The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(82)
In the three years since I was last here, the changes are dramatic. The road from Jinghong to Menghai is jammed with trucks, tractors, buses, and private cars. The street itself has been paved and the berms planted with palm trees, hibiscus, and bougainvillea. Hawkers sidle through the traffic selling grilled meats and soda pop. We pass billboards advertising motor scooters, a transmission repair garage, and baby formula.
We turn onto Menghai’s main street, illuminated by the yellow glow of overhead lamps. My breath catches as I’m thrown back to the night I walked along this road, searching for a place to hide before I abandoned my baby. As we near the Social Welfare Institute, I grip the piece of plastic that edges the passenger window. On the steps, someone sleeps in the rain under a broken-down cardboard box. Jin puts an arm around my shoulders and pulls me to him. I bury my face in his shirt. Why is this hitting me harder than the times I passed through when I was waiting to hear if I’d gotten into the tea college? Ever since I left this place, my life has been one of up, up, up. I’m married to a kind man, whom I love deeply. We have two homes—an idea inconceivable even a year ago. I’m so very lucky, but I’ll never escape the regrets I have for leaving my daughter on this very street. Ci-teh’s betrayal has complicated and multiplied my emotions. My insides are raw with pain.
We check in to the hotel. Our room has a squat toilet. The promised hot water is lukewarm, and our bath towels aren’t a millimeter larger than kitchen towels. Jin paces, looking worried. He wants to talk. I don’t. When he gets in bed, I roll away from him. He puts a hand on my hip to comfort me, but I don’t acknowledge him. I’m so down—my business failed, my family and village back on the path to poverty, all the memories this town brings up about Yan-yeh—and now I’m an ungrateful wife. My jet lag is terrible and my emotions are jumbled, but I can’t fall asleep. The mattress is too hard, the rain batters the window like knocking spirits, and my mind is awash in reminiscences. How could I have thought that the happiness I’ve felt with Jin these past months could ever erase who I am or what I’ve done?
Morning comes, and the rain still pours down. In the dining room, Jin orders tea and spicy noodle soup. I rinse our eating utensils with the hot tea to kill germs. Our napkins are lengths of toilet paper.
“If you don’t want to talk to me,” Jin says into the bleak silence, “you don’t have to, but I hope you’ll listen to what I have to say to you. We both know that wealth, privilege, hard work, and luck do not heal a heart, nor can they save us from sadness, loneliness, or guilt. Before we go to your village, let’s visit the orphanage.”
I shake my head. “No, we should go to Spring Well right away. We’ve come so far, and I have to make sure—”
“All that can wait another hour or so—”
“I have to go home,” I plead. “Please, Jin.”
The muscles in his jaw tighten as he considers his response. Finally, he says, “We’ll go to Spring Well first, but sometime while we’re here, we’re going to the orphanage. You’re in a different position now than you were when you went there with your baby’s father. And you have me.”
* * *
Despite promises that this is now an easy drive, the torrential rain has turned the unpaved road into slippery muck. We get stuck in the mud, tires spinning, the driver cursing. Jin and I get out and fill the sludge with stones and thatch. The tires catch, we get back in the car, and we’re on our way. But it’s not far before we get bogged down again. Then more skidding and shimmying. On a particularly steep curve, the car slides to the edge of the precipice. I scream as one tire slips out into space. For a moment, we sit absolutely still, desperately hoping the other three tires hold. Carefully, we all get out of the car. The driver moans and groans about his most prized possession, Jin promises to buy him another car if this one goes over the cliff, and I feel as sick to my stomach as when I left Nannuo Mountain in the back of the tea delivery truck.
We’re grateful to be alive, but we’re three drenched cats, soaked clean through, muddy, indignant—and very funny to look at. How do I know? Because the road is busy, although no one but us would be fool enough to drive an automobile or motorcycle in this weather. But even in the misery of the monsoon season, farmers have plots to work, mothers and their babies go visiting, and children have school to attend. We’re a hilarious diversion. At last, a tractor rumbles up the road. Jin flags down the driver, and I speak to him in our local dialect. A few minutes later, Jin and I climb on the back of the tractor and hang on to the rain-slick steel. Our driver remains with his car with promises that we’ll send the tractor back to help him.
A half hour later, we come to another obstacle. A portion of the road has washed out. Jin and I decide to walk the last few kilometers. At least the rain is warm. We pass through Bamboo Forest Village and turn onto the trail that will lead home. To our right, on the construction site I remember from my last visit, rises something I never thought I’d see on any tea mountain: a villa as huge as the ones Jin and I used to see outside Guangzhou. It has a tile roof, large patios extended on massive retaining walls, and bright lights blazing from every window on this dark and rainy day.
I peel off onto a smaller path. Jin follows behind me. We each have to catch ourselves several times from falling down the slippery embankment. Soon we pass through Spring Well’s spirit gate. The track that divides the two sides of the village is deserted and dismal. Dogs and chickens have found shelter under the remaining bamboo and thatch houses. The gray brick and stucco structures look bleak, already old somehow. Rain streams down the glass panes of the tea-drying sheds. An odiferous smell seeps from them. Yes, they’re fermenting tea here.