The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(62)
“His trees, and your grove,” A-ba adds pointedly. “Of course, we can’t get your a-ma to let us take a look—”
Mercifully, First Brother cuts him off. “None of us could have predicted today’s situation. Buyers now visit from all over Asia to buy Pu’er to drink, sell, and collect. We have to host big banquets, hoping to make them happy. There’s a lot of competition. That’s why we need to borrow at better rates.”
“And the price of tea keeps going up and up and up!”
Everyone pesters me about my chances of getting into the tea college.
“If you do well,” First Brother exclaims exuberantly, “you can sell our family’s tea and make it famous!”
I have only one response to that: “I have to be accepted first.”
* * *
No one embodies the changes in Spring Well more than Ci-teh, whom I see the next night at a banquet my family hosts for a buyer from Japan. Her giggling ways seem to be gone, and any embroideries that would mark her as an Akha have been packed away as well. She’s gained weight—as has almost everyone in Spring Well—and her stomach and breasts push against the buttons of her flowered cotton blouse.
“Visit me tomorrow!” she urges. And I do. Her house is the nicest in the village, naturally. “The first with electricity,” Ci-teh boasts. She’s also the first person in Spring Well to own a cellphone. She insists we exchange numbers. “So we never again lose our connection.”
We were once very close, but our lives have taken different paths, which she reminds me of again and again. “You abandoned me. You left without a word. So hurtful you are.” While the things that happened to me remain a secret, the steps in her life are well known by all on Nannuo Mountain. After her parents died, Ci-teh consolidated the land awarded to her family in the Thirty Years No Change policy. In addition to her own groves, she also leases stands of tea trees from other families, which has earned her the title of the single largest grower on Nannuo. She further strengthened her status when she paid the ruma and nima to allow her brother, Ci-do, to return to Spring Well after a spiritual cleansing—of what degree or intensity no one tells me—plus nine days of feasting provided to every man, woman, and child in the village, all paid for by her. The things money can buy . . .
“He has a new wife and two children. Times change, but the stain on him from fathering human rejects will never be completely erased,” Ci-teh confides in an offhand manner. “It’s best for everyone that he and his family spend most of the year visiting the great sights our country has to offer.”
But for all her money, success, and power, she’s been unable to control or influence the child-maker spirits. She and Law-ba have three daughters and have broken with Akha naming practices to show their disappointment: Mah-caw (Go Find a Brother), Mah-law (Go Fetch a Brother), and Mah-zeu (Go Buy a Brother).
“Why haven’t you remarried?” she asks me another day when we sip tea in the bamboo pavilion she’s built to entertain her international buyers. “If a wife dies, a man can remarry in three months. When a husband dies, a woman must wait three years, but that has come and gone for you.”
Does she spout these old-fashioned aphorisms just to goad me? She’s obviously let go of many traditions herself, but our loving but contrary relationship is the same as ever. I give a bland answer. “I want to get ahead in life.” The reality is something murkier. I’ve been alone and lonely for eight years. I’ve blinded myself to the advertisements for online dating. I’ve also learned how to walk through parks and ignore the middle-aged mothers who approach me with photos of their sons and lists of their accomplishments and possessions: a bicycle, a motorcycle, or a car; living with parents, renting an apartment, or owning a condo. “You’re too old not to be married,” more than one mother has told me. Unasked, by the way. Then, “Please consider my son.” But I can’t allow myself to repeat the mistakes of the past. If I were ever to fall in love again, it would have to be with someone who’d be accepted by my family. Otherwise, too much heartbreak.
“Do you date?” Ci-teh persists, using the Western word. “Do you go to the movies and have noodles with men?”
“Most men don’t want to go out with an Akha,” I say, hoping to end the subject.
She nods knowingly. “You look so young, and you’re too quiet. You are tu, and not in an admirable way. What about stealing love in the forest while you’re here? Surely our men will overlook your faults, and you can have fun too.”
“I don’t want to steal love.”
She ignores that and asks, “What about a foreigner? You work in a hotel. Maybe you could marry one of them and move to America.”
I couldn’t do that either. It’s hard to explain to Ci-teh how it feels to be separated from the mountain, my family, and our customs—even though so much has changed.
She cocks her head, appraising me. “Have you become one of those women who hates men?”
As I look back at my years in Kunming, I can be grateful that, despite everything, I’m not bitter. I’m not like Deh-ja—wherever she is—either: crippled by Ci-do’s abandonment. But I must protect my heart, even if that means being alone.
“I’ll never hate men,” I answer. I’d never confide all that happened to me, but I add, “I just don’t want to make another mistake.”