The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(61)
When I reach my home . . . It’s gone, as are all the newlywed huts. Where our house once stood is a building that resembles a greenhouse—glass panes held together with aluminum struts. Nearby are four stucco structures—all of the cheapest and ugliest materials, soulless, antiseptic, not one with glass in the window frames. None of them are built on stilts, so there’s no place for livestock to live. One is slightly larger than the others. I don’t see separate verandas for the women’s and men’s sides of the house. The single door stands open.
“Hello,” I call at the top of the stairs. I peer into the interior of the house, where people bustle back and forth. “Hello?” I say again, uncertain.
Young and old, men and women, all stop what they’re doing to glance in my direction. After a long moment, someone says, “It’s Girl.” I recognize A-ba’s voice. The others part, clearing a way for him. He wears plastic sandals and jungle fatigues, as though he’s in a war movie, which is about as disconcerting as anything I’ve seen so far. Otherwise, he’s still my a-ba—small and wiry. Then A-ma comes to his side. She wears her indigo tunic, skirt, and leggings, and her headdress is as magnificent, welcoming, and comforting as I could hope.
* * *
That night, A-ma and the sisters-in-law prepare a meal unimaginable when I was a child: pork four ways (crispy skin, barbecued ribs, braised belly, and meatballs in clear broth), a soy-sauce roasted goose, bitter melon with scrambled egg, rice, and a fruit plate. Instead of eating on the floor around the warmth and glow of an open fire in the main room, we sit on tiny chairs at a small table. This furniture—built little to save cost and for easy storage—nevertheless shows my family’s improved circumstances. During dinner, my relatives pepper me with questions about the world beyond Nannuo Mountain. My brothers ask about banks and loans, because they now have so many expenses. The sisters-in-law want to know about cosmetics, and I give them my lipstick to share. Their three daughters, who were all born within one month of each other, are now eight years old, attending Teacher Zhang’s class, and irrepressibly inquisitive:
“Do you think I can go to secondary school, Auntie?”
“How old should I be when I first steal love, Auntie?”
“When can I visit you in Kunming, Auntie?”
After dinner, we gather around a space heater with a single bare—and very dim—lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Electricity! When tea is poured, I gather the courage to question the changes in Spring Well, pointing out that after centuries of steady life, so much has been upended during the eight years I’ve been away. “And it all started with Mr. Huang—”
“Our lives changed rapidly after the Hong Konger came to us,” A-ba agrees, “but we haven’t seen him in years. You know how he is—always looking for something no one else has. He’s probably experimenting with leaves in a village on one of the other tea-growing mountains. So be it. With all the traders and collectors visiting us, we don’t need him anymore.”
“But what about our traditions?” I ask.
Faces stare back at me silently, but their message is clear: Who are you to ask this question with your city ways?
“Everyone changes,” A-ba says at last. “We still live in the forest, but the world has come to us. We continue to have the Swing Festival, build a new spirit gate each year, and consult with the ruma about when to plant our crops, pick leaves, and select propitious marriage dates, but we don’t have time for all the cleansing ceremonies, sacrifices, or worrying about Dog Days and Buffalo Days when we have so much work to do. Tea growing is very lucrative, you know.”
Truly, what is stranger—the matter-of-fact way he’s just dismissed our customs or the way he speaks about business? Business!
“We have to guard our product,” he continues. “Some especially greedy tea traders have sent hooligans onto our mountain to look for the most ancient trees and chop them down, because it’s easier to harvest their leaves that way—”
“They would chop down a tree?” I ask, shocked. “What about its soul?”
But no one seems interested in that.
“When the government instituted the Quality Safety Standard,” First Brother carries on, “we could no longer dry our leaves or artificially ferment them on the ground or on the floor of the house. All tea processing had to be done fifty meters away from animals, so we were forced to sell our livestock. The new rules turned out to be good for us, because now nothing can taint the flavor of our tea. We borrowed fifty thousand yuan to build the drying and processing building, where our old home once stood.”
“And we all have our own houses with indoor plumbing!” Third Brother chimes in.
Their optimism and free-spending ways have been buoyed by an early thirty-year extension to the Thirty Years No Change policy. Knowing he would “own” land until 2034, First Brother ripped out the tea bushes on his terraces, while Second Brother took out his pollarded trees so new tea trees could be planted from seeds. A-ba gave up on his vegetable plots—“We can buy what we need in Bamboo Forest Village”—so that he too could plant tea trees. For all three of them, the few wild tea trees on their respective properties have helped pay for these improvements, while Third Brother’s once worthless old tea trees are now the most valuable asset in the family . . .