The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(119)
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.