The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(30)
At this point, Mr. Huang and the tea master divide the tea so it can undergo two separate processes to create two separate test batches. The first process is for natural fermentation. The highest-grade leaves are wrapped in muslin, which is tied into a distinctive knot, steamed, and pressed under a heavy stone into a flat cake round in shape. Once this is done, the cake is placed on a rack with other cakes to dry. In a day or so, the cakes are individually wrapped in paper on which we’ve printed a design from woodblocks. These are bound together in sets of seven to seal in the flavors but still allow the tea to breathe. The tea is now ready to be stored to ferment naturally.
Mr. Huang is striving for something none of us have heard of—huigan, mouth feel or returning flavor. “The taste should be slightly bitter as the tea first enters your mouth, then will come the cool minty sensation that will linger on the sides of the tongue and open the chest, followed by a fragrance that will rise back up from the throat,” he explains. “I’m hoping for specific flavors and scents to emerge: orchid, lotus, camphor, apricot, or plum.” Time will tell if any of that happens.
The second method is for experimenting with artificial fermentation.
“We don’t have time to wait decades for our tea to ripen,” Mr. Huang says, “but I have a solution for that. Artificial fermentation was invented in Kunming almost twenty years ago. We’ll use those techniques, and invent some of our own, to make the perfect Pu’er.”
His enthusiasm never ebbs, but the results are disastrous. The sun-dried tea leaves are gathered into big piles, water is splashed on them, and then the whole mess is blanketed with cloth. The piles are uncovered every so often, the tea turned, more water sprinkled, and everything covered again. The stink! Like rotting forest undergrowth. Every so often, Mr. Huang and Tea Master Wu make a tea from one of the piles. They are less than satisfied. Mr. Huang calls some of the tea “too earthy,” an insult we know all too well. Some piles smell like ox dung. Others are as moldy and foul as the armpits of a man’s tunic at the height of monsoon season. One pile even catches fire!
The only thing we can do to his standards is provide springwater for brewing. “Springwater provides a flavorless flavor.”
When A-ba says, “How fortuitous,” I know he means, Whatever the stranger says is fine, so long as he keeps opening his money pockets.
Our water is acceptable, but we have to learn how to heat it! Mr. Huang lectures from The Classic of Tea, which, he tells us, was written in the eighth century by Lu Yü, “the greatest tea master the world has known.” Mr. Huang instructs us on what to look out for. “First, the heating water should look like fish eyes and give off barely a hint of sound. In the second stage, the water should look like pearls strung together and chatter at the edges of the pot like a bubbling spring. Water has reached the perfect stage when it leaps and foments like the ocean and sounds like waves crashing on the shore . . .”
In the end he has taught us nothing, because what do we know of pearls, the ocean, or waves?
Mr. Huang talks about the connections between tea, Daoism, and Buddhism. Oh, how he goes on about hua—a Daoist concept he admires. It means something like transformation, and he applies this to the making of Pu’er in the sense that the astringent qualities of the raw tea are transformed—“metamorphosed,” he enthuses—through fermentation and aging. “You see? Bad into good!” He believes tea can promote longevity, although people in our village don’t live to be ancients. “Tea reminds us to slow down and escape the pressures of modern life,” he says as though he’s forgotten where he is and to whom he’s speaking.
I have to admit I enjoy being needed, though. I like feeling important. Except . . . He never stops nipping at me about my hidden grove. “You don’t realize how much I need this. I’ll pay you good money, young lady. I’ll pay you more than you ever dreamed of. Don’t you have somewhere you’d like to go? Someone you’d like to marry?”
Mr. Huang is as persistent as a termite, and his questions eat at me. I have contradictory feelings. At night I lie awake and think of San-pa and what a few leaves from the mother tree might buy us. I still wouldn’t know where to find him, because I don’t know exactly where he went. But if I had my own money, I could help us get our start as newlyweds when he returns and later help pay my tuition. During the day I must be with Mr. Huang, so even if I want to, I can’t sneak away. And if I did, and A-ma found out? I can’t imagine the consequences.
In the end, I’m only a girl, and my heart’s yearnings for the future triumph over my Akha morals. One day—and it only takes one moment to change your life forever—Mr. Huang goes to Menghai to buy supplies. While he’s gone and A-ma’s in another village setting a broken bone, I hike to my grove. I climb the mother tree and pick enough leaves to make a single cake. When Mr. Huang returns and we’re alone, I sell them to him. He pays me far more than they’re worth, saying, “I’m really thanking you for all your help. Now, let’s see what we can do with these.”
Every afternoon for the next three days, he takes me to a village on the other side of the mountain, where I can—as he puts it—process the tea in private. With the greedy eyes of a tiger, he watches everything I do. When the cake is finished, he hides it in the trunk of his mountain vehicle. I believe no one knows what I’ve done.