The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(95)
“If you don’t love tea, you can’t make good tea,” I recite. “Our tea trees are gifts from God. We can see the Akha Way in them. If you have cloned terrace bushes, one gets sick, and they all get sick. Same with pollarded trees, which are so weakened by the brutality of constant trimming. But when we find a wild tea tree, we know certain things. It has been strong enough to survive and grow on its own. It has its own separate and unique genetic makeup. If one tree gets sick, others surrounding it are unaffected. We Akha understand this, because we have a taboo against close relatives marrying. This is why we Recite the Lineage.”
People murmur their agreement, understanding what’s beneath my words. Purity, not counterfeits.
“As we pick today, let’s remember our progress can only be slow—one bud set at a time. If we find perfect leaves, the tea we make will be the best. Together we’ll share the Akha Way with the outside world.”
When I step off the platform, Teacher Zhang approaches. “May I help?” he asks. I hand him a basket, and he joins us as we walk up the mountain guided by the last of the moonlight. The sun comes out and still we work, breaking only to have tea and eat rice balls. Once our baskets are full, we return to the village, where Tea Master Sun oversees laying out the leaves for their first rest.
The next day is even longer. We pick leaves and lay them out for their sunbath. Then we spend hours tossing six-kilo batches of yesterday’s rested leaves over woks to kill the green. After fourteen hours, we sit outside together—families with families—eating meals prepared by those daughters-in-law who’ve remained in the village to care for the children too old to breast-feed and too young to help.
On the third morning, who should arrive? Mr. Huang and his son.
“I’m on spring break,” Xian-rong announces, peeling out of the SUV. He’s as skinny as ever and a little pale, the last probably from the ride through the turns, bumps, and ruts of the mountain.
“And I’m looking—”
I hold up a hand to stop Mr. Huang from uttering another word. “Don’t say it!”
“To help,” Mr. Huang finishes with a grin. He wears a straw hat, a rumpled shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, khaki pants that he’s rolled up to his knees to keep cool, and plastic sandals.
Tea Master Sun rushes forward to shake hands. “Old friend! Young friend! So good to see two such expert tasters.”
The men exchange cigarettes—not that any of them smoke—as a gesture of friendship and cordiality. Mr. Huang is as disconcerting to me as he’s always been and I’ll always be uncomfortable around him, but if Tea Master Sun trusts him, then maybe I should try to trust him a little bit. As for the boy, A-ma has already pulled him inside and is probably serving him one of her special brews before they go picking, continuing the friendship they’ve had since he and his father first came to our village.
The rest of us pick up baskets, sling them over our shoulders, and begin the long hike up the mountain to the tea trees.
* * *
The next eight days are our busiest, as we pick the first flush of leaves and process them. Once this is finished, Mr. Huang and Xian-rong prepare to return to Hong Kong. The boy looks better than when he arrived—less pale, and with a little weight from First Sister-in-law’s good cooking. And of course Mr. Huang asks about my hidden grove, and I complete our customary ritual by refusing to show it to him. Some things will never change.
I pass on to my a-ba, my brothers, and other men in the village what I learned at the tea college. My plan—as was Mr. Huang’s all those years ago—involves separating our leaves into two batches: one for maocha, the semiprocessed tea that people will be able to drink as is or let age naturally, the other artificially fermented. For now, we convert the two largest drying sheds in Spring Well into fermentation rooms. The semiprocessed tea is built up into piles a half meter high. We sprinkle them with water, cover them with burlap, and let the natural heat of decomposition begin to do its work. I know all is going well when bees begin to hover outside, so attracted are they to the sweet and warm scent. There’s no evidence of mold or the sour odor of rot. Instead, the piles smell of earth and life, ripe apples and pollen. These two sets of tea will later be steamed, pressed into cakes, set outside on trays for another round of drying, and finally wrapped in our new Spring Well Village wrappers made of the finest rice paper.
Every evening, Tea Master Sun brews and pours tea for us. A-ma, A-ba, Mrs. Chang, Teacher Zhang (who is made to laugh in a way no one has seen before by my mother-in-law), and my brothers gather around the table along with Jin and me. We test the astringency of each batch of tea every three days to see how it’s progressing. These are happy times with my family, even though the sisters-in-law must remain apart, as custom dictates.
My favorite moments, though, are those spent with the women in my family, doing a task that I always considered the most monotonous—sorting every single leaf into different grades. Yellow or defective leaves can be made into a low-grade tea for retired teachers, factory workers, and farmers in other provinces that we’ll sell for forty yuan a kilo. The best leaves—and there are so few—are put aside for special batches I’ll be making. And then there are all the leaves in between that will eventually find a proper purpose and the right buyers. Sitting around baskets outside my house, we women sort—a leaf, a leaf, a leaf. I learn who’s in love—visiting the Flower Room, stealing love in the forest, getting married. I hear about petty squabbles. I’m told all the stories I missed during the years I was away.