The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(78)
The Boston Tea Party
The colonists didn’t want taxation without representation. Their motto was “Anything but British tea.” They boycotted the taxed tea. It became the symbol of rebellion. New York and Philadelphia sent tea ships back to London. In Charleston, tea was left on the dock to rot. In Boston, the colonists wouldn’t let three ships unload their tea. On December 16, 1773, some colonists dressed up like Native Americans, climbed on the ships, chopped open 340 chests of Chinese tea with tomahawks, and threw the contents into Boston Harbor. The tea weighed 90,000 pounds. In today’s money, the value would be one million dollars. Founding Father John Adams called the event “the Destruction of the Tea in Boston.” Today we call it the Boston Tea Party.
England got really mad and enacted the Coercive Acts. The colonists called them the Intolerable Acts. The laws punished the people in Boston by ending all commerce and closing the harbor until the bill for the lost tea was paid. They punished the state of Massachusetts by abolishing self-government. Now all Thirteen Colonies got mad. There were tea parties in other harbors. In September 1774, the colonists met at the First Continental Congress. They wanted to fight back. Seven months later, the Revolutionary War began.
How the Boston Tea Party Affects Me Today
For a very long time, the United States, England, and other countries could only buy tea from China. Emperors in China said that anyone who tried to take a tea seed or plant out of the country would have his head cut off. Finally, the British people stole some plants and took them to India. One of the tea gardens there was started by Sir Thomas Lipton, a grocery store owner. My grandma and grandpa still drink Lipton tea.
Tea is the second most popular drink in the world after water. The biggest tea-growing countries are China, India, and Kenya. Overall, China is the biggest tea-drinking country, but the largest per capita countries for tea drinking are Turkey, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. In Turkey, they consume seven pounds of tea leaves a year per person. Per capita means that every person in Turkey, even if they are babies, drinks ten cups of tea a day. The United States is the sixty-ninth per capita tea-drinking country. Americans only drink twelve ounces of tea leaves a year per person. (Americans aren’t in the top ten countries for coffee drinkers either.) My mom and dad like coffee, but they drink tea when we go to a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. Sometimes they let me have tea with sugar for a special treat, but not very often because I get too excited and can’t go to sleep. We may not drink tea that much in the United States, but it is still very important around the world.
TALL TREES CATCH MUCH WIND
The day after our dinner at Spago, I insist—yes, insist—that we visit Jin’s house in Monterey Park. He’d called it a “small house.” It’s larger than anything I’ve lived in, and it has to be larger than anything he lived in growing up too. The day after that, we cancel the rest of our trip, check out of the hotel, and move into the house. He drives me to the market, and everyone there is Chinese. That night, I make Jin dinner for the first time: pork belly braised in chilies, ong choy with preserved tofu, scrambled egg with tomato, and rice. For the next week, we leave the house only to go shopping. And then we go home, lock the door, make love, eat, watch the Mandarin-language channels to see what’s happening in China, sleep, and repeat it all over again the next day.
In the second week, he insists—yes, insists, and I, as Wife-of-Jin, go along—that we look for a new house. As we crisscross the San Gabriel Valley, I begin to understand the differences between the neighborhoods of Arcadia, Rosemead, Monterey Park, South Pasadena, and, of course, San Gabriel. Everything we look at seems grander than I could have imagined. My favorite, though, is a 1920s one-bedroom bungalow—cozy, and perfect for the two of us.
“But we’re going to need more than one bedroom!” Jin exclaims. Then he frowns as he realizes we’ve never spoken about children. “I hope you want children.”
Sun and Moon! How can he know how much this has been in my mind? On our first day here, when we were walking down Rodeo Drive, I saw an older man and woman—white—with a girl with long black hair walking between them, holding their hands. Yan-yeh? Could it be? As Jin and I passed them, I turned back to look. That girl had to have been adopted, but she was clearly Han majority and not Akha. After that, I stayed alert, searching always for a white mother or father or both with a girl with black hair, who’ll be turning twelve later this year. Would she be Akha small? Or would her lifetime of American food have given her extra height? I’ve spotted girls here and there: too old, too young, nose too flat, breasts too big. Besides, my daughter could be anywhere in this big country. She could be in New York City. She could be living with a cowboy family on a ranch. She could be in Alaska or Hawaii. Knowing I’ll never find her—and loving Jin as much as I do—has stirred a desire in me to have a baby. But it’s only now as Jin asks the question that I wonder how the One Child policy will apply to us. As an ethnic minority, I could have multiple children. Jin, as a member of the Han majority, will be allotted one child.
“Why worry about the rules?” he asks. “We can have as many children as we want, if they’re born in America. And they’ll be American citizens too. And even if we have them in China, what will the authorities do to us? Make us pay a ten-thousand-dollar fine? We aren’t peasants. We can afford many children.”