went to work for a newspaper. She was assigned to write about foreigners studying at the city college, and started dating one of the Americans she spoke to. They ended up getting married; in 1995, they moved to Massachusetts, where, after a few years, Nichols gave birth to two daughters. She picked up English and got a job as an antiques dealer. Ten years after the move, Nichols and her husband separated, and she found work as a Chinese-language teacher at a local Catholic school. She bought a small house in North Attleborough, which she painted light green and surrounded with a white fence. She called it her “American Dream house.” One day, she brought her students a variant of her grandmother’s medicine, made with chrysanthemum flower, which she had often given to her daughters when they were sick. (She called it boo-boo soup.) She ladled it into cups from a large saucepan; the students loved it, and pushed her to sell it. Nichols followed their suggestion and started offering it to local stores. In 2015, she formed a company, Wise Mouth.

Go to link