The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(105)

I drive car pool in the mornings, so Paul and I pick up two other kids on the way to school. Music plays on the radio. The kids sing along. I pull up to the curb for the car pool drop-offs and hit the button to unlock the doors. Paul’s the last to get out. He lingers by the door as he puts on his backpack.

“Is this Addison white or Han majority?” I ask.

But he just waves, slams the door, and runs to a group of boys I recognize—all born here, all Han majority. I can’t stay to watch him enter the building—too many cars and minivans behind me—but I feel a tug on my heart. We may not have strings tied around our wrists any longer, but I’ll always be connected to my son.

Driving home, I have time to reflect. I’m thirty-seven, in the summer of my life. My husband is successful. He’s kept his cardboard business, but that’s not his real focus these days. During the darkest days of the recession, when stocks kept tumbling and real estate prices crashed, he began buying houses at the bottom of the market, which he fixed up and sold to men like himself who wanted a foothold in America and a safe place to park their money. When our son turned five, Jin underwent yet another transformation. He was finally able to put away the ghost of his father. “Paul is the same age I was when I betrayed my father,” he told me. “I now understand that he would have loved me no matter what I’d done, as I’ll always love my son.”

With the burdens of a lifetime lifted from Jin’s shoulders, he started building housing tracts in Walnut, Riverside, Irvine, and Las Vegas—for Han majority people—featuring wok kitchens and following feng shui construction practices. Still not content, he opened real estate offices in the lobbies of the Hilton and the Crowne Plaza—the top San Gabriel Valley hotels for Chinese tourists—and hired “jumper consultants” to provide information on mortgages and schools, help people through the U.S. EB-5 visa process, and sell properties ranging from modest houses for speculation to luxurious mansions starting at $10 million for sons and daughters attending USC or Occidental.

I’ve found success as well. Since 2008, the price for good tea has steadily risen. Then this year, boom! Pu’er’s value skyrocketed again. My company is large—with offices in the San Gabriel Valley and Guangzhou. We sell raw, processed, and aged Pu’er from inexpensive to extremely rare and expensive blends that are given as gifts to the most powerful leaders in China. I have plenty of capital, and I do my own sourcing. I have arrangements with nearly every village on Nannuo Mountain. Farmers come to me each year, hearing I pay fairly and reliably, to tell me they’ve discovered ancient tea trees or abandoned tea gardens high, high up on the mountain. I tell them their tea must come from trees at least three hundred years old, and the farmers themselves need to drink from the leaves first to make sure the trees aren’t so wild that they’ll make people ill. My three brothers check every batch. And, if a farmer ever attempts to sneak poor-quality leaves into what he sells me, we’ll never do business again.

I even have a fermenting factory in Menghai. The main room is as large as an American football field. Piles of tea—each twelve by thirty feet and a foot deep—cover the entire floor, each weighing five tons and each at a different stage of fermentation. The whole complex is surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. I receive many requests for tours from international connoisseurs, dealers, and scientists. I turn them all away, saying, “If you want to learn about our ancient tea trees, come to Nannuo Mountain.” Every tea I make is artisanal: no pesticides, no mechanization. All that can carry on without my presence—except for tea-picking season, when Paul and I return to the mountains to supervise picking, processing, and fermenting—because I have the help and trust of my family.

My three nieces who were all born in the same year are now nineteen years old. The government has a message for them: “Your duty to the nation is to have a child of high quality,” but not one of them has married. They dismiss those busybodies who tell them that soon they’ll be as yellowed pearls—too old to be fully loved. They still have eight years before they’re officially labeled shengnu—leftover women—so they laugh at the television shows that show women desperately trying to get a man at any cost: The Price of Being a Shengnu, Go, Go, Shengnu, and Even Shengnu Get Crazy. They tease each other about the “twelve products to help shengnu forget about loneliness,” and give those items as birthday gifts to keep the joke going: a garlic peeler, rainbow-colored linens, and single-serving teapots.

First Sister-in-law’s daughter works for me in my shop in the Fangcun Tea Market. Second Sister-in-law’s daughter has remained in the village but travels all through the mountains on her motorcycle to make sure the farmers who sell to us are picking the very best leaves. Third Sister-in-law’s daughter lives in the San Gabriel Valley and handles my Internet sales. When and if my nieces decide they want to go-work-eat with a husband, they’ll have plenty of men to choose from, for there are 30 million more young males seeking mates in China than there are prospective brides. But how to convince them? “I do what I want to do,” First Sister-in-law’s daughter told me the last time I saw her. “I go where I want to go.” Be that as it may, I know for a fact that my mother-in-law now sits on her bench in Martyrs’ Memorial Gardens when she’s in Guangzhou or wanders San Gabriel Square—what we sometimes laughingly call the Great Mall of China—when she’s visiting us to look for eligible (wealthy and handsome) husbands for my nieces. Let them try to get out of that!