The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(104)

I’m quite conflicted about the ending. As your teacher, I would have hated to see you fall back on the Shakespearean trope of coincidence. As a mom, I really wanted your main character to find her birth mother.

For a math-science girl, you did an excellent job. Now take the nonfiction elements and run with them, making sure you keep the emotional resonance of your fictional narrative.





CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN SPRING


“A-ma! A-ma!”

My son’s screams pull Jin and me out of sleep.

“It’s all right,” I say, patting my husband’s arm. “I’ll go.”

I pad barefoot down the darkened hallway to Paul’s room, where he sits up in his bed, shaking, his hands clutching his duvet, tears streaming down his face. Dr. Katz, our pediatrician, calls what Paul gets night terrors. They’ve worsened the past two weeks, which the doctor says is completely normal. “Usually children are scared when they start first grade. They’re with all the big kids now. But in second grade, a lot of kids are scared about space aliens. Maybe that’s what’s happening here.” The ruma, nima, and A-ma would see things differently. They’d say Jin-ba is being stalked by bad spirits. Deh-ja has taken precautions, but stringing ivy around his room hasn’t seemed to help. In fact, it may have made things worse, because the kids who’ve come over on playdates see it as tu, whether they’re white or Han majority.

“Paul, look at me,” I say gently as I sit on the edge of the bed. “Do you see me?”

The saddest thing about his night terrors is that he’s not asleep but he’s not awake either. He looks at me but sees something beyond or through me. His eyes are wide. He trembles. He screams again. “A-ma!”

I hold my hands out to him and rub my thumbs against the tips of my fingers in the traditional Akha gesture to bring him to me. He climbs onto my lap, but I won’t know he’s fully conscious until he calls me Mom. Rarely is he lucid enough to tell me what his dreams are about apart from “monsters.” Tonight, though, he tells me a little of what he remembers.

“I got lost in the forest. The trees looked cracked and broken. I didn’t hear any birds. It was quiet and hot. So much sweat was running down my legs I thought I’d peed my pants.”

I tighten my arms around him. He’s had a few bed-wetting episodes lately. If he’d been raised in Spring Well, the liquid would have just spilled down between the slats of the bamboo floor. Here, Dr. Katz calls it “something we need to be concerned about.”

“Then the rains came,” Paul sputters. “Monsoon, like you’ve told me about. I felt like I was drowning. Drowning in the forest is a terrible death, isn’t that what you said, Mom?”

Mom. Good.

“You aren’t going to drown in a monsoon. You live in Arcadia. We’re in a drought—”

“But, Mom—”

“Shhh. Close your eyes. I’m right here.”

I hum to him until I feel his breath deepen. I don’t need A-ma to help me interpret my son’s dream. He’s scared about school. I understand that. But he’s also picked up on some of my anxieties. I need to be more careful when I’m talking on the phone to my brothers, and I need to be extra-vigilant in my conversations with Jin. Over the last couple of years, the dry seasons in the tea mountains have lasted longer, while the monsoons have become more intense. Our tea leaf bud sets are bursting early, and the ten-day picking season has been prolonged. Worse, the new weather pattern is stunting growth—just as Paul saw in his dream. I can taste the change in the leaves, but I’m not a scientist and I don’t know what it means. Still, I worry, and that worry has invaded my son’s sleeping hours.

Nothing is worse than seeing your child suffer. Every morning I ask about his dreams. Did a tree fall? Was there a fire, a dog on a roof, or a broken egg? Instead of these questions calming him and helping him understand his place in the world, he’s become even more scared and his dreams more tormented. I feel terrible about it, and I honestly don’t know what to do.

I slip out of bed at sunrise, heat water for tea, and roll rice balls in crushed peanuts for Paul’s lunch. Jin wanders in, kisses me, sits down, and opens the paper.

“May I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead?” Paul begs when he comes to the kitchen and sees what I’ve prepared. “Just today. Just this once.”

As if I would ever do such a thing.

Into my silence, he says, “Auntie Deh-ja would make one for me.”

Deh-ja would too—she spoils him to the extreme—but she’s in Yunnan for a month visiting her natal family, as she now does every year.

“Mom,” my son persists, “why is what I want different than a ball of rice with peanuts on the outside? White outside, brown inside. Brown outside, white inside. Same thing!”

“Is that what the Han majority children eat?” I ask, because if they aren’t eating Chinese food in school, maybe Paul shouldn’t either.

“Oh, Mom! Everyone brings Chinese food from home.”

“Then—”

“Addison likes peanut butter and jelly—”

“Addison.” I taste the three syllables on my tongue. I glance at Jin, who looks up from his copy of the Chinese Daily News. Addison? What kind of name is that?