Tea oil season is here, and the fragrance of fresh tea oil is in the air

A couple of days ago I was chatting with my other half, talking about our old elementary school classmates. Almost everyone's family either farmed or ran a shop on the street or in the market; a few had parents who were teachers, and office workers were rare. Some classmates' families ran a corner grocery store (gan-a-dian), others a bakery, a small clinic, a motorcycle repair shop… all kinds of trades were represented. After school we always had to go home and mind the shop, so often just by running down one street you could run into more than half the class.

One of them was a good friend I had been in the same class with from kindergarten all the way through junior high (yes, @Liu Lulu, I mean you!), whose family sold nothing but incense and joss paper. As I remember, her fingernails were always pink, and her uniform always carried a strong scent of incense powder; I, on the other hand, grew up living at my maternal grandmother's house, which was a "century-old oil mill." During sesame oil season, my uniform was always steeped in the fragrance of sesame oil; during tea oil season, the house was even busier and more bustling.

Tea oil commands a high market price, and it is divided into large-seed and small-seed varieties; small-seed tea oil can sell for 1,600 yuan per kilogram on the market, or even more. Because the oil pressed from the tea seeds grown by each tea farmer varies in quality, these farmers often will not accept arrangements like "exchanging tea seeds for already-pressed tea oil" or "selling the tea seeds directly to the oil mill." They insist on pressing oil from their own tea seeds, always feeling that their own seeds can yield more tea oil than another farmer's. For this reason, my eldest maternal uncle specially had a small oil press made and charged a small processing fee, so that small tea farmers could fulfill their wish of pressing oil from tea seeds they had grown themselves.