The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Page 11

  The plan was for me to act quickly. Instead, I find myself staring at my daughter on the mat. The cord still spirals from her belly to my interior. She’s covered with the white wax that’s protected her inside my body, smeared with blood, and speckled with yellow threads that have shaken loose from the mother tree. Even if my baby were not a human reject, no one would be allowed to pick her up until she cried three times. But she doesn’t cry. Her arms don’t flail. She looks calmly up at me. Perhaps it’s because the day is warm and the labor was fast. Perhaps it’s because she knows she’s a human reject and her time on earth is numbered in minutes. I’ve been told that newborns can’t see, but if that’s so, then how can my daughter be staring into the depths of my soul?

  I have a duty, a responsibility, but I don’t move.

  Then, completely unexpectedly, A-ma flicks the nail of her middle finger against the baby’s foot. The little thing startles, and her first cry cuts through the stillness of the grove, surprising the birds out of the trees, the flapping of their wings stirring the air around us. There is no recitation of the customary words.

  A second cry, irritated to have been disturbed.

  A third cry, desperate to be held.

  Inside my body, a part of me so deep I didn’t know it existed stirs, jolts, wakes. Before A-ma can stop me, I scoop up my baby and hold her to my chest. The cord pulls on my insides. A-ma—she cannot be thinking either, but also moving from some buried part of herself—gently dabs the baby’s face with a cloth. A-ma has a look I’ve never seen at a birth—not even at those for my nephews and nieces. The baby eerily returns the gaze. Tears glisten on A-ma’s eyelashes, then overflow down her cheeks.

  “A long, long time ago,” A-ma begins, following a custom as old as the Akha people, but her voice is unsteady, “a vicious tiger prowled the mountains, searching for the blood-perfumed scent of newborns. The tiger snatched these unfortunates to eat before they could receive their permanent names. One gulp. Nothing left. The ruma tried to cast protective spells. The nima went into trances, searching for the cause of the tiger’s ceaseless hunger. Mysteriously, whatever remedy the ruma and the nima implemented only emboldened the animal. He became hungrier and hungrier. It could have been the end of the Akha people.”

  A-ma should not be telling this story to a human reject. I should not be opening my tunic and exposing my breasts. Neither of us should have touched her. I can’t imagine a cleansing ceremony exists strong enough to erase our offenses.

  A-ma presses on, never hesitating in telling the traditional story. “Then, in a village so remote the people did not yet have clothes to wear and protected themselves from the elements with only palm fronds and kneaded bark, a woman like me—a midwife—gave the child the temporary name of No-food-no-tiger. From that day forward, that tiger—and all tigers born from the creature—have been repelled by the strength of temporary names carefully chosen: No-bite, Mildewed-rice, Soured-tofu.” She puts a fingertip on my daughter’s forehead. “Your temporary name is Spiny-thistle.”

  The baby nuzzles my breast and finds my nipple, seeking the healthy drops of yellow fluid that will nourish her until my milk arrives. How serene she is. How small and perfect. The pulls of her mouth are surprisingly strong, and they trigger a spasm that pushes the friend-living-with-child out of my body. I loosen my arms so A-ma can reach my baby’s stomach, cut the cord, and tie it. We cannot take the friend-living-with-child home to bury under the ancestor shrine, so A-ma buries it under the mother tree.

  A-ma hands me a jug of water and walks to the edge of the grove, leaving me alone with my daughter. I suck some of the liquid into my mouth, spray it on Spiny-thistle’s body, and use the corner of a piece of cloth to clean the birthing muck from her skin. How can this tiny bundle of flesh be so precious to me already? I understand in all my sore and aching parts, including my pathetic little heart, that this is why the mothers of human rejects may never touch or hold them.

  A-ma returns and squats next to me. She peels the heart-forget egg and hands it to me. Numb, I take a bite. It may help me forget the physical pain of childbirth, but I’ll never lose the agony of this. A-ma searches my eyes. I search hers. What are we going to do? My emotions are jumbled. Love for my daughter. Terror that A-ma will insist I use the ash and rice husk mixture on my baby. Concern that A-ma is going to remove Spiny-thistle from my arms and do what I cannot. I don’t have the strength to fight A-ma for my daughter when I just gave birth. And even if I fought her and won . . .

  I say to A-ma the obvious thing. “I can’t keep the baby—not without a father.”

  “If you take her back to Spring Well, your a-ba or one of your brothers will need to complete . . . the ceremony. The headman, ruma, nima, and village elders will see to it.”

  Tears course down my cheeks, fall from my chin and onto my daughter’s face. She blinks at the interruption of her sucking.

  “Maybe for once the Han majority laws can help,” A-ma goes on. “The One Child policy doesn’t apply to us, but suppose you give her away—as so many Han women must do when they birth an unwanted daughter. I have heard it happens.”

  Yes, we’ve heard it happens, but is it so? Could a mother abandon her baby? Look at me. I couldn’t do what Akha Law told me to do. Maybe Han majority women can’t do what Chinese law tells them to do either.

  But when I say this to A-ma, she responds, “It is the only hope for you or the baby. We must try.”

  “But where can I leave her?” My voice trembles. If someone on Nannuo Mountain found an infant abandoned in the forest, he would immediately recognize it as a human reject with a father too weak to do what needed to be done. It would be up to that stranger to make sure the rite was carried out. Akha Law is immutable when it comes to human rejects.

  “There’s a place I’ve heard the family-planning women talk about at the tea collection center.” A-ma takes her time to pronounce the Mandarin word. “Orphanage. You will find one in Menghai—”

  “Menghai?” It’s the nearest big town, where the tea factory is, and where I begged San-pa to take me. The only people I know who’ve been there are the mountain traders who bring goods to us; Teacher Zhang, who passed through when he was sent here to learn from the peasants; and Mr. Huang, his son, and their driver.

  “They say it’s about twenty kilometers or a day away by horse cart,” she says. “You ought to be able to walk there and back in three nights.”

  We make a new plan. It must forever stay a secret—to protect my reputation, if I hope to marry one day, and to keep A-ma from being disgraced as a midwife and woman, who, until now, has been an ideal of our Akha ways.

  When she goes home for supplies, I stare into my daughter’s face and tell her how much I love her, hoping my words will seep into her flesh, blood, and bones to be held within her forever. “You have been born on Chicken Day,” I whisper tenderly. “This is wonderful, because you’ll always know the opening and closing of the sun.” I tell her how sorry I am that I won’t be able to chew food for her when she reaches four months or feed her fish when she’s older so she becomes adept at fishing. “Always remember that if you’re afraid a spirit is coming toward you, spit at it, because spirits are afraid that if saliva touches them they will get leprosy.”

  I teach her the sounds of the forest around us: how to distinguish the rustling of the wind in the trees from the crackle of an animal brushing against shrubs and vines as it makes its way on a wildlife trail; how to look at the sky and estimate from the number of stars if there will be rain, fog, or a blanket of humidity at dawn; and, most important, how to understand her place in the world. “From my a-ma to me to you, know that every plant, animal, and mote of dust has a soul. You must make correct choices for the world to remain in balance.” As I murmur these words, I’m on guard for a spirit to swoop down and suck the breath straight out of my lungs as punishment for keeping my daughter alive instead of sending her to the great lake of boiling blood.

  Hours later, A-ma returns wit
h a tea-picking basket strapped to her back. She makes a camp for us in the rocky grotto, where we’ll be protected through the night. She unpacks clean clothes for me, as well as rags to place between my legs to catch blood. For the baby, she’s brought some swaddling, including a cap with charms. A-ma inspects the place where the baby came out. I have bleeding, but nothing excessive or uncontrollable. I haven’t had need for opium or any of her poultices, but I’m exhausted from the months of hiding, from the disappointment that San-pa didn’t return in time, from the trek to my land, and from expelling my daughter. I lie on my side with Spiny-thistle cradled to my breast. The moon illuminates the trees, filtering leafy shadows across the grove. If only there were a way to make her remember this moment.

  * * *

  A-ma has already made a fire and heated water by the time I wake. I feel far worse physically this morning: sore, tired, empty. Mentally, it’s as though I’ve been inhabited by a spirit: lost, confused, but determined to carry out my misdeeds.

  A-ma holds Spiny-thistle while I eat. “Look around you,” she coos to the baby. “This is the mother tree. These are the sister trees. You may never see this place again, but it is yours by right. Our blood is in this earth. It has nourished these trees. You are a part of them, and they are a part of you.” She pauses before continuing. “There can be no proper naming ceremony for you, since neither your father nor one of your grandfathers can perform the rite. You’ll live outside our Akha traditions, but you’ll take two gifts with you when you leave our mountain today.”

  A-ma glances at me, commanding my attention. I put down my cup to listen.

  “First, I name you Yan-yeh. You are the first daughter of my only daughter. Li-yan to Yan-yeh—”

  With no father to properly name her, my daughter will never learn to Recite the Lineage. The sharpness of regret stabs into my chest, cleanly, cruelly, irrevocably.

  “Second,” A-ma goes on, “I’m giving you the most precious gift we women have in our line.” With one hand, she reaches into the picking basket she brought with her and pulls out a round cake of tea. Wrapped in rice paper, the cake is not so big—maybe eighteen centimeters across and two centimeters thick. Age has faded the ink drawings. All my life I’ve lived in the same house with my a-ma, but I’ve never before seen the tea cake. And, not that it’s all that important, I thought we Akha didn’t make tea cakes, let alone wrap them in decorated papers. That’s why Tea Master Wu had to show everyone in the village what to do.

  In answer to my unspoken thoughts, A-ma says, “Since I came to your a-ba in marriage, I’ve kept this hidden in the most powerful and safe place in our home—the space between the family altar in the women’s room and the friends-living-with-child that came from me and your sisters-in-law buried in the soil directly below. Girl, you think you learned so much about tea when the stranger was here with his son. He says he came here to save Pu’er from extinction.” Even in this most profound moment, she snorts her distaste for Mr. Huang. “He knows nothing. He learned nothing. He was looking for aged tea? This is aged tea. It has survived many changes and threats. Your great-grandmother secreted it away from the Japanese in the thirties. Your grandmother hid it from revolutionaries in the forties. It was my responsibility to protect it during the dark years of the Great Leap Forward in the fifties, when tea tree plantations were razed and replanted with tea terraces. We were forced to change our old ways and make vast quantities of inferior tea to sell to the masses. We worked so hard, and we were so hungry. Many people starved to death.”

  A-ma is usually so careful with her words, releasing only those that are necessary. Not this time, and her urgency is marked by my need to absorb this new information about her and this strange tea cake.

  “Then came the sixties and seventies,” she continues, “when the Red Guards sought the Destruction of the Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs, and habits. We were no longer allowed to drink tea, because it was seen as recalling hours of leisure, as though we’d ever had those. We were forced to tear down the spirit gate and the village swing. To keep the old ways would have been to commit a political crime, but for anyone to think someone like me would forget? Or let something as precious as tea become extinct, as that stranger-fool said?”

  All this time, she could have said something to Mr. Huang. She could have helped him more.

  “This cake,” she says, turning her attention to Yan-yeh, “goes back many generations of women in our family. It is the best gift I can give you, my granddaughter, yet it holds many secrets and much suffering. Carry it with you wherever you go as a reminder of who you are and where you came from.”

  A-ma places my baby on the tea cake so that it serves as a shield on which to rest her neck and fans above her head like a halo, and then binds them together with a handwoven blanket. She picks up Yan-yeh and gives her to me. “You must go.”

  I shake my head. I’m terrified.

  “Keep walking down the mountain.” A-ma gazes out across the peaks, blue and hazy in the distance. Her jaw tightens as she pulls her knife from her belt and tucks it in mine. “Protect yourself,” she says, and I clutch Yan-yeh closer to my body. “When you see people, ask the way to Menghai. Mark your route for your return.”

  Getting around the boulder is hard with the baby, but A-ma is at my side, steadying me, keeping me from falling. As soon as we reach the old and faint path, she places on my back the basket packed with the necessities for my journey.

  “Support her neck,” she instructs. “Keep walking. I told the others we would be gone for four nights. That gives you three more nights to get her to a safe place and then come home. I will wait here for you.” Then she turns her back on me, grabs on to the boulder, and shimmies out of sight.

  I feel like a girl in an Akha fable.

  The tiny trail that leads away from my grove joins the larger path. I bypass my village entirely, always heading down. Where the path branches, I build a pile of rocks or cut into the bark of a tree. I stop every once in a while to clear my throat three times and rub the hair on my arms and legs. The world knows that spirits are not that clever or brave. They are frightened of saliva and the sounds of human hairs are excruciating to their ears. When Yan-yeh whimpers, I hunker down and bring her to my breast. I lay her on pine needles when I need to relieve myself and change my bloody rags. I eat rice balls as I walk.

  Night falls. I wend my way deep into the forest to find what I hope will be a place safe from the worst outside spirits. I strike three trees with my fist. “You be my home! Watch over us.” I roll out my sleeping mat and curl around my daughter. As soon as dawn brightens the sky, I’m up again. I hurt all over and my body screams for more rest, but I have to keep moving if I’m going to give Yan-yeh a chance at life. The mountains are still steep and should be unusable, but tea terraces undulate, following the curves of the hillsides and climbing until they disappear into the morning mists. The farmers have triumphed over nature as I must now conquer my physical pain and weakness.

  When the sun is high, the mountain path widens and I start to hear rumbling sounds. I reach a dirt road with a truck going one way, a tractor going the opposite way, and a few people bearing wares trudging in both directions. I need to find this spot when I come home. I can’t leave a pile of rocks by the side of the road, because what if someone or something tips it over? I struggle to find a landmark, but I see nothing different from what I’ve been passing through all morning. I take one of the rags A-ma gave me and tie it to a branch. Please let it be enough for me to find on my return.

  I step into the road, not knowing which way to go—left or right. I ask a woman wearing Dai nationality clothes and carrying a basket heaped with corncobs the way to Menghai. “We’re going there too,” she answers. “You can follow us if you’d like.” I feel better to be walking with someone from a hill tribe—a stranger but still familiar—because every step reveals something completely new. The land turns to gentle slopes and what’s planted on them changes. The impossibly towering
tea terraces are far behind me now. Instead, trees I don’t recognize rise up in neatly planted rows. Now, when I stop to mark my route with a slash from A-ma’s knife, thick white goo oozes from the trunks like white blood. The Dai woman tells me they’re rubber trees. “Are they for eating?” I ask. She laughs and shakes her head. I begin to see houses, which are unlike any in the mountains—made of stones, clay bricks, and some type of smooth gray material. Then I see my first two-story building. And then the most astounding sight. Way above my head. My first airplane.

  Yan-yeh stirs and squawks in her birdlike way. I say goodbye to the Dai woman and step off the road to find a spot of shade. I unwrap my baby and set the tea cake on the ground. I bring her to my breast. My milk hasn’t come in yet, but she sucks and sucks and sucks—my baby is strong, and she’ll need courage to survive what’s coming—while my insides wring and constrict. I have to bite my lips from the double pain, and yet the way she looks up at me . . . Her eyes are so clear . . . When she falls asleep, I wrap her back up, making sure to support her neck as A-ma showed me. Then it’s back to the road.

  Two hours later, as darkness falls, we arrive at the city. Dust churns and swirls as cars, trucks, motorcycles, tractors, donkey- and horse-pulled carts, bicycles, and so many people bump along the dirt road. Even in my despair, the sight is amazing, but the first time I hear a horn, I almost faint I’m so scared. Nearly everyone is dressed like Teacher Zhang—in a Mao suit and cap—but some men wear gray pants, white shirts, matching gray jackets, and knit vests. That too looks like a uniform. Here and there, I spot someone like me—a member of a hill tribe, immediately identifiable by our embroidered indigo clothes and the special headdresses that mark us as Bulang, Dai, or Akha.

  I recognize things I’ve learned about in school: apartment buildings, petrol stations, dress shops, restaurants. (Restaurants! Imagine going to a store like that, sitting down, telling the man what you want, and then he brings it to you.) But it’s the electric lights that are most alarming and fascinating. White lights. Yellow lights. Orange and red lights. Green lights. Glowing from buildings. Illuminating roadways. Shining like evil eyes from cars.