The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Read online

  I have to admit I enjoy being needed, though. I like feeling important. Except . . . He never stops nipping at me about my hidden grove. “You don’t realize how much I need this. I’ll pay you good money, young lady. I’ll pay you more than you ever dreamed of. Don’t you have somewhere you’d like to go? Someone you’d like to marry?”

  Mr. Huang is as persistent as a termite, and his questions eat at me. I have contradictory feelings. At night I lie awake and think of San-pa and what a few leaves from the mother tree might buy us. I still wouldn’t know where to find him, because I don’t know exactly where he went. But if I had my own money, I could help us get our start as newlyweds when he returns and later help pay my tuition. During the day I must be with Mr. Huang, so even if I want to, I can’t sneak away. And if I did, and A-ma found out? I can’t imagine the consequences.

  In the end, I’m only a girl, and my heart’s yearnings for the future triumph over my Akha morals. One day—and it only takes one moment to change your life forever—Mr. Huang goes to Menghai to buy supplies. While he’s gone and A-ma’s in another village setting a broken bone, I hike to my grove. I climb the mother tree and pick enough leaves to make a single cake. When Mr. Huang returns and we’re alone, I sell them to him. He pays me far more than they’re worth, saying, “I’m really thanking you for all your help. Now, let’s see what we can do with these.”

  Every afternoon for the next three days, he takes me to a village on the other side of the mountain, where I can—as he puts it—process the tea in private. With the greedy eyes of a tiger, he watches everything I do. When the cake is finished, he hides it in the trunk of his mountain vehicle. I believe no one knows what I’ve done.

  * * *

  After three months, Mr. Huang comes to the decision that all the experimental fermented tea must be destroyed. Too many things have made homes in the odoriferous piles: worms, maggots, and strange-colored growths that if we saw them in the forest we would hurry away. Chickens, ducks, water buffalo, and oxen won’t eat the garbage. That’s how bad it is. Even the pigs turn away.

  Mr. Huang refuses to give up, though. “You will spend this year tending to the trees. We’ll try again next spring.”

  As his mountain vehicle is loaded, he grabs me by the shoulders. “When I return, you’ll take me to your grove. You’ll sell me more of your leaves.”

  His touch makes me feel as though a bad spirit has entered me. It’s a sensation of disease and dis-ease. I cannot go to the ruma for ceremonial cleansing nor can I go to A-ma for one of her potions. To do so would be to admit I did something completely unforgivable. To do so would also mean that there’s something dirty and fermenting inside me that wants what the foreigner has . . . Or my version of what he has, which is money to be with San-pa so we can follow our dreams together.

  MOTHER LOVE

  Waaa! But how quickly my hopes and plans fall apart. San-pa has been gone for a season’s length of cycles. I’ve been away from school for almost as long and have lost needed studying time for the gaokao. “Your spoken Mandarin is much improved, but that won’t be tested,” Teacher Zhang says. “You’ve wasted your opportunity.” The news is stunning, ruinous. After all my years of hard work . . . For days I languish in disappointment and regret for being so unthinking of the consequences of my new role in the village. Then Teacher Zhang comes again to visit. “You are not the kind of person who gives up,” he tells me. “You are brave and tough and smart.” His encouraging words give me strength. I can’t allow this setback—as distressing as it is—to destroy my future. I force modern thoughts of opportunity to open my Akha eyes to see bigger and wider. When San-pa returns, you’ll be married. You’ll work for Mr. Huang. You don’t need college or university. I resolve to stay positive—good will come.

  And then, because I’m back to my regular routine—going to school even though I won’t be eligible to take the gaokao, doing home chores, and not thinking outward for Mr. Huang every minute of the day—I notice something I should have noticed a long while ago. I have not had my monthly bleeding. I’ve been so busy and filled with self-importance, that I ignored my body entirely. I thought I’d gained weight because Mr. Huang made sure I was fed. That my breasts hurt because they were growing fast as a result of the extra food that filled my bowl. That I was tired because who wouldn’t have been exhausted if they’d been following in my footsteps? With horror, I realize I’ve come to a head. That A-ma and the sisters-in-law haven’t caught on is just another sign of how occupied we’ve all been.

  I temporarily fell apart when I learned I wouldn’t be able to take the gaokao, but I don’t panic now. I have my money, and I’ll go to San-pa once I find out where he is. The next day, I tell A-ma that I’ll be in the forest digging for tubers. She lets me go without a single suspicious look. I walk through terrible heat and humidity to Shelter Shadow Village. It’s just as San-pa described it—on the crest of the hill, easy to defend, with views in all directions. I am not someone San-pa’s a-ma wants to see, but she invites me into the women’s room anyway. Her hands show a lifetime of work, while her eyes reveal the concerns of motherhood. I must wait a suitable length of time before I ask about San-pa, but she surprises me by inquiring about him first.

  “Have you heard from my son?” She may not want me as a daughter-in-law, but, I realize, her worry about San-pa is as deep as my own. “Has he sent word to you? At least we would know where he’s living.”

  This information causes water to form in my eyes.

  Tiny muscles in her cheek twitch at my response. “He’s so far away. And Thailand . . .” Her voice trails off. Then, “You know better than most that he can be called to mischief . . .”

  I cry the entire way home. The knowledge that San-pa is unreachable is devastating. The idea that something evil might have happened to him is crushing. Either way, I’m alone and pregnant with a human reject, making me doubly cursed.

  I wish I could confide in Ci-teh, but she might let my secret slip by accident. I can’t seek advice from my sisters-in-law, because it would be their duty to tell their husbands, who would tell A-ba. When girls find themselves in my condition they go to one person for help. This is the one person I absolutely cannot tell. A-ma would be so angry with me; I’m too afraid and humiliated to consider confiding in her. I do my best to hide the evidence of my pregnancy under my day wear: plain leggings and a tunic designed to hide a woman’s procreating status. I don’t know what will happen. I can’t think what will happen.

  For the next three cycles, everyone in Spring Well Village goes about their daily tasks—preparing the paddies for planting, pulling weeds from vegetable plots, and, for the women alone, spinning thread and weaving cloth to have material to sew and embellish when the rainy season starts. In addition, we have new responsibilities: to care for the tea trees so they’ll be improved when Mr. Huang returns. A-ma shows Third Brother how to prune his previously insignificant trees, straightening branches and trimming diseased or withered twigs and leaves. My first and second brothers ignore their bushed terraces and pollarded gardens, instead turning over and feeding the soil at the base of the old tea trees that dot their allotted lands. I go to my hidden grove—sometimes with A-ma, sometimes alone—to do the chores I inherited from the generations of women before me. Sometimes I sit under the mother tree and stare across the mountaintops. San-pa is out there somewhere. He must return soon.

  * * *

  A day comes when the sisters-in-law are inside weaving and A-ma and I are outside dyeing cloth in vats. A-ma is poking at the cloth with a stick, not even looking at me, when she says, “I see you’ve come to a head.”

  “A-ma—”

  “Don’t try to deny it. I may be your a-ma, but I’m not a fool. The three child-maker spirits that live in all women have released your water from the lake of children. You have a baby budding within you.”

  All the worry I’ve held inside now pours out with my tears.

  A-ma pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Gir
l. I have a potion to help you.”

  I shake my head. “It’s too late for that.”

  A-ma sighs. “How long?”

  “Thirteen cycles.”

  She accepts my assessment. “You’re not the first girl to have this happen. You’ll marry the boy. All will be fine.”

  But when I reveal the father is San-pa, her eyes go as black and opaque as tar. “I told you . . . You were forbidden . . .” She purses her lips. “And he’s not even here to fix it . . .”

  I’m crying hard now.

  “You can still marry Law-ba,” A-ma suggests. “Take him to the Flower Room. Take him to the forest. Let him steal love. He’s not so clever, and you wouldn’t be the first girl I’ve advised to do such a thing—”

  “But I love San-pa, and he loves me,” I sob. “He’ll come back. We’ll get married.”

  “You’d better hope so,” A-ma says darkly. “Otherwise . . .”

  She doesn’t need to say it: a human reject.

  * * *

  I stop going to school. No point.

  Teacher Zhang himself comes to Spring Well to talk to my a-ma and a-ba. “She’s been my brightest student. She’s been the light that kept me going—”

  But A-ba crows, triumphant. “At last she’s ready to prepare for being a wife.” Ha! What he means is he needs me to be here next spring and every spring after that when Mr. Huang returns to Nannuo Mountain.

  Teacher Zhang doesn’t give up so easily. “She could still go to trade school. It’s a four-year program. I can secure a place for her at any time. She could become a secretary, typist, or clerk.”

  Those are all jobs I’ve seen in school materials, but A-ba crushes the idea when he asks, “What use are those skills here?”

  “Besides,” A-ma adds, “we cannot bear the idea that we would lose our daughter to the outside world. If she went away, she might never come home.”

  By the time Teacher Zhang leaves, I’m fully back to helping A-ma.

  * * *

  The months pass. Every day I hope I’ll hear San-pa’s voice call to me in song across the mountain, reaching me long before I see him walk through our spirit gate.

  “The flowers bloom at their peaks, waiting for the butterflies to come—”

  I’ll sing back, “The honeycombs wait for the bees to make honey—”

  But the melody never reaches me.

  A-ma carries the burden of my secret. During our meals, she complains loudly to the rest of the family in an effort to explain my weight gain. “Girl thinks she’s risen above the rest of us now and eats all she wants. Look how fat she’s getting. When her tea benefactor returns they can act as two fat pigs together.” Later, she sneaks me extra vegetables. She also watches to make sure I don’t eat anything I shouldn’t. When First Brother comes home with a porcupine—a forbidden pregnancy food—he caught in a trap, A-ma orders me to help my sisters-in-law serve the meal instead of eating with my natal family. “If Girl is to become a proper wife,” she explains to A-ba, “then she should start learning what it means to be one.” When Second Brother butchers a barking deer he shot with his crossbow and discovers two forming fawns, A-ma sends me to Ci-teh’s house to visit for two days and nights for fear I too might have a litter. I gain very little weight. No more than five kilos. But should that minuscule weight gain spark the sisters-in-laws’ curiosity, despite everything A-ma has done to point them in other directions, she provides me with bloodied rags at the appropriate intervals. Where she gets the blood she doesn’t tell me.

  Some taboos I cannot avoid. Under no circumstances may a woman return to her father’s home when she’s pregnant, since the other term we use for pregnancy—one who is living under another—clearly spells out I should be with my husband. It’s also forbidden for a girl’s a-ma to be present at the birth of a grandchild. If I were to give birth here attended by A-ma, then the men in my family would die for three generations and the rest of the family would suffer tragedies for nine generations. So A-ma and I have begun making plans for the birth in case San-pa doesn’t return in time.

  “The killing of a human reject is a father’s responsibility,” A-ma whispers to me one night. “It is his duty and his sorrow, which is why he must always show anger at the baby for making him do such a terrible thing. But in cases such as yours, it falls to the mother to remove the human reject from the world of the living.”

  This knowledge is crippling. I’m so numb with foreboding that I mix ash from the fire with ground rice husks as though I’m in one of the nima’s trances. A-ma uses her finger to swipe the paste out of my bowl and into a little box, which she tucks away with her other potions and medicines. From that moment, not a second goes by that I’m unaware of its presence. The box and its contents are tiny—just enough to fill the nostrils and mouth of a newborn—yet it looms, a growing shadow over everything I do.

  Sometimes at night, lying on my sleeping mat with my palms spread underneath my tunic against my bare belly, I feel my baby jut its elbows and knees, as though it’s trying to touch my fingers. Deh-ja, Ci-teh’s ill-fated sister-in-law, used to chant, “Let it be a son. Let it be a son. Let it be a son.” My chanting is simpler. “San-pa, San-pa, San-pa.” No matter how far away he is, surely he must hear the call of my heart.

  * * *

  Then, on a day that is dead still without a whisper of a breeze—suffocating, really—the first spasm of labor starts in my spine, grabs around my abdomen, and presses down. When the second pain arrives, followed by so many others—the relentless pushing of a baby ready to come out—I try everything I can to keep the baby inside. I cross my legs. I use my hands to lift my belly against the spasms. A-ma is too knowledgeable about these things not to notice. When she approaches me to say, “It’s time,” despair whooshes through me, draining whatever hope I had. I fight back tears. I mustn’t cry. I absolutely cannot cry, if A-ma’s and my plan is to work. We’ll go to the forest, I’ll expel my human reject, and kill it before it has a chance to cry. “Quick,” A-ma has said, “so you’ll suffer the least amount of anguish.”

  Seemingly out of nowhere, A-ma announces to the rest of the family that she and I will be gone for a day or more to care for the tea trees on my land. The men hardly pay attention, while the sisters-in-law stiffen their shoulders to show their irritation at the extra work they’ll need to do in our absence. A-ma puts a few things in her satchel, including a hard-boiled egg wrapped in protective cloth. I see her palm the tin with the ash and husk mixture just as the worst spasm yet grips around the thing inside me. I try to keep my face relaxed so no one will notice. A-ma says our goodbyes and pulls me from the house. Once on the veranda, I scan the lane that divides the village, hoping to see San-pa. He’s not there. How could he have failed me—failed us—so?

  I choke back my emotions. I must leave the village looking as I usually do if I’m to come back and resume my life without being tainted by my mistakes.

  Our progress is slow. I’m filled with dread and sadness, but I’m as scrabbly as a crab, climbing the mountain, grabbing for rocks, hunched close to the earth every time another pain disables me. If anything, our journey is speeding my labor.

  “We must hurry,” A-ma urges, clutching my arm and dragging me up the path.

  The hardest part is edging around the boulder that hides the entrance to my grove, because my belly, facing that immutable wall of stone, upsets my balance and threatens to throw me off the cliff. When we enter the clearing, I’m too weak to make it to the shelter of the grotto. Instead, I collapse under the mother tree. A-ma spreads a mat, and I roll onto it. She helps me out of my leggings. She opens her satchel and lays out her knife, the tin with its deadly contents, and a few other small bags and boxes that hold the herbs that will help stop bleeding, fight pain, and tranquilize my mind after I’ve done what will be required. My circumstances are calamitous, but in the mother tree’s spreading branches above me, I see a dome of protection.

  A-ma follows the proper rituals, monitoring the
messages my body sends her. She has me squat and brace myself against the trunk of the mother tree. The spasms are strong and frequent until my body is reduced to that of any animal. Strange sounds escape my mouth. My water breaks, rushing forth from my body, seeping through my birthing mat, and into the soil. A-ma’s fingers feel around beneath me.

  “You may push,” she says.

  I grasp a low branch. My back presses against the trunk as I push as hard as I can. A second push. A third push.

  “I feel the head,” A-ma announces. She massages my opening. “You can do this without my cutting.” A fourth push. “The head is out. The shoulders are the hardest, Girl, but you can do it.” Gods and spirits must be looking out for me, because none of this is as painful as I anticipated. A-ma seems to read my mind, because she says, “You’re lucky. Now push!”

  I suck in air and hold it for one last push. The feeling? The one I’ve sensed from births I’ve witnessed, only this time it’s from the inside out—like a fish slipping through greased fingers. Whoorp.

  “It is a girl,” A-ma announces. What should follow is “You and your husband will always have water to drink,” meaning that she’ll fetch water for us, as is proper. Instead, A-ma mutters, “A little happiness.” Does she realize she’s quoting the Han majority saying for the birth of a girl? I don’t think so. Rather, she’s reminding me how fortunate I am that my human reject is a daughter instead of a son. A little happiness that I will only have to kill a worthless female.