The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(120)

Finally, the woman in the tree notices us. Her eyes widen. Then she becomes so still it’s as if her heart has stopped beating and her muscles have frozen. At last she begins to move, slowly climbing down, stepping gracefully from limb to limb. When she reaches the ground, she looks from the old woman to me. A moment of confusion. Then recognition. I know her too, because I’ve seen traces of her in my face in the mirror.

My mother. My a-ma.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane begins with a dream and the Akha aphorism No coincidence, no story. The same could be said for the writing of this novel. I was on vacation and woke up one morning with half a title in my head: The Something-Something of Hummingbird Lane. I didn’t know what the “something” would be until it came to me at an event hosted by Susan McBeth of Adventures by the Book, where I spoke. She had arranged to have Kenneth Cohen do a Chinese tea ceremony and tasting, featuring Pu’er, before my presentation. By the end of the day not only did I have a title but I knew what the historic background for the new novel would be.

As I began planning a trip to Xishuangbanna for spring tea-picking season, Chui Tsang, then president of Santa Monica College, asked my husband what I was working on. When Chui heard it had something to do with tea, he asked, “Could it be Pu’er?” It just so happened that the previous week Chui and his wife, Echo, had been to a Chinese banquet where they were seated next to Wanyu (Elaine) Luo, who is the largest Pu’er importer into the United States. The following week, Angelina Shih drove Echo and me out to Hacienda Heights to meet Elaine at the home of one of her friends. That woman, Linda Louie, owns Bana Tea Company, which deals primarily in Pu’er. (I advise all interested readers to visit her website: www.banateacompany.com.) We spent the afternoon sampling different types of Pu’er, including one that was fifty years old. Elaine reminisced about growing up in the tea mountains and how she came to want to preserve and promote the traditional methods of making and drinking this rare tea, while Linda spoke eloquently about the history, culture, and world of connoisseurship that has developed around this leaf.

At the end of the afternoon, I asked Linda if I could e-mail her for advice about whom I should meet and where I should go on my trip. She said—and remember, we had known each other for only a couple of hours—“Why don’t you come with me on my next buying trip?” which happened to coincide exactly with the dates I had already scheduled. So off we went, first to Guangzhou, where we visited the Fangcun Tea Market, and then to Yunnan to Jinghong, Menghai, Nannuo, and Yiwu, with side adventures to Luoshuidong and other villages. To all these people who helped set the story in motion, I am deeply grateful. To Linda, in particular, I must add further thanks for being my guide at the World Tea Expo (twice!), introducing me to so many incredible people who helped to make the novel immeasurably better (including Angie Lee, owner of 1001 Plateaus Tea), her hours of translation, and training my palate. Linda is a dynamic and tireless advocate for Pu’er, and I’m now very lucky to call her my friend.

Traveling with Linda and me were Jeni Dodd of Jeni’s Tea and her partner, Buddha Tamang, owner of the Himalayan Bardu Valley Tea estate, a plantation in Nepal. What adventures we had! Many thanks to: Li Lin for his cautious driving; Tea Master Chan (Vesper) Guo Yi for his enthusiasm, knowledge, and taking us through his massive tea-fermenting warehouse; Mr. Liu for inviting us to a tea pavilion high on a mountain, where we sampled many teas, looked through drying sheds, and learned about the GPS systems now monitoring the oldest tea trees; Chen Xinge, the host of Fujin Ji guesthouse on Nannuo Mountain, for teaching us how to press and wrap tea cakes and decorate the rice paper wrappers, as well as for his beautiful singing of Akha love songs; his girlfriend, mother, and daughter for making sure we were properly fed and giving us much tea to taste and gossip to mull over; Ah-bu, a young Akha woman, for sharing not only her story but also those she’d collected from elders over the years; Wu Yan Fei, Ah-bu’s sister-in-law, for walking us up steep hillsides to visit ancient tea trees and showing us the village’s swing. This family also taught me how to kill the green and knead leaves. (Hard work!) In Yiwu, we met Zheng Bi Nung, the owner of a thriving tea factory, where close to thirty women were sorting tea a leaf at a time. He gave us lunch (which included one of many chickens whose necks would be snapped for us) and recounted the story of Lü Li Zhen and his quest to make Truly Simple Elegant. We visited Yu Xiu Fen, an extraordinary tea grower and businesswoman, whose teas are given as gifts to people in the highest levels of the Chinese government. We spoke with farmers—in their homes, by the sides of roads, and on remote hilltops—as well as other tea merchants and connoisseurs. To all of them, thank you so very much for your knowledge and expertise, as well as your willingness to share the inspiring, yet often difficult or sad, details of your personal lives. Thank you to Ginny Boyce, travel agent extraordinaire, for getting me to the tea mountains and back again.

I’d like to acknowledge the following authors for their insights into the history, culture, and etiquette of tea: John Blofeld (The Chinese Art of Tea), Beatrice Hohenegger (Liquid Jade; and editor of and contributor to Steeped in History: The Art of Tea, along with contributors Steven D. Owyoung and John E. Wills, Jr.), Lu Yü (The Classic of Tea), Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane (Green Gold: The Empire of Tea), Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh (The True History of Tea), and Jinghong Zhang (Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic). In 2008, The Art of Tea published a special issue on Pu’er with articles on different tea mountains, the tea crisis, and international pricing by Bao Zhuo, Chen Zheng Wei, Chen Zhi Tong, Aaron Fisher, Heidi Kyser, Guang-Chung Lee, Li Jun, Luo Ying Yin, Yang Kai, Ye Huanzhi, Zeng Zhixian, and Zhou Yu. Christina Larson’s article, “Rich Man, Pu’er Man,” for ChinaFile explored issues of authenticity and pricing, while Mark Jenkins’s piece for National Geographic gave me interesting details about the Tea Horse Road.