I begin to wait. I want this. I lie awake at night, weighing my chances of getting into the Pu’er program, doubting the answers I gave Tea Master Sun, and questioning why I had to be so rude to him when all he had done was show interest in me. After five days, I’m distracted, impatient with guests, and sharp with the maids. I’ve never taken a vacation from my job, but I need one now.
When I first heard about vacations I was surprised, because the closest we Akha had to anything like that was rainy season—the months of darkness when spirits were considered to be mischievously active and we worked on our weaving, sewing, and embroidery. Hence, I’ve always turned down the opportunity to go on holiday. Even if I’d been forced to take one, where would I have gone? Home, to where people might still blame me for San-pa’s terrible death? To tourist sites, alone, to remind myself that I have no one to love me? So I’ve earned the gratitude of my co-workers, because I cover their shifts when they take time off. But now I need my family. I want them to see how far I’ve come, but I also need their good wishes. It’s a momentous decision and the outcome may not be what I hope for, but I ask my manager if I might return home for three weeks. “It’s spur of the moment,” he tells me, “but how can I say no? You’ve been an exemplary employee for many years, and you’ve never asked for a single favor.” I leave on the eve of what Westerners call Christmas, promising to be back in time to cover the absences of others who wish to visit their families during Spring Festival.
I buy a ticket for the evening bus to Menghai. The road has been improved, so the trip lasts just twelve hours. In the morning, after an uncomfortable and mostly sleepless night, I board a minibus, which takes me and about a dozen others into the mountains on a new, roughly carved, extraordinarily bumpy, and very narrow dirt road. After a few hours, I get off at the stop for Bamboo Forest Village. When I was a girl, the village was nothing—no better or worse than Spring Well. With the new road and the bus stop, Bamboo Forest has opened a small café and started a morning farmers’ market. About half the women wear their traditional Dai, Bulang, or Akha attire. The rest are dressed like me, in blue jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes. I’m taking in the surprising changes when a motorcycle skids past. The rider shouts at me to get out of the way. I’m stunned.
I swing my knapsack onto my back and head out of Bamboo Forest. Not long after I dip onto the trail that will lead to Spring Well, I pass a construction site with bulldozers moving earth and workers building massive retaining walls. The main structure is still a puzzle, shrouded in bamboo scaffolding on which dozens of men crawl like ants. I can’t imagine what it is or why it’s here. But soon enough the noise and ugliness are behind me, and I’m on a quiet forest path. People are out, tending to their trees. Songs come to me on wafts of air. It’s winter, but tea-picking season is around the corner and each tree seems ready to burst forth with emerald-green buds. Every leaf—so alive—reaches for the morning sun and sends forth a fragrance that’s light and brilliant. I pick a leaf and chew it. With each breath, another layer of huigan is released. I am home.
I know things are now better for my family. When I was first hired at King World, I worked to repay A-ma. Then I sent money to help the family. But two years ago, Teacher Zhang wrote to tell me that life was going so well at home—income from tea work had increased fiftyfold, an amount difficult for me to absorb—that I no longer needed to worry about my family. Still, I expect everything to be more or less the same, believing that our culture and traditions are so old and deep that they would withstand all attempts to transform them. I’m reassured when I arrive at the spirit gate that protects the entrance to Spring Well. But as I walk farther? Dogs nap in the middle of the lane that divides the village and chickens peck at the ground, but everything else is different. Many of the bamboo and thatch houses have been replaced with gray brick boxes. Plastic troughs in pink, orange, and green lie about—filled with soaking laundry, vegetables to be washed for the evening meal, or animal feed. Empty plastic water bottles stand at attention in a neat row on one veranda. And just like in Bamboo Forest Village, many of the people wear Western-style clothing, although every woman still covers her hair with a scarf of some sort. I don’t recognize a soul; no one seems to recognize me either. But what’s most shocking is the number of people sitting on the ground with piles of tea leaves spread before them, negotiating with outsiders. I pass one group of visitors bargaining hard. They’re Korean!
When I reach my home . . . It’s gone, as are all the newlywed huts. Where our house once stood is a building that resembles a greenhouse—glass panes held together with aluminum struts. Nearby are four stucco structures—all of the cheapest and ugliest materials, soulless, antiseptic, not one with glass in the window frames. None of them are built on stilts, so there’s no place for livestock to live. One is slightly larger than the others. I don’t see separate verandas for the women’s and men’s sides of the house. The single door stands open.
“Hello,” I call at the top of the stairs. I peer into the interior of the house, where people bustle back and forth. “Hello?” I say again, uncertain.
Young and old, men and women, all stop what they’re doing to glance in my direction. After a long moment, someone says, “It’s Girl.” I recognize A-ba’s voice. The others part, clearing a way for him. He wears plastic sandals and jungle fatigues, as though he’s in a war movie, which is about as disconcerting as anything I’ve seen so far. Otherwise, he’s still my a-ba—small and wiry. Then A-ma comes to his side. She wears her indigo tunic, skirt, and leggings, and her headdress is as magnificent, welcoming, and comforting as I could hope.
That night, A-ma and the sisters-in-law prepare a meal unimaginable when I was a child: pork four ways (crispy skin, barbecued ribs, braised belly, and meatballs in clear broth), a soy-sauce roasted goose, bitter melon with scrambled egg, rice, and a fruit plate. Instead of eating on the floor around the warmth and glow of an open fire in the main room, we sit on tiny chairs at a small table. This furniture—built little to save cost and for easy storage—nevertheless shows my family’s improved circumstances. During dinner, my relatives pepper me with questions about the world beyond Nannuo Mountain. My brothers ask about banks and loans, because they now have so many expenses. The sisters-in-law want to know about cosmetics, and I give them my lipstick to share. Their three daughters, who were all born within one month of each other, are now eight years old, attending Teacher Zhang’s class, and irrepressibly inquisitive:
“Do you think I can go to secondary school, Auntie?”
“How old should I be when I first steal love, Auntie?”
“When can I visit you in Kunming, Auntie?”
After dinner, we gather around a space heater with a single bare—and very dim—lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Electricity! When tea is poured, I gather the courage to question the changes in Spring Well, pointing out that after centuries of steady life, so much has been upended during the eight years I’ve been away. “And it all started with Mr. Huang—”
“Our lives changed rapidly after the Hong Konger came to us,” A-ba agrees, “but we haven’t seen him in years. You know how he is—always looking for something no one else has. He’s probably experimenting with leaves in a village on one of the other tea-growing mountains. So be it. With all the traders and collectors visiting us, we don’t need him anymore.”
“But what about our traditions?” I ask.
Faces stare back at me silently, but their message is clear: Who are you to ask this question with your city ways?
“Everyone changes,” A-ba says at last. “We still live in the forest, but the world has come to us. We continue to have the Swing Festival, build a new spirit gate each year, and consult with the ruma about when to plant our crops, pick leaves, and select propitious marriage dates, but we don’t have time for all the cleansing ceremonies, sacrifices, or worrying about Dog Days and Buffalo Days when we have so much work to do. Tea growing is very lucrative, you know.”
Truly, what is stranger—the matter-of-fact way he’s just dismissed our customs or the way he speaks about business? Business!
“We have to guard our product,” he continues. “Some especially greedy tea traders have sent hooligans onto our mountain to look for the most ancient trees and chop them down, because it’s easier to harvest their leaves that way—”
“They would chop down a tree?” I ask, shocked. “What about its soul?”
But no one seems interested in that.
“When the government instituted the Quality Safety Standard,” First Brother carries on, “we could no longer dry our leaves or artificially ferment them on the ground or on the floor of the house. All tea processing had to be done fifty meters away from animals, so we were forced to sell our livestock. The new rules turned out to be good for us, because now nothing can taint the flavor of our tea. We borrowed fifty thousand yuan to build the drying and processing building, where our old home once stood.”
“And we all have our own houses with indoor plumbing!” Third Brother chimes in.
Their optimism and free-spending ways have been buoyed by an early thirty-year extension to the Thirty Years No Change policy. Knowing he would “own” land until 2034, First Brother ripped out the tea bushes on his terraces, while Second Brother took out his pollarded trees so new tea trees could be planted from seeds. A-ba gave up on his vegetable plots—“We can buy what we need in Bamboo Forest Village”—so that he too could plant tea trees. For all three of them, the few wild tea trees on their respective properties have helped pay for these improvements, while Third Brother’s once worthless old tea trees are now the most valuable asset in the family . . .
“His trees, and your grove,” A-ba adds pointedly. “Of course, we can’t get your a-ma to let us take a look—”
Mercifully, First Brother cuts him off. “None of us could have predicted today’s situation. Buyers now visit from all over Asia to buy Pu’er to drink, sell, and collect. We have to host big banquets, hoping to make them happy. There’s a lot of competition. That’s why we need to borrow at better rates.”
“And the price of tea keeps going up and up and up!”
Everyone pesters me about my chances of getting into the tea college.
“If you do well,” First Brother exclaims exuberantly, “you can sell our family’s tea and make it famous!”
I have only one response to that: “I have to be accepted first.”
No one embodies the changes in Spring Well more than Ci-teh, whom I see the next night at a banquet my family hosts for a buyer from Japan. Her giggling ways seem to be gone, and any embroideries that would mark her as an Akha have been packed away as well. She’s gained weight—as has almost everyone in Spring Well—and her stomach and breasts push against the buttons of her flowered cotton blouse.
“Visit me tomorrow!” she urges. And I do. Her house is the nicest in the village, naturally. “The first with electricity,” Ci-teh boasts. She’s also the first person in Spring Well to own a cellphone. She insists we exchange numbers. “So we never again lose our connection.”
We were once very close, but our lives have taken different paths, which she reminds me of again and again. “You abandoned me. You left without a word. So hurtful you are.” While the things that happened to me remain a secret, the steps in her life are well known by all on Nannuo Mountain. After her parents died, Ci-teh consolidated the land awarded to her family in the Thirty Years No Change policy. In addition to her own groves, she also leases stands of tea trees from other families, which has earned her the title of the single largest grower on Nannuo. She further strengthened her status when she paid the ruma and nima to allow her brother, Ci-do, to return to Spring Well after a spiritual cleansing—of what degree or intensity no one tells me—plus nine days of feasting provided to every man, woman, and child in the village, all paid for by her. The things money can buy . . .
“He has a new wife and two children. Times change, but the stain on him from fathering human rejects will never be completely erased,” Ci-teh confides in an offhand manner. “It’s best for everyone that he and his family spend most of the year visiting the great sights our country has to offer.”
But for all her money, success, and power, she’s been unable to control or influence the child-maker spirits. She and Law-ba have three daughters and have broken with Akha naming practices to show their disappointment: Mah-caw (Go Find a Brother), Mah-law (Go Fetch a Brother), and Mah-zeu (Go Buy a Brother).
“Why haven’t you remarried?” she asks me another day when we sip tea in the bamboo pavilion she’s built to entertain her international buyers. “If a wife dies, a man can remarry in three months. When a husband dies, a woman must wait three years, but that has come and gone for you.”
Does she spout these old-fashioned aphorisms just to goad me? She’s obviously let go of many traditions herself, but our loving but contrary relationship is the same as ever. I give a bland answer. “I want to get ahead in life.” The reality is something murkier. I’ve been alone and lonely for eight years. I’ve blinded myself to the advertisements for online dating. I’ve also learned how to walk through parks and ignore the middle-aged mothers who approach me with photos of their sons and lists of their accomplishments and possessions: a bicycle, a motorcycle, or a car; living with parents, renting an apartment, or owning a condo. “You’re too old not to be married,” more than one mother has told me. Unasked, by the way. Then, “Please consider my son.” But I can’t allow myself to repeat the mistakes of the past. If I were ever to fall in love again, it would have to be with someone who’d be accepted by my family. Otherwise, too much heartbreak.
“Do you date?” Ci-teh persists, using the Western word. “Do you go to the movies and have noodles with men?”
“Most men don’t want to go out with an Akha,” I say, hoping to end the subject.
She nods knowingly. “You look so young, and you’re too quiet. You are tu, and not in an admirable way. What about stealing love in the forest while you’re here? Surely our men will overlook your faults, and you can have fun too.”
“I don’t want to steal love.”
She ignores that and asks, “What about a foreigner? You work in a hotel. Maybe you could marry one of them and move to America.”
I couldn’t do that either. It’s hard to explain to Ci-teh how it feels to be separated from the mountain, my family, and our customs—even though so much has changed.
She cocks her head, appraising me. “Have you become one of those women who hates men?”
As I look back at my years in Kunming, I can be grateful that, despite everything, I’m not bitter. I’m not like Deh-ja—wherever she is—either: crippled by Ci-do’s abandonment. But I must protect my heart, even if that means being alone.
“I’ll never hate men,” I answer. I’d never confide all that happened to me, but I add, “I just don’t want to make another mistake.”
She waves off my words as though they mean nothing. “Look at me. I’m fat, but you’re still beautiful. I could find someone to marry you by nightfall.”
She could too, but I’m not interested.
Ci-teh’s inquisitiveness spreads to others. The sisters-in-law, A-ba, my brothers, even some of the nieces and nephews buzz their noses at me like persistent gnats, asking why I haven’t remarried, giving me advice, and trying to prove how much they care for my well-being.
“We don’t want you to be lonely,” Third Brother says.
Second Brother takes a more practical approach. “If you don’t get married, who will look after you when you get old?”
First Brother is even more frank. “If you don’t get married, who will care for you when you go to the afterlife? You’ll need a son to make offerings to you.” He shakes a warning finger at me. “You can only be a leftover woman for a limited time. After that, it will be too late for you. No one will want to marry you.”
A-ba, who shouldn’t speak directly to me on such matters, sends messages through the sisters-in-law, as is proper.
Third Sister-in-law speaks to me one morning as we gather firewood: “You can’t act too picky.”
Second Sister-in-law passes on the following: “No man wants to marry a woman who is overly ambitious or wants to outshine him.”
A-ba has First Sister-in-law deliver the bluntest caution: “People will say you don’t like to do the intercourse, but it is your duty to the nation and to the family to have a child.”
Their talk leaves me feeling both irritated and insecure.
During the third week, I walk to Shelter Shadow Village to pay respects to San-pa’s parents, only to find they died five years ago in a typhoid epidemic. I also visit Teacher Zhang at the primary school, where the same old maps and posters hang on the bamboo walls as when I was a girl. I confide in him my concerns that I failed my interview and will let my family down again. Here’s what he says:
“There’s nothing you can do about it now! But if you ask me—and I guess you are—I believe you will get in. Who is more qualified than you, after all?”
Which lifts my spirit.
I don’t get to see or talk to A-ma much at all. She’s the only person, apart from Teacher Zhang, who seems unchanged—from the way she dresses to the way she moves to the way she ignores the spiraling world around her. She’s as busy as ever, though, cooking for the family, settling arguments between the sisters-in-law, washing clothes by hand, spinning thread, weaving cloth, embroidering and decorating caps for her grandchildren, delivering babies, and mixing potions for those who come to her ill or injured. She’s so busy that I’m alone with her only once—when we visit the mother and sister trees on my last day. As we wander through the grove, she stops here and there to stroke a branch, clip a few leaves, or pick some of the parasites that cling to the mother tree for medicinal concoctions. The last time we were here together . . .
“Nothing will take away the pain of a lost child,” A-ma says. “My feelings for your daughter are always strongest here. In nature. In the atmosphere. Because that’s where Yan-yeh has gone. Into the ether.”
“For me, my grief is like a huge hole. Everything flows around that hole. I have forced myself to move forward, but I can never move on.”
A-ma regards me, weighing so much. When she finally speaks it’s to drive forward the theme that has come at me from every direction since I’ve returned home.
“You shouldn’t be alone. You cannot let memories of what happened in the past turn you into someone you wouldn’t recognize. Be who you are, Girl, and the right person will find you and love you.”
While I still don’t think love will happen for me again, her words give me strength—to say goodbye, walk alone back to Bamboo Forest Village, board the minibus to Menghai, and travel on to Kunming.
When I enter my apartment, I find a note from Teacher Guo, asking me to visit him immediately. He breaks away from dinner with his family to give me the news. Of the two thousand people who applied, I’m the only student accepted into both programs. I’m ecstatic. I sell my moped and most of my belongings so I’ll have money to live on without taking an extra job to support myself.
For the next twelve months, I’m rarely apart from Tea Master Sun. In the first track, he teaches me how to buy raw tea, store it, and let nature do its job of aging. I learn to judge the minutes required for wilting, killing the green, kneading, the sunbath, and fermentation. (I’ve had a head start on some of these things, which gives me an advantage over the other students.) In the second track, I study the best qualities of tea so that one day I might become a tea master myself, like—and here’s my first French word—a wine sommelier.
“Taste requires a lifetime of dedication,” Tea Master Sun instills in me. “You have a simple palate shaped by your childhood, cultivated by mountain springs, and enriched by the soil. I like this about you, but you must learn subtlety and refinement. You’ll stumble and make mistakes, but as long as you’re humble and honest, you’ll learn. You love tea. I see it in your face. Always remember If you don’t love tea, you can’t make good tea.”
Nothing romantic grows between my tea master and me, but after months of being around him the last of the sadness and loneliness I’ve felt about the past dissipates like clouds after a storm. When I look back at my life—all twenty-six years of it—I see the many men who’ve helped me, but none of them will ever be as important as Tea Master Sun, who opens my eyes, heart, and soul. The things he teaches me range from the practical to the spiritual.
“Confucius taught his followers that tea could help people understand their inner dispositions,” he tells me, “while Buddhists grant tea the highest spiritual qualities, ranking it among the four ways to concentrate the mind, along with walking, feeding fish, and sitting quietly. They believe tea can link the realms of meditation. Just the physical process we experience when we drink tea—our search for huigan—causes us to turn inward and reflect as the liquor coats our tongues, shimmers down our throats, and then rises again as fragrance. The Daoists see tea as a way to regulate internal alchemy, be in harmony with the natural world, and serve as an ingredient in the elixir of immortality. Together, these three disciplines have taught us to look upward to see the state of the heavens and downward to observe the natural arrangement of the earth. But whatever you believe or however you view life, the quality and goodness of a tea are for the mouth to decide.”
My mouth does learn to find the best flavors, distinguish the body (light or heavy), discern texture (like water or velvet), as well as detect the most disagreeable notes—chalky, dusty, and rancid, or petroleum, disinfectant, and plastic. I become adept at identifying the differences between Pu’er, Iron Goddess of Mercy, Dragon Well, Silver Needle, and White Peony teas by taste alone. I study auction prices and have seen how values change and surge. In 2001, a special Iron Goddess of Mercy sold for 120,000 yuan, but just one year later a three-year-old Pu’er sold for 168,000 yuan. Two years ago, in 2004, when the yuan was at a historic high against the U.S. dollar, a mere three grams of a Pu’er once stored in the Palace Museum sold for 12,000 yuan—thirty-two times the price of gold! And now, just as I’m graduating, another 100 grams of Pu’er has sold for 220,000 yuan or about $28,000.
How can I not rejoice in my good fortune in living with this particular leaf, celebrate my knowledge of it, and show courage in revealing it to others? It’s time for me to start “plucking the hills and boiling the oceans” by entering the tea trade, and I have many options to choose from in Kunming alone. More than four thousand wholesale and retail tea dealers, as well as countless teahouses, have sprung up in the city like frogs after the monsoon. But before I can apply to any of those establishments, Tea Master Sun presents me with an offer from a business that wants to invest in the future of Pu’er by bankrolling a shop in the Fangcun Tea Market in Guangzhou, the largest wholesale tea market in China. “They’ll put up the capital—not much, but enough to rent a space and buy product—and you’ll produce the sweat and have all the worry,” Tea Master Sun explains. “You’ll make money on commission until you’ve paid back the initial investment. Then you’ll own the business fifty-fifty. I don’t think you’ll find an opportunity better than that.”
Who can question fate? Bad things happened to me; then my fortunes turned when I went to the trade school and Pu’er Tea College. Now another propitious moment blossoms before me. Perhaps what the Han majority say is true: Good luck comes in threes. I sign the contract with Green Jade, Ltd., on my tea master’s advice.
Before taking the train to Guangzhou, I write a note to Teacher Zhang:
Please ask Ci-teh, my family, and our neighbors to find me the best teas, and I will sell them.