Nobody has a personality anymore

 

This recent article I just ran across, with the same title, seems a good starting point for adding some meandering thoughts here.  I think a lot about how social media and the now-changed forms of human experience shape people in different ways than were familiar in the past.  In general it all works.

So I'll summarize what I take this article to say, highlight what seems to not work, and then extend it a bit.  The general point is that people now overanalyze their personas, especially in relation to identifying disorders, so that instead of seeing themselves as a balanced, good person they identify as a series of gaps, as having anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD, and so on.  I see this in younger people, but more in the US than in Thailand.

credit that article source

Let's let the article describe their take on that:

My generation is obsessed with treating every trait as a symptom of a disorder. You’re not shy, you’re autistic. You’re not forgetful, you’ve got ADHD.

Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Now, we are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72 percent of Gen-Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27 percent of boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life to explain everything—psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorized, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, and mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, ourselves.

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people.

It adds a lot of depth to that in another page or more of text, but this is their general point.  At a glance this is definitely one trend in self-definition and a general description of reality.  It goes further:

Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorized. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalized. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental-health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached or the codependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatized, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious...

It's an odd word choice, describing people as products.  That seems to relate to the sense of how we are identified as outcomes of prior conditioning, of trauma, genetic flaws, and distinct cultural factors, but maybe mostly the first two.

An online interest related contact shifted over past several years from seeing himself as normal enough but also quirky, in terms of personality, and then "on the spectrum" related to autism, and most recently he's fully accepted that he is autistic.  Is he?  Who knows, really. 

All of this sounds more judgmental than I intend it.  We all struggle with working around our quirks, and defining what they really mean.  We all have very significant limitations; more of those than our strengths.  The range a person could possibly span is broad, and we can each only cover so much of that.  

This article is about papering over the limitations with labels, that put the blame on others, past events, or genetics, versus accepting that we are responsible for ourselves.  That other example, of someone wanting to be in one generation versus the one prior, is about identifying more with that stereotypical character.  They're different things, but of course they can overlap.

In my youth, and among my generation now, we didn't have an inclination towards so much acceptance of weaknesses, or so much doubt and insecurity.  We weren't self-aware enough to describe ourselves in terms of a long list of gaps, so we just set out to do whatever interested us, typically learning by failing.  If you define yourself as a set of limitations you end up switching the order around, and not trying things that aren't going to work, because you can see how the gaps in your capacity map together to ensure that failure.  But that cuts short the exposure and learning process.

More of the article explains how this basic premise extends further into our experience:

Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realize they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted. We even—helpfully—diagnose the dead. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything. They are trying to hold onto themselves; every piece of their personality is contained within them.

And it’s not only personality traits we have lost. There are no experiences anymore, no phases or seasons of life, no wonders or mysteries, only clues about what could be wrong with us. Everything that happens can be explained away; nothing is exempt. We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives.

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are.

This never even seems seems to cross over to what seems to be one main drawback of this kind of perspective:  people end up reaching for drugs as a crutch, and relying on years of therapy to sort out internal issues, instead of working through actual instances of the problems, by experiencing personal relationships.

Of course this is a bit exaggerated.  And this kind of culture and perspective is quite advanced in some places, and lags in others.  I remember visiting an ex-girlfriend living in LA in the 90s, how I was surprised that she was being medicated to deal with social anxiety.  That whole paradigm was brand new to me, that such an issue could seem unusual, and could be treated by drugs.  Of course that treatment is problematic; there are significant side effects, and whenever you take drugs to adjust for any sort of condition over time the effectiveness of the drug wears off, and you need to take more to get the same effect.  Or change drugs later, which involves a new set of problems, new side effects.

All of this pointed towards a new way of framing reality itself, not just self definition:

Every human experience we have is a data point, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think that people were so cruelly deprived of in the past.

I’m not sure I believe this anymore—that we are more enlightened now than previous generations, more emotionally intelligent. My grandma sees herself as a grandma, a mother, a wife; young people identify with our disorders. She is selfless and takes things to heart; we have rejection sensitive dysphoria and fawn as a trauma response. They are souls; we are symptoms.

Of course it does go on to accept that in some cases significant and pronounced mental disorders are defined, identified, and treated through a related therapy process.  It's not just about people using new ways to describe themselves and reality, changing the experience some through this redefinition.  But it points out an interesting example of such a broach change:

I think this is why my generation gets stuck on things like relationships and parenthood. The commitments we stumble over, the decisions we endlessly debate, the traditions we find hard to hold onto, are often the ones we can’t easily explain. We are trying to explain the inexplicable. It’s hard to defend romantic love against staying single, because it isn’t safe or controllable or particularly rational. The same with having children. Put these things in a pros-and-cons list and they stop making logical sense.

This reminds me of parts of younger people's experiences I hear of, maybe both in the US and in Thailand.  Almost no one where I work has children, or maybe even ever plans to, because it would be a costly endeavor, trading out both freedom and expense, and it doesn't make it as a goal through the evaluation process.  Just speculation on my part, of course; everyone has their own experiences and perspective.

That article's conclusion circles back to roughly the same place:

We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads. We underestimate it, this miserable business of understanding ourselves. I feel for the girls forensically analyzing their childhoods while they are still in them, cramming their hope and pain and suffering into categories, reducing themselves down to trauma responses. It hurts to see this heartbreaking awareness we have inflicted on a generation, whose only understanding of the world is this militant searching, this reaching for reasons. God, the life they are missing.

Because we can’t ever explain everything. At some point we have to stop analyzing and seeing through things and accept the unknowable. All we can ever really achieve is faith. And a sense of humor about ourselves, perhaps. It’s impossible to heal from being human, and this is why the mental health industry has infinite demand. Explain anything long enough and you will find a pathology; dig deep enough, and you will disappear.

Maybe a little exaggerated and negative, but for sure plenty of this goes on, and some people must be debilitated by it.  

Younger people today couldn't imagine how far we were from that perspective in the 80s, as Gen X kids.  I had heard of a personality type test, at one point, but I didn't try to do much with it.  I didn't have a single self-description available in relation to a mental health condition or trauma response.  We didn't even have "trauma" then, in the same sense.  People who were severely abused as children were intuitively aware that some related cycle was playing out for them, but not in the same detailed and explicit sense as today, where they are defined by it in a list of distinct ways.

We took so much risk back then that it seemed as if we had a death wish.  I have no idea what all that was about, the drinking, drugs, and high risk behavior.  I only tell my son about it bit by bit, so as not to overwhelm him, or endorse that kind of ridiculous behavior.  He shouldn't be drinking a lot when he is in high school, as I did.  I shouldn't have been.  

The drugs that are around now could easily be deadly, versus us barely having access to weed back then.  Now weed is sold in a booth that looks like a garden shed in the alley we live in, in Honolulu, 15 steps or so from the front door of our apartment complex.  It's not illegal.  Kids can't buy it without ID, but then the drinking age was also 21 when I was 18.

one version of those booths (photo credit)

In one sense it's great that greater awareness of real risks narrow down kids' range of behavior today.  That's very appropriate.  In another sense they really might be averse to the potentially awkward parts of a normal life, like getting rejected when you ask someone out.  That was my first "romantic" experience, rejection, and I guess at the time it did seem rough.  I think that I was 13 then, and it probably delayed my participation in that scope by a few more years.

If social media had existed back then there might be an awkward photo trail of lots of it, or at least we would've had a chance to evaluate such patterns as experienced by others, before we blindly did foolish things.  We would've heard stories of lots of people dying doing them, and it was just dumb luck that none of my friends did.  Or maybe it's just that one in thousands would die, and I had less than 10 close friends; the odds were in our favor.

I've not really critiqued this article's content much.  To a large extent it seems to work.  It may be a little overstated, but I think that's in part because I can't fully relate to a young person's perspective today, even though I talk to people at different stages essentially every day.  If I were out there actually living it I'd be more familiar with a few dozen other examples, and the patterns would seem all the clearer, and more pervasive.  

Tea China 7572 Dayi (Taetea) shou / shu pu'er

 

I'm trying the last sample from a small Tea China vendor's set (sent at no cost for review; many thanks!).  

The posts need to have some sort of story that they tell, and often that's about something completely novel, a new style or origin.  This isn't that; this is a very standard type.  But it could be interesting referencing back to what that standard is.  I was still looking into types and background back in 2014 when I wrote a bit on what Dayi / Taetea 7572 is, in 2014, and on storage issues with tasting notes on multiple versions in this post.  I can't directly compare back to experiences 11 years ago, but I can try to look at this experience based on trying dozens of versions of shou / shu since.  

I'll just call it shou here, but I have trouble deciding which is more correct.  If whichever version matches the best standard Romanization practice is less conventional then it would be hard to say.

Their site listing:

Yunnan DaYi Pu’er Tea 7572 Classic Ripe Pu’er Tea  ($18.53, for 250 grams)

Pu’Er ripe tea from the famous Yunnan Menghai Pu’Er Tea Factory (Dayi). 7572 is a classic formula for Pu’Er tea and a benchmark for Pu’Er ripe tea.  We purchased these Pu’Er teas in 2022.

Dayi 7572 is a bulk Pu’er ripe tea from Menghai Tea Factory, which has been produced since the mid-1970s. It undergoes moderate fermentation, featuring the iconic reddish-brown and thick liquor color as well as a mellow taste.

Taste Profile:

In the new tea stage, it has a rich caramel aroma with a sweet scent, and after brewing, the lingering sugar aroma at the bottom of the cup is rich and full-bodied.

As the storage time increases, its aroma gradually changes. For example, after 3 years of storage, the aged aroma and sugar aroma begin to emerge and become more prominent, while the pile fermentation smell and woody aroma fade away. For ripe teas aged over 7 years, the aroma is mainly dominated by the aged scent.

I suppose that works.  One part of the sales listing says it's 250 grams, and the other 150, so I take that to be a typo / accidental mistake.  It's 150; that's listed on the packaging they show.

Review:

First infusion:  brewed a bit strong, using maybe 4-5 grams of tea to brew over 250 ml, maybe nearer to 12 ounces instead.  I did use a quick rinse this time; that's relatively standard, and it could cut back mustiness or funk a little.

Level of funk stands out most.  Shou often has a damp cardboard sort of scent to it, which others could associate as still within the range of peat.  It's pronounced in this.  Moychay shou versions, which are typically pretty good, tend to have a characteristic form of that, which I guess someone could love or else dislike.  Storage conditions input would enter in.  I think that aspect is mainly coming from the original tea character, which transitions over time, but storage would change how it is expressed, especially if a tea is stored very dry or very wet (diminishing that range, if quite dry, and changing it and increasing it, if stored wet or damp).

It has always been interesting how Hong Kong is considered quite damp storage, with Malaysia also described as such.  From online discussion it sounds like these are two consistent themes, based on conditions in those areas, but in reality vendors could, and probably typically would, adjust humidity level in storage conditions.  Malaysia, and Bangkok, are both much warmer and more humid than Hong Kong.  I've written about that here, and I wrote so much on that subject that I wrote a summary of it all here.  But the second of those was in 2019; I've learned a lot more through experience since.  And I write less now; that's how that tends to go.

Back to the tea, flavor is complex in this.  It's generally positive.  I think these benchmark Dayi / Taetea numbered shou are a great representation of good, basic shou character, and are positive to experience.  Of course they would vary.  Beyond the heavy earth baseline in this some hint of dried fruit and rich spice stands out, or aromatic dark wood.  It all mixes; it's hard to express as a list.  Maybe this does taste a bit like betel nut, the traditional Chinese herb input used for chewing, maybe like how people experience chewing tobacco.

This wouldn't be completely separate from the flavor range of chewing tobacco, just not all that close to it either.  Probably the larger leaf version, with a richer, deeper flavor, than the sharper, lighter, more stinging version of "snuff," the ground version.  I've never experienced much of either, but I did do a tour of vices back in my teens, as was common in the 1980s.  Right, I'm getting old.

That's already describing most of the flavor, but in unusually general terms (like spice, like dried fruit or dark wood).  Maybe I can narrow that down a bit, along with describing transitions, in a next round.  But since I'm brewing this Western style it would typically only make about three strong infusions.  This would also be pleasant to experience brewed Gongfu style, and you would see more transition between rounds.  Not a lot, typically, for this tea type, but some.  

Most people seem to like shou brewed inky black, and there is no limit for astringency or other limitations entering in, so it can be as strong as you like.  It's good for thermos brewing, which is just what it sounds like, using a very low proportion and the longest possible infusion time in a thermos, that you take with you.  It's so gentle on your stomach that it's the only tea I drink when fasting, beyond a little aged white, and I'm on day 1 of a planned 5 day fast today.  It's no problem to have this without breakfast.  Rushing through an extra strong brewed 12 ounce mug to write notes on the next part is a little more questionable.

Second infusion:  lighter, brewed faster.  Some of the peat range drops out.  It wasn't really musty before, kind of clean in effect, but describing a fermentation input like peat is hard to clarify related to that.  I think this may really relate to what people describe as like betel nut, as a main flavor.  I really should try that; it's out there in the local Chinatown (in Bangkok; I'm not in Hawaii now, where I also live sometimes).

The rest is still complex, but still not so distinct.  Warm tones do seem like dark wood, and some supporting range like dried fruit or spice.  Maybe sandalwood?  Dried fruit is perhaps closest to jujube, dried Chinese date.  And then it's hard to make any of that more specific.

Feel is decently rich and full.  Aftertaste expression is limited, but it doesn't clear from your mouth immediately, so those two parts give it some complexity.  It doesn't come across as amazing quality tea, but it's solid, and pleasant.

Conclusions:

On to guessing, limited to age, since I already know what it is.  As I see it shou tends to undergo two main transitions related to aging, related to the early fermentation related off notes clearing, typically over 3 years or so, then within 10 to 15 a version can pick up depth, and a less fermented style--which is more rare now--can transition even more.  I would guess that this is around that 3 year age range, that whatever off notes remained have had time to clear.  That's a bit unreliable, because some shou expresses less of that within the first couple of years.  And some more; some is better after about 4 years, which is really long enough for most of that to settle.

That just leaves placing the quality level, or match to what I like in shou.  It's as good as it's supposed to be, lacking significant flaws, so it's already in the top 50% of the range.  I'm just not sure it's better than 7572 would be from most sources, given it had some age, in appropriate storage conditions.  

All shou seems to resemble all other shou more than for most other tea types, to me, kind of like how there is low, medium, and high quality light Tie Guan Yin, and the versions don't vary as much as you'd expect between examples at the same level.  Of course plenty of people would reject both assertions.

So it's good; it's how it should be.  It's down to pricing and considering aging input, related to where to get it.

Wanmu Tea Garden (Xinyang, Henan producer) Dong Fang Mei Ren

 

first and second samples

third sample

I'm trying three more versions of another type of tea from the Wanmu Tea Garden (small factory producer), a Xinyang, Henan (China) tea producer.  There is a little more background on them from trying two yellow tea versions, that were exceptional, but I've still not turned up more depth of background.  Their website mentions a more history than that blog post, but nothing on this tea type.

These are presented as versions of Dong Fang Mei Ren, more commonly known in Western tea circles as either Oriental Beauty or Eastern / Asian Beauty (renaming around "oriental" moving to seem negative).  The other sample I have yet to try is described as an award winning black tea; it is probably a more standard offering type from them.  They would sell a tea like this, but may well be working out processing details, or which inputs make the best version of it.  

The review part goes into issues of it being true to type, and why to some extent that may not apply.  Some tea types are source-area limited, as pu'er is (from Yunnan), or Japanese tea versions (sencha, gyokuro, matcha, and others).  Teas like Wuyishan area oolongs or Longjing green tea could potentially be made from material from other places, but those are source limited too, so only versions from the original area would be authentic.  

It's my understanding that Dong Fang Mei Ren / Oriental Beauty is a style, relating to plant type, location input, and processed form, but that it's not tied to one origin area, beyond originating in Taiwan.  Good versions are made outside of Taiwan, in Thailand and Vietnam, produced by copying those three main inputs as closely as possible.  Those use plant types from Taiwan, which should also relate to using bug-bitten material.  

These teas are made using local plant types, so they won't be as similar.  I didn't know that when trying the first two samples, and had talked to my Wanmu contact prior to trying the third, to cover that by then.  So the goal, for them, might be to produce the best quality, most pleasant tea possible, using comparable but different inputs, that won't necessarily match the original aspect range closely.  Oxidation level is one main related concern, which I go into more in these notes.

Review:

#1, first infusion:  this looks a little lighter than the other, more golden and less towards golden-amber; it's surely less oxidized.  It will be interesting to see how that works out.

Flavor is interesting; very complex, covering more ground than is typical for just about any tea version or type.  It includes warm, rich, sweet tones and also some greener, lighter, more vegetal range.  It's a little early to say that's going to amount to a flaw or limitation but that's a natural early impression.  

The warm and rich flavors present are right for Dong Fang Mei Ren, which I still think of as Oriental Beauty.  There's honey sweetness and a citrus note, not extending into warm cinnamon type spice much, but it's complex in different directions, potentially including that.  Sure, I think it's there.  The vegetal note is along the line of green wood.  As a primary flavor input that wouldn't be good at all, but it balances better than it sounds in this.  

The feel has a bit of a related edge, almost implying bitterness is also present in the flavor.  It's in that space where feel and taste seem to overlap, astringency and bitterness.

#2:  interesting, also quite different.  I was expecting at least one of these to completely match the standard DFMR / OB flavor profile, but neither really do.  This is warmer and richer, and that part works.  Sweetness is ok; it would seem sweeter if there were more of an associated fruit note, which doesn't stand out, but there's some to make it balance.  There's a wood range flavor that's completely different than the mild green wood in the other, in this case more along the line of cured oak.  Someone might interpret that associated dry feel as linking with sourness, versus bitterness.  That's not how DFMR / OB goes.

I really thought that I'd be discussing how these fall well within standard DFMR range, describing how fruit in one compares to more cinnamon in the other, or something such.  Instead this might be about how they vary from that range.  These were presented as experimental tea versions, not a finished product that they've been producing for awhile.  That impression came from those yellow teas being absolutely spot-on for character, and very pleasant in aspect range.  Even great related to flavor complexity, cleanness, depth, and balance.  These two versions could be interpreted as showing flaws as much as promise, and falling much further from trueness to type.

Maybe that could relate to using a very different plant type material than what DFMR / OB is usually made from?  I don't know that part.  Of course processing also comes into play, and growing conditions inputs.  I'll try a lighter version of both; that may help them stand out more positively.

This makes me wonder what the third sample is like.  I won't know until I try it.

#1, second infusion:  it balances better.  Honey sweetness stands out as a dominant flavor this round, which is typically pleasant, in a lot of mixed flavor contexts.  This tastes a lot more like a good Jin Jun Mei I just tried at a favorite Chinatown shop recently than one would imagine it could.  I wonder if they could make something similar?

Fruit drops back, maybe extending into dried fruit more, maybe apricot.  The wood tone does soften, and for the most part transitions out.  It's not exactly type-typical for OB (I'll start writing the shorter form), but it's as close as these have been, and it's quite pleasant.  Feel is full, without much astringency, beyond that fullness.  You probably wouldn't think of green wood, or even vegetal range, when trying this, for this infusion.

#2:  this is better as well.  That wood tone has softened, with more complexity entering in.  Astringency hangs in there more, in that different form, but it decreases, with broader positive flavors making it balance better.  It is a lot closer to cinnamon spice; that's one decent interpretation for a main flavor input.  A good bit of wood offsets how one experiences that.  

It seems like oxidation level for both of these might be a little low, maybe less so for the second one, but possibly even for it.  Then maybe the material isn't as suited for this tea type, or at least it might not be able to duplicate how Taiwanese oolong material ends up in that form.  Looking up standard online references don't mention the plant type used, or at least the first two didn't, so I asked Google's AI to fill that in:

Oriental Beauty tea is made from a specific cultivar of the Camellia sinensis plant, but its unique flavor comes from being bitten by the tea green leafhopper. The insect bites damage the leaves, causing the plant to produce a special chemical reaction that creates a natural honey-like aroma and sweet taste. The tea is a type of oolong tea that requires this specific, pesticide-free process to achieve its distinct qualities. 

Plant: The base is the Camellia sinensis tea plant, with a cultivar often used being Chin-shin Dah-pang, notes Nih.

Insect: The tea green leafhopper (Jacobiasca formosana) bites the leaves, stems, and buds.

Flavor development: The insect bites trigger a defense response in the plant, leading to the production of chemicals like diol, which are converted into compounds like hotrienol during processing.

Pesticide-free: This process is only possible on tea plants that have not been sprayed with pesticides.

It's usually bug-bitten, as this covers.  I thought that Qing Xin / Chin Shin would've been a common plant type used, but one from Thailand I reviewed not long ago used a #17 variant, with good outcome.  Here's that review; it was from Tea Side (a Thai vendor selling Thai teas online), and that was the Ruan Zhi / Bai Lu cultivar, however one names that.

In looking up that reference I ran across lots I've written about lots of OB versions, from different places, made from different cultivars (plant types).  It would work to scan through another dozen posts here to get a feel for different range.  I won't go into what it means here here, but this covers lots of local Taiwanese cultivars / plant types:

this TRES / TTES content is off that agency site now, I think, so attribution would require some extra steps finding it on the wayback machine

#1, third infusion:  it's even better; this is evolving to taste a bit like bees' wax, not just honey.  That's really like Jin Jun Mei then (Fujian black tea from the Wuyishan area).  It's odd that it's so close, for being less oxidized (seemingly).  Kittichai, the Jip Eu Chinatown shop owner, just mentioned that good Jin Jun Mei should be a little less oxidized; it may relate to that, that the black tea style is also like that.

For flavor list this also includes a bit of citrus and dried fruit, and limited warm tone range, some mineral.  Feel is quite pleasant.  The vegetal edge is diminished, but I suppose a little is still there.  It's not that close to type-typical original OB but it's good.

#2:  warmer toned, which one would expect to match OB better, but that one wood flavor aspect and slightly dryer feel really throws that off.  It's also pretty good, but I suppose I like the first more.  It balances better, for the green wood and astringency generally dropping out.  This does include some fruit, but it's harder to appreciate as separate from a cured wood flavor range.  I tend to describe warm toned dried fruit as like tamarind, as a default, and it's not so far from that, just probably not so close either.  It probably works better to say it includes some dried Chinese date, jujube, and then a warm mineral tone that seems to link is really something else.

It's pleasant, but if this is an experimental tea it may not be quite there yet.  It's not balanced and pleasant enough.

Second review, the third type:

first infusion:  again a bit more vegetal than DFMR / OB tends to be.  The flavors are nice, bright, clean, and complex, but the range is completely different than that standard oolong type.  Some sort of warm tones are there, in the background, but this is mostly floral with some green wood sort of vegetal range, so completely different.  Maybe there's a touch of citrus fruit; I'll check again next round.

#2:  this tea is interesting for balancing between two different things.  On the one hand the astringency and vegetal range (mostly flavor related, not feel) ties to a lighter themed tea, not really a standard type that's easy to reference, but along the lines of green or light oolong.  Since it's a non-standard form it might come across as less approachable or positive, just due to being unfamiliar.  

Then on the other side it also balances well, and is clean and complex, so it has a range of positive character going for it.  It just doesn't completely "make sense," related to falling outside of expectations.  Not just for DFMR / OB, but related to the entire range of standard tea types.  In a sense it tastes like an adjusted version of a green tea, not an oolong.

Setting all that aside the actual aspects are pleasant.  It includes some kind of non-descript fruit and floral range, and that doesn't really oppose the vegetal range (towards "green").  That last aspect is closest to green wood, but it might be even closer to a somewhat unfamiliar vegetable type.  Bitterness is really moderate, but present, but the flavor isn't so far off bitter gourd.  If that's unfamiliar I suppose it's a little towards okra?

In talking to Gisele about these, that tea contact, who works for them, she said that it probably wouldn't match normal DFMR / OB character for using a different, local plant type, and for growing conditions being different.  And of course processing steps wouldn't be a complete match; this isn't oxidized as much.  She said that her understanding is the range for OB is 60 to 85% oxidation level, and I suppose that kind of works, even though that kind of designation is problematic.  80 to 85 might be more normal, probably even overlapping with the lower end range of black tea (Shai Hong, often more lightly oxidized Dian Hong, as a sun-dried variation).

#3:  a little more spice emerges, and the tone warms; this creeps a little closer to standard OB range.  Deeper fruit tones seem to pick up, replacing brighter range that had seemed split between floral tones and fruit earlier on.  It's dried fruit, along the line of dried apricot.  This may well be my favorite of these three versions, but the "#1" version was pretty good too.  The third, the second I tried, had a bit of warm cured wood flavor, and dryness of feel, that threw it off a bit, to me.

It's odd judging these based on my judgment.  I love Oriental Beauty, so that should work, but I don't love green tea range as much as all other tea types.  If it's especially vegetal, like Japanese green teas tasting like seaweed, that's not so pleasant, per my preference.  This vegetal range matches with other green tea range, I guess.  I suppose it should match with Xinyang Maojian, the main type they make in this area.

#4:  a hint of citrus picks up, maybe along the line of tangerine peel.  This is the best that it's been.  If tones were a good bit warmer, if this had been more oxidized, it might actually come closer to normal OB range.  It's still good, it's just a different kind of tea.  I'm not sure that vegetal edge would ever completely drop out, but more oxidation may transition it quite a bit.  Just a guess; I really wouldn't know.

Brightness is good, how clean this is in effect, and intensity and complexity.  Sweetness level is good.  Feel is fuller and richer than it sounds, given how one might expect astringency to pair with some bitterness and vegetal flavor range.  There is some astringency, but it's limited.  It's not full, round, and smooth as light oolongs tend to be, but there is some fullness to it.

A green tea drinker who also likes light oolong might absolutely love this.  But it's hard for me to see it from that kind of perspective.  

I completely "get" Dan Cong, and the clean nature, intensity, and refinement match for this, but the flavor profile is completely different (from that oolong type).  And the feel.  There is a characteristic astringency edge to lower quality Dan Cong that partly matches part of this better than the smooth, rich, full, approachable nature of higher quality Dan Cong versions.  I've always wondered what that's about.  Does it relate to using more whole leaf, to growing tea at higher altitude, to getting processing steps just right?  Maybe all of those, or maybe it's something else.

#5:  hanging in there; this is still the best it's been, which is quite pleasant.  Again I think this is my favorite of the three versions.  To review the flavor list, which I keep mentioning in relation to what changes, in order of intensity, this is balanced between expressing dried apricot, a bit of citrus, cinnamon, and a vegetal range note, now in between a wood tone and some type of gourd.  If it's easier to relate to that last vegetal aspect isn't far off the small eggplant version Thais often use, which is almost nothing like the purple eggplant used in the US.

It's good.  It's not very close to standard Taiwanese OB, but still pleasant.  Thai versions of OB (I've probably reviewed a half dozen here) are much closer to that, but it's not a fair comparison, since they've imported those Taiwanese oolong related plant types, and are trying to replicate the growing conditions and processing steps.  Same for Vietnamese versions.  This is something else, that has to be judged as something different.  The more you expect it to be "type-typical" the worse it comes out in judgment.  Judged as a varied form of OB that leans a little towards green tea two of these versions would seem exceptional.