Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to read this and connecting to the heart of The Hive.

To introduce us separately, The Hive is a platform created to share the art, musings and wisdoms culminated along the way of tea. We share from the world of tea both here online, and physically in Naarm/Melbourne of so-called Australia. 

The Hive is a single human operation, created and sustained by myself, Charlie Há Cheesman.

I’m is a first generation ‘Australian’ born of Vietnamese descent. My mother migrated from Vietnam in the 1990s, having fled from Vietnam in the wake of war and poverty, in search for resource for her family back home. Quickly needing to assimilate into rural Australia and find her place in the working class, she struggled to settle into home while carrying her culture into the vastly indifferent environments of the country. This often cued a neglect of her cultural background.

I was born shortly after, into this environment without adequate backbone for cultural empowerment. I found it incredibly hard to step into my cultural identity at a young age. Afraid to be seen exposed in the open for the things I could not help or change, I took to oppressing parts of my identity that would been associated to my cultural roots. As one learns to harden to the outside world, a beckoning for softening did grow evermore present I have learnt however. The more I began to traverse the worlds of isolation growing up, the need for introspection paved ways to ally with myself and connect to interests and expressions that would inherently protect & allow me to hold something to that missing backbone.

I guess, the longer one proceeds on that path of enquiry and discovery, the more the path begins to purify- clearing the density and readily shining light on the core wounds that informs the ways one moves through the world. This would ultimately entice the acknowledgement of cultural neglect, rejection and the perpetuated suffering that trails behind such a path.This has very much became a way finder for me today.In this acknowledgement came a dire need to tend to. This would send me back to my mother’s homelands of Vietnam and soon into the mountains of the indigenous, known under the umbrella as the Bai Yue people.In this discovery of deep, deep cultural roots came to connection to tea, amongst other various mediums of belief, embodiment & intrinsic nature.

This soon blossomed into what The Hive is today