The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

“Not even Ci-teh?” I ask.

“Not even Ci-teh. Not even your sisters-in-law or nieces. This place is for the women in our bloodline alone. You to me to my mother to . . .” Her voice trails off. She glides her hand down the mother tree’s bumpy trunk. A gentle caress.

She’s as quiet on the way down the mountain as she was on the way up. I can tell from the stiffness in her shoulders and the heaviness of her silence that she’s supremely disappointed in me. I didn’t react to my inheritance with enough joy, awe, or gratitude. But how could I, really? A-ma may be the most important woman in our village, but every single man and boy is above her. I would be violating Akha Law to believe her over anything one of them said, and A-ba says this grove is cursed, filled with old trees no one wants and one tree that caused the death of his father. For whatever reason—whether it’s punishment against A-ma’s female line for bringing the grove into his family or he just thinks so lowly of me because I’m a girl—this is what he has provided as my dowry.

My final acceptance of this allows me to see my future very clearly. I’ll have to hope for true love to find a mate, because I’ve been given nothing of value to take into marriage apart from my poor embroidery skills, a worthless grove of ancient tea trees, and my face, which may not be pretty enough to overcome my other disadvantages. The entire way home, I think about what I can do to change my fate. We Akha are meant to roam, and right now I feel anxious to escape. I have enough sense to know, however, that I can’t go anywhere yet. I’m only a child, after all, and I wouldn’t last many days alone in the jungle. Teacher Zhang said, “You don’t have to stay on this mountain forever.” Maybe education can help with my flight, if only in my mind.



* * *



The next day is Monkey Day. I leave the house when it’s still dark. And, yes, it’s still raining. I arrive at the schoolhouse wet but determined to enjoy the rhythms of learning. Teacher Zhang launches into a history lesson about the land. It’s one we’ve all heard before, but today I hear it very differently. He begins by talking about how for centuries the people in these mountains worked for big landlords, who passed down tea tree gardens from generation to generation, keeping and hoarding everything.

“Peasants stayed poor,” he drones. “They often starved to death. Life was not fair. But after Chairman Mao united the country in . . . What year?”

“Nineteen-forty-nine,” we chant.

“All land was confiscated and redistributed to the masses.”

I know this is so, because my a-ba’s family was given a little land—not to own, all land belongs to the government, but to be responsible for. A-ma’s family, who lived on the other side of Nannuo Mountain, also received land. They didn’t tell anyone about the hidden grove. If someone had found out, they would have been classified as landlords. Luckily, the grove was, as I now know, so utterly hard to find that it had escaped detection by surveyors or other farmers. It wasn’t on anyone’s map, so it wasn’t confiscated by a landlord, redistributed by Chairman Mao, taken back by him during the Great Leap Forward, or impacted by what Teacher Zhang is talking about now.

“Nine years ago, in a deal that was part of a nationwide program to return property to original owners, old landlord families in this area were once again allowed to work their ancestral lands. But they, and all Chinese, still had no rights to ownership. Neither do people like you.”

Finally, he arrives at the most important part of his lesson: the Thirty Years No Change policy, which singled out the ethnic minorities in the tea mountains of Yunnan. I lean forward and listen hard. This policy affects each of us, and yet no matter how many times I hear it explained, I’m still confused. Once Teacher Zhang said it was supposed to be like that: “Confusing on purpose.”

“Six years ago, the Thirty Years No Change policy divided the land yet again,” he begins. “Each person—from infant to those in their nineties—received an allotment. The divisions were supposed to be fair, with each family receiving some land in the sun and some in the shade, some on steep slopes and some that could easily be cared for, some rocky and some with soil rich with nutrients, some with tea trees and some with terraced rice paddies.” The stretch of his mouth sags as wilted and forlorn as a length of vine cut from its mother plant. “Are there problems with this policy?”

Yes, but no one would be foolish enough to say them out loud. No baby born since the policy was given to us has received an allotment of land. When an elder dies, the land is either kept in the family or returned to the village. When a woman marries out, she often loses her land to her father or a brother, but when she goes to her husband’s village, she isn’t given new land.

“Think, children, think. What repercussions has this policy had on your families?”

Still no one raises a hand. Teacher Zhang begins calling on different boys and girls. The stories are more or less the same. Once the land allotments were assigned to a family—maybe two people, maybe thirty people—the a-ba took charge and determined who would receive the land in the sun, the rocky hillside, and so on. My a-ba kept the best land for himself. He slashed and burned his tea trees to raise ducks, pigs, and chickens. The ducks died, he could never afford a pig, and we used our chickens for ceremonial purposes faster than they could lay eggs. He then tried to grow market crops. The monsoon season guarantees that the rice will turn out well, and we would starve if not for it, but otherwise A-ba does not have the gift for growing vegetables.

As the second most valuable person in the family, First Brother was given the second-best land. Like A-ba, he burned his tea trees. In their place, he planted tea bushes on terraces. Second Brother received the third-best land. He pollarded his tea trees—the tops were hacked off so that new and shorter branches would grow—making the leaves easier to pick and supposedly more profitable. So far that hasn’t turned out to be so, because these plants are susceptible to diseases and parasites and require large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. Third Brother received land immediately around our house and close to the village. He’s the owner of many tea trees—two to four hundred years old. Since the tea collection center won’t buy those leaves, Third Brother has done nothing to his groves. “Too much work,” he says. This tea costs us nothing, so that’s what we drink.