The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(74)
“The ruma.”
“He gave me a date.”
That Jin’s been planning this moment for such a long time . . .
“And that’s not all,” he goes on. “It seems a spirit incantation needed to be held for me. No one told me why, but it included the killing of a chicken and a goat and the passing from hand to hand of an old coin. What was all that about?” he inquires genially.
“Are they asking us to come home for the wedding?” I manage to choke out, because I’m not about to tell him that a special ceremony must always be performed when a widow remarries so her new husband won’t have his life cut short. The goat is added to protect the new husband of a widow whose first husband died a terrible death.
“Your mother had a different idea. It seems she’s heard about honeymoons,” he says, bemused. “She thought you might like a honeymoon in America.” He grins as he confides, “She pulled me aside to tell me that the first time I visited.”
Which means she liked him from the beginning . . . Which is why I now have a wedding outfit, as well as a passport and visa . . . But which also means she deliberately wanted to remind me of Yan-yeh . . .
“Even before I met you,” he says, “my mother made me love you. Then, when I saw you the first time, sitting on the bench with her . . . You were even more beautiful than she’d described.”
“Beautiful?” Since we Akha don’t use this word to describe people, this is the first time it’s been applied to me. Beautiful.
“My mother liked you because she saw you as hardworking and honest. Please forgive me for my lies. I promise they won’t happen again.”
I have to bite my lips to hold back my emotions. He’s been keeping secrets, but they’ve come from a place of goodness and kindness, while mine . . . How could I have said yes to him when I don’t deserve him? I bow my head, and let the tears come. He pulls me into his arms, probably believing I am overcome by happiness. I lay my head against the softness of his sweater. I feel the warmth of his body and the beat of his heart. For a few seconds, I allow myself to relish what might have been. Then I make myself pull away. I cannot go into marriage with lies and secrets as my only dowry.
“I love you,” I say, “and I would love to marry you, but you may not want to marry me when you know the truth about me.”
“Nothing you could say would make me think less of you.”
“You haven’t heard my story yet.”
We sit on the couch, facing each other. Jin holds my hands, and I hesitantly begin to speak. I start with the easiest and least damning sin I’ve committed: that I broke a promise to my a-ma by selling leaves from my grove which should only be used for medicinal purposes and shouldn’t have gone to any man, especially someone like Mr. Huang. Jin easily accepts this, saying, “You were young and poor. You made a mistake. And it sounds like the mother tree was not permanently damaged.” Next, I tell Jin about being married and widowed. His eyes widen with each new detail. When I get to the end, he takes time to compose his response. “I’ve never been married,” he says at last, “but would it be fair for me to look into your eyes and deny that I’ve been with other women before you? If I’d grown up on your mountain, I would have been married too.”
“Whatever happens next,” I say, “I want you to know that I’ll always think of you as an honorable man.” He squeezes my hands, giving me strength. “Before San-pa and I were married, I got pregnant. I didn’t realize it until after he’d gone to Thailand, so he didn’t know. I gave birth in secret and abandoned my daughter. By the time San-pa returned to Nannuo Mountain, she’d been adopted by a family in America.”
Jin slowly releases my hands, stands, and crosses to the window. He keeps his back to me, as though I no longer exist. I don’t blame him. I sigh and get up to leave.
“Wait,” he says, swiveling to me. Twin trails of tears trickle down his cheeks, which he roughly wipes away. “You’re very brave, Li-yan. Far braver than I am. We both have secrets, but you had the courage to be honest with me.” He visibly struggles. “One mistake can change the course of your life. You can never return to your original path or go back to the person you were.”
“That’s how I’ve always felt. If I hadn’t taken a bite of San-pa’s pancake. If I’d only listened to A-ma when she said she didn’t want me to see him. If I hadn’t let false ideas of the future compel me to sell leaves to Mr. Huang—”
“But nothing you did resulted in death.” He pauses to make sure he has my full attention. “I’m responsible for my father’s.”
“How can you say that?” I ask, bewildered. “Your father died of pneumonia. You were a child when he got sick—”
“Perhaps you can understand a little of what it was like for my parents. They went from Guangzhou to a village in Anhui province called Moon Pond. Such a pretty name, but it held only darkness. I was born there, and we lived in a one-room shack made from mud bricks. It was more miserable and wretched than anything I’ve seen in your village.”
That stings, especially since he didn’t see Spring Well before all the changes. But this is not the time to take offense.
“My parents lost their positions, clothing, papers, photographs, friends, everything,” he goes on. “The only tokens from the past they carried with them were five of my father’s philosophy books, which they kept hidden under the wood platform that served as our bed. My mother learned how to haul water, wash clothes by hand, and make soles for our shoes from whatever scraps of paper she could find. My father gathered night soil from different families and hoed it into the fields. My parents weakened from the physical demands of working under a merciless sun or being soaked to the bone during the monsoons. My earliest memories are of having dysentery from the bad water and poor sanitation. We were all sick.” He takes a moment to ask, “What do you remember of the Cultural Revolution?”