The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Read online

  “Then you must have stolen love in the forest by now,” she presses, so nosy.

  “Do you see forest around you?” I ask, starting to get irritated. “Besides, I already told you. He hasn’t tested the machete.”

  Undaunted, Ci-teh changes the subject. “So how rich is he?”

  “Rich enough to buy you an airplane ticket,” I answer.

  “I didn’t need him to fly me here. I could have bought my own ticket,” she brags. “My family now makes one hundred times what we did just five years ago. All because of Pu’er.” She laughs, giddy, I suppose, at the craziness of the changes we’ve seen. But crowing about her own wealth serves to bring her back to her original subject. “Really, how rich is he? A millionaire? A billionaire?”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter to me anyway.” I’ve been reciting these phrases to myself the past twenty-four hours. In truth, I wouldn’t mind having the answers, although a part of me is afraid of them.

  “Would he invest in a business with me?”

  As I put on my headdress, I meet my friend’s eyes in the mirror. “Ci-teh, you already sell your teas through my shop. Are you hoping to compete with me?” I’ve kept the question light and teasing.

  Ci-teh frowns at my reflection. I hope I haven’t gone too far and insulted her. “Why aren’t you having a Western wedding with a big white dress?” she asks, ignoring my question. “That’s what I see in the magazines. That’s what everyone wants.”

  I stare at myself in the mirror. I look young and unmarred by my experiences, which is both unsettling and a relief. The clothes remind me of all I’ve lost, but also gained, and all I’ll need to forget . . . and remember. It feels strange to leave the ladies’ room and walk down a public hallway wearing something that so marks me as an ethnic minority. I worry about Jin’s reaction, but he lights up when he sees me. That he’s happy makes me happier still. He holds my hand through the five-minute ceremony. Mrs. Chang dabs at her eyes with a tissue. Ci-teh’s laughter feels as light as air. Jin can’t stop smiling, and neither can I. Our banquet is small—just four people sharing a moment of supreme joy.

  We drop my mother-in-law at her apartment. Alone in the backseat, Ci-teh chatters like she’s had too many coffees, pointing excitedly at the skyscrapers, neon lights, and limousines. When we pull into the motor court of a hotel next to the Fangcun Tea Market where she’ll stay—too hard to teach someone so tu how to use the subway or hail a taxi—she leans over the front seat to whisper in my ear. “Tell him to make a way down there first,” she advises in Akha, as though I’ve never done the intercourse before.

  An hour later, Jin and I are sitting on our veranda, overlooking the tree-lined pedestrian walkway outside our beautiful home, and drinking champagne. I excuse myself to change into a cotton nightgown I bought at a night market. Ready, I open the door into our bedroom. Jin has closed the shutters and lit candles.

  “I’m not a girl anymore,” I remind him.

  He takes me in his arms. We don’t steal love or do the intercourse. We make love.

  * * *

  Three days later, I’m in Beverly Hills, having dinner in a restaurant called Spago. I’m still struggling with how to use a knife and fork—which my husband finds supremely amusing—and worrying that the meal will make me sick. Everything is too rich and too heavy with cow: cow meat, cow cream, cow butter. And why can’t the dishes be served all at once in the middle of the table to be shared by the two of us like a normal meal? Later, after the main course plates are removed, Wolfgang Puck himself comes to the table to shake Jin’s hand and kiss me on both cheeks. He promises to send over a special dessert that isn’t on the menu—a Grand Marnier soufflé. If I don’t spend the night throwing up, I’ll be happy. Every wife must adapt, but the food part has been hard for me. But the rest? Wow! I so like this American word. Wow! Wow! Wow!

  We’re staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which makes the King World look like a guesthouse. My husband took me shopping on Rodeo Drive, where he bought me new clothes, because, he said, “We don’t want you to look fresh off the boat.” I tried on clothes made with a quality of textiles—silk, cotton, and cashmere—I didn’t know existed and fit me in a way I didn’t think possible. Dior. Prada. Armani. He even took me to a store to buy new underwear and a nightgown so pretty I can’t imagine sleeping in it, to which he whispered in my ear, “I don’t expect you to sleep in it.” I got a new haircut too. By the end of the first day—and I was completely jet-lagged, something tourists at the King World used to complain about—I looked like a different person. Jin couldn’t stop grinning, or saying, “You’re beautiful.” I’m a married woman, and my life has been totally transformed.

  But those are only outside things. Now, as we sit in this elegant restaurant, I look like I belong, but inside I feel out of place. Maybe it’s the jet lag or the shock of encountering so many new things at once, but I feel myself beginning to spin with unwanted questions. Do I need to be changed this much by Jin for him to love me? Am I being as easily corrupted by his money as I was by Mr. Huang’s offer to buy leaves from my grove? How rich is my husband anyway? Village rich? China rich? America rich? Self-doubt and distrust are a bad combination.

  As we wait for the mysterious dessert to arrive, I gently ask Jin about his business. Without hesitation, he answers my questions, saying, “You need to know everything about me, just as I need to know everything about you.” Some of what he tells me I already know. Jin was ten years old when he and his mother were allowed back to Guangzhou. His mother had a job, true, but they were allotted only a single unfurnished room in the worst of the faculty dormitories, which also served the most meager food.

  “In the countryside, I’d learned to save everything I found, because we never knew when it would come in handy,” he explains. “Nothing could go to waste. Not even a scrap of paper.”

  “I grew up the same way—”

  “Which is why I love you.” He pauses for me to take in the statement I’ll never tire of hearing. Then, “So, as a boy newly arrived in the city, I began to collect paper trash, bundle it, and sell it to a recycling mill to earn extra money. It had to be completely under the table, because all enterprises were still state-owned.”

  “Was it dangerous?”

  “Definitely! But you have to remember that our country’s need for cardboard, lumber, and pulp was growing quickly. Where were factory owners going to get the materials when so many of our forests had been cut down during the Great Leap Forward?”

  With the money he earned, he was able to buy necessities and extra food. He kept up with his classwork too. Armed with good test results, he got into a local college, where he studied engineering.

  “Engineering?” How could I not know even that?

  “All through those years,” he continues, “I kept my little business, hiring kids like me, who were poor and hungry, to collect discarded paper and cardboard. I would have been sent to labor camp if I’d been caught, but I had to do what I could to help improve my mother’s life after what I’d done.” His eyes flit off to the side for a moment, then return to me. “Besides, when you’re desperate, you’ll do anything to make life easier, even if it’s dangerous.”

  When he graduated, his education and his own connections got him a job at the recycling mill, but still he kept his side business. The kids who collected paper grew up, moved on, and were replaced by new kids who were in such sad circumstances that they too risked being arrested for collecting and selling paper to him.

  “When Deng Xiaoping began his economic reforms in the mid-nineties,” he continues, “I was eager to participate, and I already had my own business. I easily got an EB-5 visa to come here under the U.S.’s Immigrant Investor Program. What better place to look for trash than in America—the land of consumption and waste?”

  His laughter booms through the restaurant. The people at the next table glance in our direction. I blush and stare down at the tablecloth. Will I ever feel comfortable here? />
  “Of course, Zhang Yin had a head start. Have you heard of her?” When I shake my head, he explains. “She’s the queen of cardboard and the richest person in China. She’s the second richest self-made woman in the world, after Oprah.” (I have no idea who that is, but no matter.) “When I met Zhang Yin, she said, ‘Other people see scrap paper as garbage. You and I see it as a forest of trees to be utilized.’ I was only too happy to sell to her. I now send container ships filled with trash across the sea to China, where her Nine Dragons Paper Holdings turns it into cardboard. Goods are placed in those boxes, loaded onto other shipping containers, and sent right back to America to become trash again. The cycle continues day after day, and as Deng Xiaoping predicted, we’ve gotten rich. You’d be too modest to ask me directly, so I’ll tell you. If Zhang Yin is the queen of cardboard, then maybe I’m her two-hundredth princeling.”

  I can’t begin to untangle in my head just what a two-hundredth princeling might mean.

  When dessert arrives, Jin abruptly switches subjects. “I want to take you all across this country to see places for yourself, but do you already have an idea about where you might want to live?”

  “Live?”

  “We should buy a house here too,” he says matter-of-factly. “I already have a small house in Monterey Park—”

  “A house here?” He needs to stop surprising me . . . “Why aren’t we staying there now?”

  “Because this is our honeymoon! Later, I want us to have a new house, where we can start fresh together.” He hesitates before continuing. “But that’s not the only reason. You never know what can happen in China. Dog today; cat tomorrow. As entrepreneurs, we need to think about how to protect our money.” We. I like how he includes me as an equal. “So what can we do? Buy jewels and gold? Buy a hotel? Buy art? Buy wine? I’ve done a little of all that.”

  “You own a hotel?” I need to break this habit of repeating what he says.

  “Half the Chinese I know own hotels here.”

  But that can’t possibly be right.

  “I want to make you happy,” he goes on. “I want you to feel beautiful. I want us to have a glorious life together.”

  When he puts it that way . . . Wow! I’m swept up. It’s very easy to be loved this way. I could even eat that dessert again too.

  Mr. Kelly’s fifth-grade American history unit: Choose a person or event from the Revolutionary War to write about. Divide your report into three sections: background, the person or event, and how this person or event continues to have an impact on you, America, and/or global life today. Due January 10, 2007.

  The Boston Tea Party

  by

  Haley Davis

  Background

  China is the birthplace of tea. The botanical name for tea is Camellia sinensis. It is an evergreen plant. In 782, during the Tang dynasty, China put the first tax on tea. In history, many other countries have placed taxes on tea. In the ninth century, bricks of tea began to be used as money. Some people thought this was better than gold or silver, because if you were starving, you could eat it. In the sixteenth century, tea was introduced to Portuguese priests and merchants traveling in China.

  In 1650, the Dutch brought tea to New Amsterdam (what is now New York City) on sailing ships. When England acquired the colony, they discovered that the small settlement drank more tea than all of England put together! The colonists didn’t have very much to eat and drink, and they really liked tea, but in England tea was only for rich people. In 1698, the British Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on tea importation. Even though there was a monopoly, smugglers brought tea to the colonies at a much cheaper price. On May 10, 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which was supposed to help the English government pay for its wars with France and help the East India Company survive. People said that the East India Company would last forever because it was so big and strong, but actually it was failing. (My dad says that today we would call what happened a bailout.) Now the Thirteen Colonies and the colonists had to pay a big tax on top of buying their tea.

  The Boston Tea Party

  The colonists didn’t want taxation without representation. Their motto was “Anything but British tea.” They boycotted the taxed tea. It became the symbol of rebellion. New York and Philadelphia sent tea ships back to London. In Charleston, tea was left on the dock to rot. In Boston, the colonists wouldn’t let three ships unload their tea. On December 16, 1773, some colonists dressed up like Native Americans, climbed on the ships, chopped open 340 chests of Chinese tea with tomahawks, and threw the contents into Boston Harbor. The tea weighed 90,000 pounds. In today’s money, the value would be one million dollars. Founding Father John Adams called the event “the Destruction of the Tea in Boston.” Today we call it the Boston Tea Party.

  England got really mad and enacted the Coercive Acts. The colonists called them the Intolerable Acts. The laws punished the people in Boston by ending all commerce and closing the harbor until the bill for the lost tea was paid. They punished the state of Massachusetts by abolishing self-government. Now all Thirteen Colonies got mad. There were tea parties in other harbors. In September 1774, the colonists met at the First Continental Congress. They wanted to fight back. Seven months later, the Revolutionary War began.

  How the Boston Tea Party Affects Me Today

  For a very long time, the United States, England, and other countries could only buy tea from China. Emperors in China said that anyone who tried to take a tea seed or plant out of the country would have his head cut off. Finally, the British people stole some plants and took them to India. One of the tea gardens there was started by Sir Thomas Lipton, a grocery store owner. My grandma and grandpa still drink Lipton tea.

  Tea is the second most popular drink in the world after water. The biggest tea-growing countries are China, India, and Kenya. Overall, China is the biggest tea-drinking country, but the largest per capita countries for tea drinking are Turkey, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. In Turkey, they consume seven pounds of tea leaves a year per person. Per capita means that every person in Turkey, even if they are babies, drinks ten cups of tea a day. The United States is the sixty-ninth per capita tea-drinking country. Americans only drink twelve ounces of tea leaves a year per person. (Americans aren’t in the top ten countries for coffee drinkers either.) My mom and dad like coffee, but they drink tea when we go to a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. Sometimes they let me have tea with sugar for a special treat, but not very often because I get too excited and can’t go to sleep. We may not drink tea that much in the United States, but it is still very important around the world.

  TALL TREES CATCH MUCH WIND

  The day after our dinner at Spago, I insist—yes, insist—that we visit Jin’s house in Monterey Park. He’d called it a “small house.” It’s larger than anything I’ve lived in, and it has to be larger than anything he lived in growing up too. The day after that, we cancel the rest of our trip, check out of the hotel, and move into the house. He drives me to the market, and everyone there is Chinese. That night, I make Jin dinner for the first time: pork belly braised in chilies, ong choy with preserved tofu, scrambled egg with tomato, and rice. For the next week, we leave the house only to go shopping. And then we go home, lock the door, make love, eat, watch the Mandarin-language channels to see what’s happening in China, sleep, and repeat it all over again the next day.

  In the second week, he insists—yes, insists, and I, as Wife-of-Jin, go along—that we look for a new house. As we crisscross the San Gabriel Valley, I begin to understand the differences between the neighborhoods of Arcadia, Rosemead, Monterey Park, South Pasadena, and, of course, San Gabriel. Everything we look at seems grander than I could have imagined. My favorite, though, is a 1920s one-bedroom bungalow—cozy, and perfect for the two of us.

  “But we’re going to need more than one bedroom!” Jin exclaims. Then he frowns as he realizes we’ve never spoken about children. “I hope you want children.”

  Sun and Moon! How can
he know how much this has been in my mind? On our first day here, when we were walking down Rodeo Drive, I saw an older man and woman—white—with a girl with long black hair walking between them, holding their hands. Yan-yeh? Could it be? As Jin and I passed them, I turned back to look. That girl had to have been adopted, but she was clearly Han majority and not Akha. After that, I stayed alert, searching always for a white mother or father or both with a girl with black hair, who’ll be turning twelve later this year. Would she be Akha small? Or would her lifetime of American food have given her extra height? I’ve spotted girls here and there: too old, too young, nose too flat, breasts too big. Besides, my daughter could be anywhere in this big country. She could be in New York City. She could be living with a cowboy family on a ranch. She could be in Alaska or Hawaii. Knowing I’ll never find her—and loving Jin as much as I do—has stirred a desire in me to have a baby. But it’s only now as Jin asks the question that I wonder how the One Child policy will apply to us. As an ethnic minority, I could have multiple children. Jin, as a member of the Han majority, will be allotted one child.

  “Why worry about the rules?” he asks. “We can have as many children as we want, if they’re born in America. And they’ll be American citizens too. And even if we have them in China, what will the authorities do to us? Make us pay a ten-thousand-dollar fine? We aren’t peasants. We can afford many children.”

  We get to work making a baby that afternoon. I sense old emotions and traditions bubbling to the surface. I don’t say this to Jin—he might think me too backward—but inside I call to the three child-maker spirits that live in every woman to release my water from the lake of children so I’ll become pregnant quickly.

  Perhaps Jin is motivated by a similar urge, because by the end of the third week, he’s found our new house: a pretty four-bedroom Spanish-style home on a street planted with jacaranda trees in Arcadia. For the first time, I observe my husband as a businessman. He’s a tough negotiator, and honestly, I don’t know what all the things he talks about are: deeds of trust, CC & Rs, escrows, title searches, insurance—none of which we have in China. No matter. It turns out that if you do an all-cash deal, you can buy a house very quickly.