The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(15)
“Is this my land?” I ask.
“When I went to your a-ba in marriage, the old traditions were supposed to be over. No more buying and selling of women into slavery or marriage. No more dowries either. But it doesn’t matter what the government says. This land belongs to the women in our line. It is ours alone to control. It was given to me as my dowry as it will one day go with you into marriage.”
I’m only half listening, because I’m so disappointed. It’s just as A-ba and everyone else in my family has said. What I’ve been allotted is worthless. It will be hard to get a basket of leaves around the boulder and down the mountain to the tea collection center. The hope I’ve hidden that my land isn’t as bad as everyone has always hinted has been smashed, but A-ma doesn’t notice. Instead, she takes my hand and leads me farther into the grove. “Look how the stone on this side has opened to embrace this special place,” she whispers. “See how part of the rock comes up and over, so you could sleep under it and stay dry, if you wished.”
Yes, it’s hollowed out on this side, forming a grotto, but what difference can that make to me?
She tells me the camphor trees are eight hundred years old or more and that the “sister trees” that surround the ancient tea tree are more than one thousand years old. My stomach sinks even further. Not only could no one find this place, but no one wants leaves from old trees. Tea bushes and pollarded tea trees bring money and food. Not that much money or food, but something. The leaves from these trees? The word that has been so much in my mind lately pounds against the inside of my skull. Worthless. Worthless. Worthless.
“And here is the mother tree,” A-ma continues. Her voice is at once softer and filled with more emotion than it ever is during ceremonial sacrifices. She places her palms on the trunk as delicately as she did on Deh-ja’s belly. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Not really. The tree is much taller than the ones A-ma called sister trees, but the years show in the way they do in village elders. The bark is cracked. The limbs are bent and gnarled by age. Some of the color has faded from the leaves. And it also has eerie growths—not moles or cracked toenails, but parasites and fungi—that mottle the bark and fester in the crooks of the limbs and at the base of the trunk. I’ve seen things like this before when we’ve tramped into the forest, but one characteristic is new to me. Bright yellow threads have crept into, over, and around the other parasites. The tree looks like it could die tomorrow. Worthless.
“Rice is to nourish,” A-ma says. “Tea is to heal. Always remember that food is medicine, and medicine is food. If you take care of the trees, the trees will take care of you.”
“But A-ba hates this place. I’ve heard the others call it unlucky. It’s—”
“You don’t know a thing about it.” She takes my arm and pulls me—not so gently—out of the rain and under the crescent-shaped canopy formed by the boulder. “This tea garden has belonged to the women in my line since the Akha first came to this mountain thirty-three generations ago. The sister trees were still young back then, but the mother tree was already old. My grandmother told me it had to have lived more than one hundred generations already. And it has always been used for tea.”
One hundred generations? For the first time, I use Teacher Zhang’s math for something other than a class lesson. That would be over three thousand years old. The forest has been here since it was created by the gods, but did they drink tea?
“Do you see how the tree has grown?” A-ma asks. She strides back into the rain and climbs the tree! Each step is graceful and easy—from branch to branch, higher and higher.
“Footholds,” she says when she returns to me. “Long ago, the tree’s caretakers pruned and trained it for easy climbing . . . and picking. Look at any tea tree on our mountain, and you’ll see the same thing. But this one is the most ancient.”
“And most unlucky.”
“Girl!” The look in A-ma’s eyes tells me I’ve come close to making her break the taboo of hitting a child . . . again.
“I was told never to bring a man to this grove,” she says after a long moment. “But after my marriage, your grandfather—my father-in-law—insisted. He kept at me—every day, every night—claiming that now that I was his daughter-in-law the land belonged to him. I was only sixteen, and I didn’t know how to say no strongly enough. I finally gave in. I brought him here, and he climbed up into the branches. When he fell . . .”
A-ma guides me back into the rain and through the trees to the opposite side of the grove to the very edge of a precipice. I’ve lived on Nannuo my entire life, but I’ve never seen the tops of so many peaks at the same time. Even I understand that this spot has ideal feng shui with its marriage of mountains, wind, and fog, mist and rain. Everything in this spot—trees, climate, insects, and animals—has existed in natural harmony for centuries, millennia. Except for what happened to my grandfather . . .
“He was dead by the time I reached his side,” A-ma confides in such a low voice it’s as if she doesn’t want the trees to hear. “Broken neck. I had to drag him back to the village.”
Around the boulder and down the mountain? How?
“This tragedy,” A-ma goes on, “caused your a-ba and brothers to hate all wild tea. Since that day not even your a-ba has dared to follow me here. It’s my duty to care for these trees, especially the mother tree. It will be your duty too one day. And you must promise that you’ll never let a man enter this grove.”