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.
Nichols continued to work as a teacher, but she spent more time on her fledgling business. She fine-tuned her recipes, driving an hour to make each batch in a small industrial kitchen in Rhode Island, where she would chop fruit by hand, mix it with dried leaves, and brew large vats of tea. She convinced nearby Stop & Shop stores to stock the tea on their shelves. Most of her ingredients were imported from China. In the winter of 2020, with both her daughters having moved out, Nichols sold her house. Business suffered on account of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she picked up a night job selling clothes to make ends meet. She also developed new flavors and advertised them as alternative medicine: chrysanthemum-dragon-fruit-rose to treat depression and aging; chrysanthemum-pear-ginseng to treat poor eyesight and skin conditions; orange-ginger for indigestion.
Incidental costs can become prohibitive when you operate on a small scale, so in 2024 Nichols took a six-month course with the Small Business Administration and came up with a three-year expansion plan: she would get her own kitchen, scale up marketing, hire advisers, work with bigger distributors, and increase sales sixfold by the second year; in year three, she would start selling internationally. She obtained a guaranteed loan of fifty-thousand dollars from M&T Bank with the help of the S.B.A., and this past February began leasing space for the business in an old textile mill in Fall River. That same month, the Trump Administration imposed tariffs of ten per cent on all Chinese imports. At the end of the month, the planned tariffs were raised to twenty per cent. They promised to keep going up.
Well before his second term kicked off, Donald Trump promoted tariffs as a means of returning production and manufacturing to the United States. In his Inaugural Address, he pledged to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” Since then, he has issued tariffs on imports from numerous countries, including Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Japan, nations within the European Union, and any country that imports oil from Venezuela. Many of these declarations were quickly followed by retractions or temporary suspensions, like a series of balks in an opaque tactical game. But, amid the noise, the Administration took a particularly aggressive stance toward China. On April 9th, after pausing reciprocal tariffs on all other countries, Trump raised baseline tariffs on Chinese imports to as high as a hundred and forty-five per cent, effective immediately. In the midst of this, the Chinese government placed a tariff of a hundred and twenty-five per cent on American imports. “I’m not calling it a trade war, but I’m saying that China has escalated,” Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, said at the time.
When Nichols read about the initial tariffs, she was in the process of ordering twenty-six thousand glass bottles from a supplier in Chicago. The usual price for a bottle was thirty-eight cents; now she had to to pay fifty-four. Uncertainty around import costs had already shifted the global supply chain, and the stock market had fallen sharply. She paid most of the bill in March with money from the S.B.A., and took the rest on loan. Anticipating a continued rise in prices, she tried to stock up on ingredients, purchasing eight large boxes of tea leaves and six more of crystallized sugar from her wholesaler in China—each cost much more than usual—and a box of chrysanthemum flowers, the cost of which had spiked from two hundred and eighty-five dollars to nearly four hundred.
Nichols began looking for suppliers in other countries. She found a few in Taiwan, India, and Thailand that offered ingredients similar to the ones she used. But she was hesitant to buy from them. “Flower tea, it’s very sensitive, because every place has a different smell, different taste,” she told me. “It’s not like black tea or green tea. It has to be exact.” She made changes where she could: instead of ordering four fifty-five-gallon kettles for her kitchen, she ordered two forty-gallon ones. She thought about cutting her bottle order, but she couldn’t delay expansion for long. Rent was twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and she’d already paid twenty thousand installing new sinks and cooking areas. She would need ready inventory to fulfill new orders. “I hold back, but when I hold back I’m still losing,” she said.
During the past several weeks, small businesses like Wise Mouth have been hit especially hard by Trump’s tariffs—both those that have been suspended and those that have been enacted—because they often rely on a variety of distributors that offer little insulation from price volatility. Two days after Trump announced the hundred-and–forty-five-per-cent tariff on Chinese imports, I walked through Boston’s Chinatown with Debbie Ho, who has worked with local businesses for decades as the executive director of a nonprofit called Chinatown Main Street. On our walk, I met a woman who runs a dried-goods store. She told me that some of her suppliers had already doubled their prices, and she had to mark up her products in response. “Customers have been coming in, looking at prices, and saying it’s too expensive,” she said.
Other small-business owners showed me recent messages that they’d received from their venders, informing them that prices would increase soon on account of the tariffs. “What percentage? That I don’t know yet,” a dollar-store owner in Waltham told me. Ho said, “People are jumpy. They talk about it constantly. It’s like, ‘What if?’ No one’s going to know until it’s really up in their faces.”
Nichols had planned to throw a launch party for her new facility at the beginning of May, but she postponed it. She’d hired one part-time employee two weeks before the tariffs were raised, and intended to hire three more, but decided that she couldn’t afford them. She felt bitter toward the large beverage companies that had the resources to weather price increases. Coca-Cola could sell a bottled drink for less than a dollar and still make a profit. The lowest retail price Nichols was able to put on her beverages was five dollars, and even then she found herself running the company at a loss. “Two countries fighting is normal, but you have to protect us when you’re doing that,” she told me, a week after the largest tariff increases. “And I’m worried this change just makes rich people more rich, and poor people lose everything.” She said that she was thinking about giving up.
Later, I met Nichols at her production facility in Fall River. The building is long and made of granite; inside, it was dusty and bare. Her key wasn’t working, so we climbed a back staircase and hopped over a railing to reach the second floor. In the far corner was her kitchen, full of cardboard boxes: tea leaves, bottles, labels, sugar. There was a large empty space for her kettles, which she’d had a hard time acquiring. A company sent her the wrong order, and she was considering driving down to New York to pick up two used ones herself. “I’m really, really tight, no money,” she told me, her voice staccato. “But still alive. That means good.”
Nichols is small, with short black hair and dark eyes. Last month, her sales dropped precipitously. “Orders just suddenly stopped,” she said. “The wind has changed.” She wondered if the label on her teas, which features two dragons facing each other, now put people off. “People don’t like my Chinese face, or my logo,” she said. During demos in grocery stores, she told me, people sometimes seemed wary of it. “Everybody’s scared,” she said. “They know your Chinese background. They know China makes your ingredients.”
She pointed out the prominent red words on the label, just below the dragons: MADE IN THE USA. Still, she worried that anti-China sentiment, spurred by the tariffs, would eventually spell ruin for her company, even if she could ride out her current financial difficulties. “I think I’m American,” she said. “I speak English. I’ve lived here longer than I lived in China. But I do carry the Chinese culture. I know what I grew up with. If you cut out that, I don’t know anything.” She said that now young Chinese people have stopped looking up to America, which is very different from when she was growing up. “They used to dream to come here,” she said. “They give their life to come to this country—for freedom, for this beautiful sky, even for religion. But now people have changed. They don’t think of us like that anymore. That’s really sad.”
Nichols leaned against a window as she spoke; low clouds were blowing quickly across the sky behind her. She has no plans to shut her business down, she said. She intends to start production as soon as she picks up her kettles—and she wants to invite as many people as possible to her ribbon-cutting. She has faith that the tariffs will eventually be lifted, and that she’ll be able to start selling internationally. “I think in one sense, something can change back—I’m talking about taxes,” she said, sweeping her hands out in front of her. Probably the tariffs wouldn’t last forever. But she worried about the animosity that people sometimes feel for those who are different from them, and how easy that can be for others to ignore. “My heart is shaking,” she said. “Even so, my hands are still holding my American dream.” ♦
