Yin Annie Lin, owner of Fresh Coffee Roastery Inc., 406 N. Seventh St., has traveled across continents in search of freedom and a new life, learned a new language, earned a master’s degree in planning, embraced new careers and held on to a childhood dream. The one constant has been her connection with tea.

The roots of growing and appreciating tea run deep in her family. A century ago, her grandfather was a tea merchant in Hangzhou, a popular tea-growing area of China known as “human’s heaven” because of its pleasant climate, beautiful scenery and the combination of river, lakes and mountains. It runs along the lower streams of the Yangtze River near Shanghai, Lin’s birthplace. Her father, who inherited the gift for recognizing good tea by its look, texture, smell and taste, continued in the tea business.

“Tea is important in China. We drink it all the time,” Lin said. “My favorite occasion is visiting Dim Sum restaurants where people gather in the early morning with a pot of tea, then sit for hours drinking, conversing and tasting a wide variety of small dishes – sometimes over 200. ‘Dim Sum’ means ‘to touch your heart,’ and this experience involves all your senses.”

Lin remembers sipping from her father’s cup.

“In my heart I dreamed of opening my own tea shop,” she said.

This dream wasn’t fulfilled in China. Like many others, Lin’s grandfather lost some of his tea and rice businesses as a result of Japanese occupation in Shanghai in 1942, and the remainder after the Communist Party took control of the People’s Liberation Army in 1949. Growing up in China presented many challenges.

“Like everyone else, we were poor,” Lin said. “Wages were low; we lived in government-controlled apartments and had no hopes of ever owning a home.”

Lin obtained a degree in TV communication from the Beijing Broadcasting Institute in 1985 and worked as a producer, editor and program host for the Shanghai TV station. Around this time, students were renewing complaints about corruption in the Chinese Communist Party. Protests in Shanghai were peaceful, but when Lin heard reports of larger gatherings in Beijing, she traveled there at her own expense in early 1989.

“I wanted to see first-hand what was going on in the place where I studied,” she said, “and wanted to understand why our TV station wasn’t reporting it.”

On her return to Shanghai, she was reprimanded and told TV station officials shouldn’t be siding with protesters. After the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, Lin moved to the United States in search of intellectual and political freedom and a better standard of life. Friends in Tennessee encouraged her to study urban planning. She spent several years learning English and saving money by working as a waitress, then attended the University of Tennessee where she met and married her husband, Hungwei, a food science doctorate student from Taiwan. They moved to Lawrence eight years ago.

With Hungwei’s knowledge of food sciences, and her gift with tea, her childhood dream became a reality. They opened a cafe, Fresh Coffee Roastery, on Sixth Street and served great tea and coffee in a peaceful, comfortable setting.

“After two years, we decided to put part of the dream on hold to concentrate on being good parents to our young son,” Lin said. “I needed to spend more time with him, and it was hard to do that with the demands of a coffee shop.”

She now operates a retail business and imports fresh organic coffee beans and tea leaves directly from a Chinese export company.

“I roast and blend the coffee and tea in a hand-crafting manner to suit the business and deliver orders myself,” she said. “It’s time-consuming, but having a personal relationship with customers is important.”

Her coffee and teas are sold at Checkers, Community Mercantile, Hy-Vee, Global Cafe, at many Lawrence and Kansas City coffee shops and on the Internet.

In addition to developing her connections with tea, Lin’s journalistic skills are being utilized again, too. Her writing has appeared in the Chinese-language newspaper “Shi Jie Ri Bao,” which, coincidentally, is translated “Journal World.”

She rejoices that her son was born in America where people are free to follow their heart and achieve dreams.