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.”
She waves off my words as though they mean nothing. “Look at me. I’m fat, but you’re still beautiful. I could find someone to marry you by nightfall.”
She could too, but I’m not interested.
Ci-teh’s inquisitiveness spreads to others. The sisters-in-law, A-ba, my brothers, even some of the nieces and nephews buzz their noses at me like persistent gnats, asking why I haven’t remarried, giving me advice, and trying to prove how much they care for my well-being.
“We don’t want you to be lonely,” Third Brother says.
Second Brother takes a more practical approach. “If you don’t get married, who will look after you when you get old?”
First Brother is even more frank. “If you don’t get married, who will care for you when you go to the afterlife? You’ll need a son to make offerings to you.” He shakes a warning finger at me. “You can only be a leftover woman for a limited time. After that, it will be too late for you. No one will want to marry you.”
A-ba, who shouldn’t speak directly to me on such matters, sends messages through the sisters-in-law, as is proper.
Third Sister-in-law speaks to me one morning as we gather firewood: “You can’t act too picky.”
Second Sister-in-law passes on the following: “No man wants to marry a woman who is overly ambitious or wants to outshine him.”
A-ba has First Sister-in-law deliver the bluntest caution: “People will say you don’t like to do the intercourse, but it is your duty to the nation and to the family to have a child.”
Their talk leaves me feeling both irritated and insecure.
During the third week, I walk to Shelter Shadow Village to pay respects to San-pa’s parents, only to find they died five years ago in a typhoid epidemic. I also visit Teacher Zhang at the primary school, where the same old maps and posters hang on the bamboo walls as when I was a girl. I confide in him my concerns that I failed my interview and will let my family down again. Here’s what he says:
“There’s nothing you can do about it now! But if you ask me—and I guess you are—I believe you will get in. Who is more qualified than you, after all?”
Which lifts my spirit.
I don’t get to see or talk to A-ma much at all. She’s the only person, apart from Teacher Zhang, who seems unchanged—from the way she dresses to the way she moves to the way she ignores the spiraling world around her. She’s as busy as ever, though, cooking for the family, settling arguments between the sisters-in-law, washing clothes by hand, spinning thread, weaving cloth, embroidering and decorating caps for her grandchildren, delivering babies, and mixing potions for those who come to her ill or injured. She’s so busy that I’m alone with her only once—when we visit the mother and sister trees on my last day. As we wander through the grove, she stops here and there to stroke a branch, clip a few leaves, or pick some of the parasites that cling to the mother tree for medicinal concoctions. The last time we were here together . . .
“Nothing will take away the pain of a lost child,” A-ma says. “My feelings for your daughter are always strongest here. In nature. In the atmosphere. Because that’s where Yan-yeh has gone. Into the ether.”
“For me, my grief is like a huge hole. Everything flows around that hole. I have forced myself to move forward, but I can never move on.”
A-ma regards me, weighing so much. When she finally speaks it’s to drive forward the theme that has come at me from every direction since I’ve returned home.
“You shouldn’t be alone. You cannot let memories of what happened in the past turn you into someone you wouldn’t recognize. Be who you are, Girl, and the right person will find you and love you.”
While I still don’t think love will happen for me again, her words give me strength—to say goodbye, walk alone back to Bamboo Forest Village, board the minibus to Menghai, and travel on to Kunming.
* * *
When I enter my apartment, I find a note from Teacher Guo, asking me to visit him immediately. He breaks away from dinner with his family to give me the news. Of the two thousand people who applied, I’m the only student accepted into both programs. I’m ecstatic. I sell my moped and most of my belongings so I’ll have money to live on without taking an extra job to support myself.
For the next twelve months, I’m rarely apart from Tea Master Sun. In the first track, he teaches me how to buy raw tea, store it, and let nature do its job of aging. I learn to judge the minutes required for wilting, killing the green, kneading, the sunbath, and fermentation. (I’ve had a head start on some of these things, which gives me an advantage over the other students.) In the second track, I study the best qualities of tea so that one day I might become a tea master myself, like—and here’s my first French word—a wine sommelier.
“Taste requires a lifetime of dedication,” Tea Master Sun instills in me. “You have a simple palate shaped by your childhood, cultivated by mountain springs, and enriched by the soil. I like this about you, but you must learn subtlety and refinement. You’ll stumble and make mistakes, but as long as you’re humble and honest, you’ll learn. You love tea. I see it in your face. Always remember If you don’t love tea, you can’t make good tea.”
Nothing romantic grows between my tea master and me, but after months of being around him the last of the sadness and loneliness I’ve felt about the past dissipates like clouds after a storm. When I look back at my life—all twenty-six years of it—I see the many men who’ve helped me, but none of them will ever be as important as Tea Master Sun, who opens my eyes, heart, and soul. The things he teaches me range from the practical to the spiritual.
“Confucius taught his followers that tea could help people understand their inner dispositions,” he tells me, “while Buddhists grant tea the highest spiritual qualities, ranking it among the four ways to concentrate the mind, along with walking, feeding fish, and sitting quietly. They believe tea can link the realms of meditation. Just the physical process we experience when we drink tea—our search for huigan—causes us to turn inward and reflect as the liquor coats our tongues, shimmers down our throats, and then rises again as fragrance. The Daoists see tea as a way to regulate internal alchemy, be in harmony with the natural world, and serve as an ingredient in the elixir of immortality. Together, these three disciplines have taught us to look upward to see the state of the heavens and downward to observe the natural arrangement of the earth. But whatever you believe or however you view life, the quality and goodness of a tea are for the mouth to decide.”
My mouth does learn to find the best flavors, distinguish the body (light or heavy), discern texture (like water or velvet), as well as detect the most disagreeable notes—chalky, dusty, and rancid, or petroleum, disinfectant, and plastic. I become adept at identifying the differences between Pu’er, Iron Goddess of Mercy, Dragon Well, Silver Needle, and White Peony teas by taste alone. I study auction prices and have seen how values change and surge. In 2001, a special Iron Goddess of Mercy sold for 120,000 yuan, but just one year later a three-year-old Pu’er sold for 168,000 yuan. Two years ago, in 2004, when the yuan was at a historic high against the U.S. dollar, a mere three grams of a Pu’er once stored in the Palace Museum sold for 12,000 yuan—thirty-two times the price of gold! And now, just as I’m graduating, another 100 grams of Pu’er has sold for 220,000 yuan or about $28,000.
How can I not r
ejoice in my good fortune in living with this particular leaf, celebrate my knowledge of it, and show courage in revealing it to others? It’s time for me to start “plucking the hills and boiling the oceans” by entering the tea trade, and I have many options to choose from in Kunming alone. More than four thousand wholesale and retail tea dealers, as well as countless teahouses, have sprung up in the city like frogs after the monsoon. But before I can apply to any of those establishments, Tea Master Sun presents me with an offer from a business that wants to invest in the future of Pu’er by bankrolling a shop in the Fangcun Tea Market in Guangzhou, the largest wholesale tea market in China. “They’ll put up the capital—not much, but enough to rent a space and buy product—and you’ll produce the sweat and have all the worry,” Tea Master Sun explains. “You’ll make money on commission until you’ve paid back the initial investment. Then you’ll own the business fifty-fifty. I don’t think you’ll find an opportunity better than that.”
Who can question fate? Bad things happened to me; then my fortunes turned when I went to the trade school and Pu’er Tea College. Now another propitious moment blossoms before me. Perhaps what the Han majority say is true: Good luck comes in threes. I sign the contract with Green Jade, Ltd., on my tea master’s advice.
Before taking the train to Guangzhou, I write a note to Teacher Zhang:
Please ask Ci-teh, my family, and our neighbors to find me the best teas, and I will sell them.
Birthday letter to Constance from Haley, March 1, 2006
Dear Mom,
I am ten years old. Dad is sixty years old. And today you turned fifty years old. We all have zeroes in our ages. I think that’s cool. Zero is my favorite number.
I like skiing with you. I like riding horses with you. You drive me lots of places. You let me and my friends eat lots of ice cream! Jade and Jasmine like you a lot. You also take us to the movies. You let us talk in the backseat of the car and don’t tell us to be quiet like Jade’s mom. You help me with the computer. I like science just like you.
You are the best mom in the world. No other mom could have taken her daughter to the Observatory to look through the telescope, like you took me, when no one else was there. I love you as much as the whole universe.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Haley
THE SWEETEST DEW OF HEAVEN
I’ve been in Guangzhou two weeks, and every morning I wake up with a knot in my stomach. Even seven floors up I can hear the inelegant thrum of the city and knowing I have to venture into it—be a part of it—is a challenge. I get dressed, eat breakfast standing up, and leave my apartment. The hallway reeks of garlic and cigarette smoke. I squeeze into the too-small elevator with other people who live in the building. When we reach the ground floor, I’m pushed from behind as my neighbors hurry to be first through the lobby and out the door. Once they’re gone, I linger for a moment. I take a breath to fortify myself. You can do this! I step outside and am immediately swept into a current of thousands of people heading to work and school.
Not even in my dreams could I have imagined such a big city. It’s loud and crowded, with more than double the population of Kunming. Instead of eddies of bicycles like I used to see in Teacher Zhang’s posters, the road is solidly packed with cars, at a standstill, their horns blaring. I pass restaurant windows filled with big aquariums in which sea creatures I don’t recognize wait to be scooped out by the chef for a family’s lunch or dinner. (Why would anyone eat those things?) Stores sell all manner of goods—more than anyone could ever want or need. To get rich is glorious! But the success of the campaign has also brought a dark side: beggars. China isn’t supposed to have them and the government is supposed to keep peasants in the countryside, but with so many people and not enough watchers . . .
It’s a short walk to my subway stop near the Martyrs’ Memorial Gardens. Once I reach the platform for Line 1, I let the tide of humanity draw me with it into the car that will take me seven stops to the exit for the Fangcun Tea Market in the Liwan District. We are so jammed together that the other passengers and I sway as one entity through every acceleration, bump, and turn. Things are quieter once I’m back on the street, but not by much, because hundreds—maybe thousands—of people work in the market. It’s still hard for me to grasp its vastness. It covers several blocks and does big business. This year it’s on target to sell 67 billion yuan worth of tea, with Pu’er making up a third. Each block contains a cluster of four-story buildings. On each floor, in each of those buildings, on each of those blocks, are dozens upon dozens of shops. Some are just four by four meters. Others take up half a floor. Still others are little more than a couple of stools surrounded by bags of tea overseen by a single family in the open hallway, and banded together with similar smaller dealers. The long hallways are dimly lit by fluorescent tubes. Shipping containers—crates, cardboard boxes, and stuffed burlap bags—create obstacles outside nearly every purveyor’s door. But not every shop sells tea. Some offer cups, pots, glass pitchers, picks to break apart tea cakes, tables and trays for tea pouring, in every price range imaginable.
When I unlock the door to my Midnight Blossom Teashop, I’m greeted by the intoxicating aroma of Pu’er, the only type of tea I sell. Knowing the rest of my workday will follow my rhythms allows me to relax. My first customer is from Beijing. We exchange business cards, each of us making internal calculations as happens in every transaction across China these days. His belt buckle has been let out a couple of notches, which tells me that whatever his business is he must be doing well but not so well that he feels comfortable buying a new belt. Is he a collector or an amateur trying to get in on the action? I learn he’s serious when he says he’s looking to buy a jian, which holds twelve stacks of seven bing to a total of eighty-four cakes of Pu’er to give as gifts to people in the government to help him build guanxi—connections. It quickly becomes evident, however, that he doesn’t know a thing about tea. I could take advantage of him—sell him an inferior tea or overcharge him—but in just two weeks I’ve already started to gain a reputation for being fair and honest, something that can’t be said for some of my competitors. Besides, if he’s an entrepreneur on his way up, this could be the first of many purchases.
I brew tea; we taste it. I make a different infusion; we taste that, and so on, for a couple of hours. I teach him a popular saying that has recently sprung up: You’ll regret tomorrow what you don’t store today. The idea encourages him to exceed my expectations. He buys a kilo of loose tea for his personal use. An hour later, we get down to real business: he orders twenty kilos of Spring Well Village Pu’er to put on the menus at his eight cafés. As I copy down his shipping information, he asks where I’m from.
“I was born in Yunnan,” I reply.
His nose prickles enviously. Then he asks the question I hear nearly every day. “Why would you move to Guangzhou? Every person who lives here longs for the tranquillity of your province. Remote and untouched. With clean air and wild forests.”
“I miss it,” I admit, “but I’m helping my family by selling the natural gifts of our mountain.” Actually, I’m selling treasures from the Six Great Tea Mountains plus another twenty tea mountains, including Nannuo. Ci-teh has found some wonderful teas from Laobanzhang. What she sends isn’t the highest quality, but the liquor is good and the name value unsurpassed. I think of my Laobanzhang Pu’er as a small but surprising vintage from an area that produces some breathtaking products.
After my customer departs, the afternoon stretches out before me. I fetch bottles of springwater, wash and dry serving utensils, and package tea in single servings to sell or give as samples. I lock up at 5:00. I jump back on Line 1, and it’s as awful as it was this morning. My attitude about it is better, though, because at the end of the ride I will reward myself. I get off at the stop for Martyrs’ Memorial Gardens. I buy a bottle of water from a woman who sells commemorative key chains, pinwheels, and other items from a cart. I wave and say hello in my pathetic Cantonese to three retired me
n—wearing their old People’s Liberation Army uniforms—who bring their caged finches to the park, smoke cigarettes, and share stories. I stroll along the walkways to one of the benches that ring the memorial. I sit, breathe, listen. There’s no escaping the rabid roar of the city, but the rustling of the breeze through the trees sweeps away the stresses of the day.
I found this spot a week ago, and already I’ve learned the patterns of others like myself, who seek comfort in the park’s embrace. On the bench to my left sits a woman around sixty. She wears the costume of her age: a short-sleeved white blouse and gray trousers. Past hardship has set lines in her face. I’m most struck by her eyes, which are surprisingly wide for a Chinese. Her purse serves as a paperweight to keep what I assume are copies of her son’s biography and photos of him from blowing away. She has none of the desperation or pushiness of the mothers in Kunming’s parks who used to hound me, looking for daughters-in-law for their sons. Rather, during the past week, she’s placidly watched young women meander by, never once approaching or speaking to one of them.
* * *
A month later, I arrive at the park, ready to let the hustle of the long day fall from my shoulders, when the woman on the bench next to mine motions for me to join her.
“I’m Mrs. Chang,” she announces in English. “I’ve noticed you don’t know much Cantonese and my Mandarin is abysmal. English will work for me, if it will work for you.” She pats the seat next to her. “Please sit down.”
I obey because I don’t know how to avoid her invitation politely, but I take care not to glance at the pile of papers between us. If she’s been watching me as I’ve been watching her, she has to know I’m not interested in matchmaking.
“I’m a widow,” she tells me straight off.
Her revelation causes me to be equally blunt. “So am I.”