The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(17)
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The next day is Monkey Day. I leave the house when it’s still dark. And, yes, it’s still raining. I arrive at the schoolhouse wet but determined to enjoy the rhythms of learning. Teacher Zhang launches into a history lesson about the land. It’s one we’ve all heard before, but today I hear it very differently. He begins by talking about how for centuries the people in these mountains worked for big landlords, who passed down tea tree gardens from generation to generation, keeping and hoarding everything.
“Peasants stayed poor,” he drones. “They often starved to death. Life was not fair. But after Chairman Mao united the country in . . . What year?”
“Nineteen-forty-nine,” we chant.
“All land was confiscated and redistributed to the masses.”
I know this is so, because my a-ba’s family was given a little land—not to own, all land belongs to the government, but to be responsible for. A-ma’s family, who lived on the other side of Nannuo Mountain, also received land. They didn’t tell anyone about the hidden grove. If someone had found out, they would have been classified as landlords. Luckily, the grove was, as I now know, so utterly hard to find that it had escaped detection by surveyors or other farmers. It wasn’t on anyone’s map, so it wasn’t confiscated by a landlord, redistributed by Chairman Mao, taken back by him during the Great Leap Forward, or impacted by what Teacher Zhang is talking about now.
“Nine years ago, in a deal that was part of a nationwide program to return property to original owners, old landlord families in this area were once again allowed to work their ancestral lands. But they, and all Chinese, still had no rights to ownership. Neither do people like you.”
Finally, he arrives at the most important part of his lesson: the Thirty Years No Change policy, which singled out the ethnic minorities in the tea mountains of Yunnan. I lean forward and listen hard. This policy affects each of us, and yet no matter how many times I hear it explained, I’m still confused. Once Teacher Zhang said it was supposed to be like that: “Confusing on purpose.”
“Six years ago, the Thirty Years No Change policy divided the land yet again,” he begins. “Each person—from infant to those in their nineties—received an allotment. The divisions were supposed to be fair, with each family receiving some land in the sun and some in the shade, some on steep slopes and some that could easily be cared for, some rocky and some with soil rich with nutrients, some with tea trees and some with terraced rice paddies.” The stretch of his mouth sags as wilted and forlorn as a length of vine cut from its mother plant. “Are there problems with this policy?”
Yes, but no one would be foolish enough to say them out loud. No baby born since the policy was given to us has received an allotment of land. When an elder dies, the land is either kept in the family or returned to the village. When a woman marries out, she often loses her land to her father or a brother, but when she goes to her husband’s village, she isn’t given new land.
“Think, children, think. What repercussions has this policy had on your families?”
Still no one raises a hand. Teacher Zhang begins calling on different boys and girls. The stories are more or less the same. Once the land allotments were assigned to a family—maybe two people, maybe thirty people—the a-ba took charge and determined who would receive the land in the sun, the rocky hillside, and so on. My a-ba kept the best land for himself. He slashed and burned his tea trees to raise ducks, pigs, and chickens. The ducks died, he could never afford a pig, and we used our chickens for ceremonial purposes faster than they could lay eggs. He then tried to grow market crops. The monsoon season guarantees that the rice will turn out well, and we would starve if not for it, but otherwise A-ba does not have the gift for growing vegetables.
As the second most valuable person in the family, First Brother was given the second-best land. Like A-ba, he burned his tea trees. In their place, he planted tea bushes on terraces. Second Brother received the third-best land. He pollarded his tea trees—the tops were hacked off so that new and shorter branches would grow—making the leaves easier to pick and supposedly more profitable. So far that hasn’t turned out to be so, because these plants are susceptible to diseases and parasites and require large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. Third Brother received land immediately around our house and close to the village. He’s the owner of many tea trees—two to four hundred years old. Since the tea collection center won’t buy those leaves, Third Brother has done nothing to his groves. “Too much work,” he says. This tea costs us nothing, so that’s what we drink.
A-ba assigned A-ma’s hidden land—with its worthless bride-price of ancient tea trees—to me. I was four at the time. Even if I’d been the age I am now, what could I have done to change the result? Nothing, because I’m only a daughter. I’ll be thirty-four when the Thirty Years No Change policy ends. No one knows what will happen then. But one thing is certain . . .
“Everything always changes,” Teacher Zhang says. “Now we’ve entered a new era. Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping has given us a slogan to follow. To get rich is glorious . . .”
As he sometimes does when the last minutes before the lunch break near, Teacher Zhang points to the wrinkled posters of Beijing tacked to the bamboo walls. “If you study hard, maybe you could visit our capital one day.” His arm drops limp as he stares at the images: thousands of people riding bicycles, everyone dressed alike. He looks homesick, but I would die if I had to live in a place like that. He sighs, blinks a few times, and then asks in the saddest voice, “Does anyone have any questions?”