The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(110)

A knot instantly forms in my stomach. I swallow to push it down.

“They want to protect China’s most precious gifts,” he continues. “Once recorded, they can watch to make sure no one cuts down a tree to pick its leaves easily or carve graffiti in its bark. From high in the sky, they can see through mists, fog, and clouds to the outlines of mountains, boulders, and hollows.”

Attempting to keep my expression as bland as possible, I let my eyes float over the crowd. Where is Jin? I need him.

“The Pu’er Tea College is not the only institution or person to have GPS.” Mr. Huang intrudes on my silence. “Did you know I have access to it? Do you know what that means? For twenty-one years I’ve been searching—”

“No!” Unable to stop myself, I turn away. Moving through the mingling couples, I escape onto one of the little paths that wends around the lake.

“Li-yan, wait!” he calls, switching to my Akha name.

I try to compose myself.

“There’s so much you don’t know,” he says when he reaches me.

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You’ve never trusted me, but you need to start now.”

“Why? So you can wheedle and pry your way into my life?”

“That’s entirely unfair,” he responds, heated and defensive. “Somehow you blame me for things that happened to you when you were young, but I don’t know what they were or what I did that was so terrible. Couldn’t you think of it another way? Maybe my visits to Nannuo Mountain helped pave the way for your success—”

“You taught us about Pu’er, but you’ve had nothing to do with what I’ve made of my life.”

“Really? Then how do you think you got into the tea college? You know that Tea Master Sun and I are acquainted, but did you know the two of us have been friends for a long time? Why else would he accept you into two programs, when not a single other person from a hill tribe was admitted to either?”

“Then I thank you for changing my life,” I say.

I start to leave, but he gently takes hold of my arm. “Have you ever wondered who your secret partner was in the Midnight Blossom Teashop?”

“Green Jade . . .” A hand goes to my mouth in surprise. “Was that you?”

“One of my companies, yes. I was your partner.” He pauses to let the unbelievable news sink in. “And I came here tonight to warn you about the study base’s plans.”

“I don’t understand. Why would you do any of those things?”

“I needed to repay your family.” His voice fades and he gazes across the lake. The red reflections from the lanterns ripple across the surface. I wait. Finally, he goes on. “Your mother saved my son’s life.”

“What are you talking about?” My question comes out sharper than I intended, but I can’t help feeling he’s trying to put something over on me.

“You’ve never asked about my wife,” he says.

This is so. How odd.

He pulls out his wallet and shows me a photo of a pretty young woman holding a baby in her arms.

“I loved her very much,” he says. “She got breast cancer right after Xian-rong was born. She didn’t live to see his first birthday.”

“I’m sorry.”

“To lose a wife is terrible, and I’ll always miss her. But nothing prepared me for the anguish I felt when Xian-rong was diagnosed with bone cancer. He was three.”

I’m speechless, trying to reconcile this information with my memories of our first encounter. The sound of the old PLA jeep grinding its way through the forest, the initial unsettling sight of Mr. Huang in his strange clothes, and the little bald boy in what I now know was a Bart Simpson T-shirt, skipping up the path from the spirit gate to the main part of the village as if he knew exactly where he was going. Everything about those moments was alien and frightening. How was I to know Xian-rong was sick?

“He’d had chemo and radiation therapies,” Mr. Huang says, addressing my doubt. “We’d tried alternative treatments. I won’t go into every detail, but some friends in Hong Kong told me about the medicinal qualities of Pu’er. I had to find the purest and most potent. Once I got to the tea mountains, I asked everywhere for the name of the best village doctor—”

“But you came to us because you were a connoisseur—”

“I wasn’t a connoisseur, but I had a dying son and had to become one very quickly.”

“You said you were a collector,” I insist. “You came to make Pu’er. We made it. You took it away . . .”

“I made Pu’er, and I took it away, true. I sold most of it, which is not what a collector would do.”

Were we so gullible that we believed everything he said back then? Of course, we were. Even so, I must look like I need more convincing.

“How can I best prove it to you? Ah, so easy. I could have been the one to make Truly Simple Elegant. Mr. Lü and I each had what we needed to make an iconic tea, but I wasn’t on Nannuo for that. I came to Spring Well for your mother. She was the person everyone mentioned. If there was a cure for my son, then she would have it.”

I replay those weeks in my mind. Xian-rong’s exuberance never lasted very long, and he must have been bald from his treatments. And despite A-ma’s continued distrust of Mr. Huang, she’d always shown a particular fondness for the boy, letting him stay with her in the women’s side of the house in the afternoons when he was tired. And there was Mr. Huang’s behavior, which at the time had seemed so strange: how easy he was to bargain with, how he’d said, “I need this,” how much he was willing to pay for the mother tree’s leaves during his second visit. Through it all, I’d been so absorbed with thoughts of San-pa—and uninformed about the outside world—that I hadn’t searched beyond the surface of his words.