The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Page 37

  Sean translates as the other male guests sing to the women: “The flowers bloom at their peaks, waiting for the butterflies to come—”

  Then the women sing to the men: “The honeycombs wait for the bees to make honey—”

  Then back to the men: “A beautiful flower calls to her love—”

  We’re both able to join the chorus. “Alloo sae, ah-ee-ah-ee-o, ah-ee-ah-ee-o.”

  After the festivities, we’re handed oil lamps. Sean guides me to my bungalow. He leans in, barely brushing his lips against mine. He pulls back to gauge my reaction. The air feels so heavy between us I can barely breathe. He puts a hand on the small of my back and pulls me to him. Our kiss is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. In another minute, we’re in my little room. The oil lamps flicker. He slowly undresses me. “You’re beautiful,” he says. Nothing in my life has prepared me for what I feel when we make love.

  Afterward, I lie in his arms. Something extraordinary is happening, but is it too fast? He edges up onto an elbow so he can stare into my eyes. I don’t know how, but I feel as though he knows me completely, and somehow I know him. And then he says the most remarkable thing.

  “I’ve loved you from the moment you walked into my booth at the tea expo. I’ve brought you to the place I love most in the world. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could spend our lives traveling the world, drinking tea, and reading the great poets?”

  The realities of our lives escape me for a moment. We make love again, and it’s even more exquisite. When he falls asleep, I let my breathing follow his.

  * * *

  The next morning begins as it usually does—with Sean on WeChat, contacting the people we’re going to see—but with every second heightened by blissful joy. Then we get in the car and set off. After an hour, we’re driven onto a narrow unpaved stretch you could barely call a road. We reach a gate watched by a couple of men. They recognize Sean immediately and wave us through, but we don’t go far before we reach another gate. It’s decorated like some of the others I’ve glimpsed off the side of the main road—with a man with a gigantic penis and a woman with bulging breasts.

  “We need to walk the rest of the way,” Sean says.

  The driver parks the car. Sean and I pass through the gate—he warns me not to touch the posts—and proceed along a path. The wind rustles through the trees, cicadas whine, birds trill. The moist tropical air feels warm and soothing on my skin. The first thing I see when we reach the village are some barefoot children washing dishes in a pig trough. In the end, though, it’s much like the other villages we’ve visited. Everyone is involved in tea processing. People are bringing in baskets of tea leaves and spreading them on raised platforms to wilt, killing the green in outdoor woks over wood fires, kneading, steaming, or doing the twist on the heavy round stones that will press the tea into cakes.

  We reach a house where a group of women sit around flat baskets, sorting tea. One of them is quite old and wearing full ethnic minority clothing. A little boy, eight or nine, sits next to her.

  “Xian-rong! Mom said you were coming!” The boy squeals in English without a trace of an accent as he runs to Sean and jumps into his arms.

  The old woman rises. “Xian-rong.”

  I look at Sean quizzically. “They know me by Huang Xian-rong, my Mandarin name,” he explains. “And this is Paul.”

  “Jin-ba when I’m here with Grandma!” the boy says cheerily.

  “He lives in Arcadia,” Sean goes on.

  “Then we’re practically neighbors,” I say. What a trip.

  The old woman, who’s introduced as So-sa, doesn’t speak English, but she seems happy to see Sean. She pulls us to another table under a bamboo and thatch pavilion, where one of her granddaughters, whose name I don’t catch, pours tea.

  “I really want you to meet Tina,” Sean says to me, “because she might have some ideas about your tea cake. While we’re waiting for her to arrive, why don’t you show it to So-sa? You never know . . .”

  When I pull it out of my bag and lay it on the table, the old woman gasps and then scurries away as though she’s seen a ghost. The boy from Arcadia laughs. “Grandma . . . She’s so superstitious . . .”

  The woman lingers at the edge of the main house, peeking out at us, wiping her eyes, then disappearing again. Sean looks at me and shrugs. The granddaughter pours more tea, but the whole thing is weird.

  “Is she crying? Maybe we should go,” I say, rising.

  Before Sean can respond, the old woman sidles back to us and angrily addresses him.

  “She thinks my father has sent us,” he translates, but he sounds as confused as I feel.

  “Your father?”

  “My father and this family have a long history together.”

  She gestures up the mountain and rattles off a stream of sentences directed at me.

  “She wants you to go with her,” he translates, obviously editing. “She says the two of you must go alone.”

  “What does she want?” I ask nervously. It’s one thing to be in a remote village with Sean, but it’s quite another to go off with some crazy old bat.

  “She says no men are allowed,” Sean answers, but his voice goes up at the end as if in question. “You’ll be fine.” His words are hardly reassuring.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere—”

  Then the old woman snatches my tea cake and runs away! Without thinking, I take off after her, but she’s a lot stronger than she looks. She’s sure-footed as she dashes up the narrow mountain path. I’m a lot younger, but I’m not a farmer and I’m not accustomed to the altitude. I have to grab on to the limbs of trees and scraggly weeds to keep from falling. Higher and higher we go. I should have turned back after five minutes, but now it’s too late because now I truly am in the middle of nowhere. In the forest. Picking my way through a spidery network of pathways. Monkeys screeching. Birds calling alarms. A half hour, an hour, longer. I can’t lose sight of the old woman, because if I do, not only will my tea cake be gone but I’ll be hopelessly lost. My lungs burn, my thighs ache, and all I can think about are my mom and dad, how much I love them, and how broken they’ll be if I don’t come home.

  The old woman stops in a small clearing, finally allowing me to catch up. I’m gasping for breath, but she’s fine. She gives me a steady look, takes my upper arm with a firm hand, and turns me toward the view. She holds up the tea cake and then points to the mountains. Instantly I see it—the V’s, the terraces, the stream. The realization makes my knees buckle. Is the old woman my mother? She can’t possibly be.

  She practically drags me up the hill. We’re climbing and climbing. The whole time she’s jabbering something that sounds like a-ma-a-ma-a-ma, stopping occasionally to point at her belly and then up the mountain. Pretty soon the path disappears entirely. Up ahead I see a boulder—the squiggly circle I know so well. No one could find this place without the map, because it’s so well hidden. The old woman tucks my tea cake inside her tunic. Like a crab she edges around the boulder with me right behind her. I’m shaking badly, but I make it to the other side.

  Camphor trees centuries old create a canopy above us, sheltering several tea trees. The old woman pulls out the tea cake, but I don’t need her to point out the tree that’s been the symbol I’ve dreamed and wondered about my entire life. Up in the boughs a woman picks leaves, which confirms my impression that this grove, while hidden, is both well cared for and private, as though only these two have ever been here. I start to feel something. Memories. Although I can’t possibly have a single memory of this place. Then, from deep within me, a profound sense of love radiating out to everything around me complemented by reciprocal waves of love coming at me, enveloping me. All that seems impossible too. I’m both perplexed and overwhelmed.

  Finally, the woman in the tree notices us. Her eyes widen. Then she becomes so still it’s as if her heart has stopped beating and her muscles have frozen. At last she begins to move, slowly climbing down, stepping gracefully from limb to limb.
When she reaches the ground, she looks from the old woman to me. A moment of confusion. Then recognition. I know her too, because I’ve seen traces of her in my face in the mirror.

  My mother. My a-ma.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane begins with a dream and the Akha aphorism No coincidence, no story. The same could be said for the writing of this novel. I was on vacation and woke up one morning with half a title in my head: The Something-Something of Hummingbird Lane. I didn’t know what the “something” would be until it came to me at an event hosted by Susan McBeth of Adventures by the Book, where I spoke. She had arranged to have Kenneth Cohen do a Chinese tea ceremony and tasting, featuring Pu’er, before my presentation. By the end of the day not only did I have a title but I knew what the historic background for the new novel would be.

  As I began planning a trip to Xishuangbanna for spring tea-picking season, Chui Tsang, then president of Santa Monica College, asked my husband what I was working on. When Chui heard it had something to do with tea, he asked, “Could it be Pu’er?” It just so happened that the previous week Chui and his wife, Echo, had been to a Chinese banquet where they were seated next to Wanyu (Elaine) Luo, who is the largest Pu’er importer into the United States. The following week, Angelina Shih drove Echo and me out to Hacienda Heights to meet Elaine at the home of one of her friends. That woman, Linda Louie, owns Bana Tea Company, which deals primarily in Pu’er. (I advise all interested readers to visit her website: www.banateacompany.com.) We spent the afternoon sampling different types of Pu’er, including one that was fifty years old. Elaine reminisced about growing up in the tea mountains and how she came to want to preserve and promote the traditional methods of making and drinking this rare tea, while Linda spoke eloquently about the history, culture, and world of connoisseurship that has developed around this leaf.

  At the end of the afternoon, I asked Linda if I could e-mail her for advice about whom I should meet and where I should go on my trip. She said—and remember, we had known each other for only a couple of hours—“Why don’t you come with me on my next buying trip?” which happened to coincide exactly with the dates I had already scheduled. So off we went, first to Guangzhou, where we visited the Fangcun Tea Market, and then to Yunnan to Jinghong, Menghai, Nannuo, and Yiwu, with side adventures to Luoshuidong and other villages. To all these people who helped set the story in motion, I am deeply grateful. To Linda, in particular, I must add further thanks for being my guide at the World Tea Expo (twice!), introducing me to so many incredible people who helped to make the novel immeasurably better (including Angie Lee, owner of 1001 Plateaus Tea), her hours of translation, and training my palate. Linda is a dynamic and tireless advocate for Pu’er, and I’m now very lucky to call her my friend.

  Traveling with Linda and me were Jeni Dodd of Jeni’s Tea and her partner, Buddha Tamang, owner of the Himalayan Bardu Valley Tea estate, a plantation in Nepal. What adventures we had! Many thanks to: Li Lin for his cautious driving; Tea Master Chan (Vesper) Guo Yi for his enthusiasm, knowledge, and taking us through his massive tea-fermenting warehouse; Mr. Liu for inviting us to a tea pavilion high on a mountain, where we sampled many teas, looked through drying sheds, and learned about the GPS systems now monitoring the oldest tea trees; Chen Xinge, the host of Fujin Ji guesthouse on Nannuo Mountain, for teaching us how to press and wrap tea cakes and decorate the rice paper wrappers, as well as for his beautiful singing of Akha love songs; his girlfriend, mother, and daughter for making sure we were properly fed and giving us much tea to taste and gossip to mull over; Ah-bu, a young Akha woman, for sharing not only her story but also those she’d collected from elders over the years; Wu Yan Fei, Ah-bu’s sister-in-law, for walking us up steep hillsides to visit ancient tea trees and showing us the village’s swing. This family also taught me how to kill the green and knead leaves. (Hard work!)

  In Yiwu, we met Zheng Bi Nung, the owner of a thriving tea factory, where close to thirty women were sorting tea a leaf at a time. He gave us lunch (which included one of many chickens whose necks would be snapped for us) and recounted the story of Lü Li Zhen and his quest to make Truly Simple Elegant. We visited Yu Xiu Fen, an extraordinary tea grower and businesswoman, whose teas are given as gifts to people in the highest levels of the Chinese government. We spoke with farmers—in their homes, by the sides of roads, and on remote hilltops—as well as other tea merchants and connoisseurs. To all of them, thank you so very much for your knowledge and expertise, as well as your willingness to share the inspiring, yet often difficult or sad, details of your personal lives. Thank you to Ginny Boyce, travel agent extraordinaire, for getting me to the tea mountains and back again.

  I’d like to acknowledge the following authors for their insights into the history, culture, and etiquette of tea: John Blofeld (The Chinese Art of Tea), Beatrice Hohenegger (Liquid Jade; and editor of and contributor to Steeped in History: The Art of Tea, along with contributors Steven D. Owyoung and John E. Wills, Jr.), Lu Yü (The Classic of Tea), Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane (Green Gold: The Empire of Tea), Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (The True History of Tea), and Jinghong Zhang (Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic). In 2008, The Art of Tea published a special issue on Pu’er with articles on different tea mountains, the tea crisis, and international pricing by Bao Zhuo, Chen Zheng Wei, Chen Zhi Tong, Aaron Fisher, Heidi Kyser, Guang-Chung Lee, Li Jun, Luo Ying Yin, Yang Kai, Ye Huanzhi, Zeng Zhixian, and Zhou Yu. Christina Larson’s article, “Rich Man, Pu’er Man,” for ChinaFile explored issues of authenticity and pricing, while Mark Jenkins’s piece for National Geographic gave me interesting details about the Tea Horse Road.

  One day, out of the blue, I received an e-mail from Arris Han, asking to interview me, as a Chinese American, about my personal interest in tea for a project she was working on. We then pursued a lively correspondence, talking all things tea. Online, I found interesting articles about Yunnan’s tea plantations, huigan, and cultivation, posted by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Bev Byrnes, and Peter Peverelli. The May 15, 2015, issue of Bon Appétit explored the booming interest in tea in the United States. At the World Tea Expo, I attended a tasting hosted by the Hunan Tea Company, where I learned about yellow-hair tea. Then it was on to seminars on the chemical mysteries of Pu’er (presented by Kevin Gascoyne), the social history of tea (presented by Bruce Richardson and Jane Pettigrew), and mixology (presented by Abigail St. Clair).

  The scientific writings of Jeffrey B. Blumberg, Bradley W. Bolling, and Chung-yen Oliver Chen greatly contributed to those sections of the novel devoted to the purported health aspects of tea. Dr. Selena Ahmed, an ethnobiologist, has been gracious and helpful. I’ve heard her speak several times and was fortunate to attend her lecture at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, which included taste tests of cocktails using tea and other plant-based bitters and infusions. She and photographer Michael Freeman traveled the entire length of the Tea Horse Road and produced a stunning book called, not surprisingly, Tea Horse Road. The abstract for the multidisciplinary and multisponsored study on the effects of global climate change on ancient tea trees of Yunnan, of which Dr. Ahmed is a part, is the clear inspiration for Haley’s work. I thank Dr. Ahmed for her brilliant mind, her dedication, and for answering my countless questions.

  I am hugely indebted to the writings of Paul W. Lewis, who served as a missionary to the Akha with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society in Burma from 1947 to 1966, and then went to northern Thailand in 1968 to continue his study of the Akha as an anthropologist. His Ethnographic Notes on the Akhas of Burma and Hani Cultural Themes (written with Bai Bibo) were invaluable resources. The writings of Deleu Choopoh and Marianne Naess (“Deuleu: A Life-History of an Akha Woman” in Development or Domestication? Indigenous Peoples of Southeast Asia), Thomas S. Mullaney (Coming to Terms with the Nation), Chih-yu Shih (Negotiating Ethnicity in China), and Zhang Weiwen and Zeng Qingnan (In Search of China’s Minorities) further developed my understanding of the Ak
ha. If you’re interested in learning more about the Akha’s culture, I can recommend the following websites: the Akha Heritage Foundation (with special thanks to Matthew McDaniel, whose article on Akha beliefs, lifestyle, and their concept of seeing themselves as one link in the long chain of life I used almost verbatim), Akha Minority—Facts and Details, Ethnic China, Virtual Hilltribe Museum, and The Peoples of the World: Akha.

  Many years ago, I met Xinran, who has collected hundreds of stories from women in China. I am a huge admirer of her work, and I’m honored that she’s helped me on various projects over the years. Her book, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother, is powerful and heartbreaking, and a must-read for families with children adopted from China. Articles by Barbara Demick and Laura Fitzpatrick provided information on Chinese babies who’ve been stolen from their families for illegal adoption and other aspects of the dark side of the One Child policy. Shifting to the American experience, I’d like to acknowledge Kay Bratt for Silent Tears: A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage, and Jenny Bowen, founder of the Half the Sky Foundation, for Wish You Happy Forever. After I finished writing the novel, someone recommended that I watch Somewhere Between, a powerful documentary about teenage adoptees, one of whom goes to China and finds her birth mother. I would like to recommend it to all of you as well.