That night, A-ma and the sisters-in-law prepare a meal unimaginable when I was a child: pork four ways (crispy skin, barbecued ribs, braised belly, and meatballs in clear broth), a soy-sauce roasted goose, bitter melon with scrambled egg, rice, and a fruit plate. Instead of eating on the floor around the warmth and glow of an open fire in the main room, we sit on tiny chairs at a small table. This furniture—built little to save cost and for easy storage—nevertheless shows my family’s improved circumstances. During dinner, my relatives pepper me with questions about the world beyond Nannuo Mountain. My brothers ask about banks and loans, because they now have so many expenses. The sisters-in-law want to know about cosmetics, and I give them my lipstick to share. Their three daughters, who were all born within one month of each other, are now eight years old, attending Teacher Zhang’s class, and irrepressibly inquisitive:
“Do you think I can go to secondary school, Auntie?”
“How old should I be when I first steal love, Auntie?”
“When can I visit you in Kunming, Auntie?”
After dinner, we gather around a space heater with a single bare—and very dim—lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Electricity! When tea is poured, I gather the courage to question the changes in Spring Well, pointing out that after centuries of steady life, so much has been upended during the eight years I’ve been away. “And it all started with Mr. Huang—”
“Our lives changed rapidly after the Hong Konger came to us,” A-ba agrees, “but we haven’t seen him in years. You know how he is—always looking for something no one else has. He’s probably experimenting with leaves in a village on one of the other tea-growing mountains. So be it. With all the traders and collectors visiting us, we don’t need him anymore.”
“But what about our traditions?” I ask.
Faces stare back at me silently, but their message is clear: Who are you to ask this question with your city ways?
“Everyone changes,” A-ba says at last. “We still live in the forest, but the world has come to us. We continue to have the Swing Festival, build a new spirit gate each year, and consult with the ruma about when to plant our crops, pick leaves, and select propitious marriage dates, but we don’t have time for all the cleansing ceremonies, sacrifices, or worrying about Dog Days and Buffalo Days when we have so much work to do. Tea growing is very lucrative, you know.”
Truly, what is stranger—the matter-of-fact way he’s just dismissed our customs or the way he speaks about business? Business!
“We have to guard our product,” he continues. “Some especially greedy tea traders have sent hooligans onto our mountain to look for the most ancient trees and chop them down, because it’s easier to harvest their leaves that way—”
“They would chop down a tree?” I ask, shocked. “What about its soul?”
But no one seems interested in that.
“When the government instituted the Quality Safety Standard,” First Brother carries on, “we could no longer dry our leaves or artificially ferment them on the ground or on the floor of the house. All tea processing had to be done fifty meters away from animals, so we were forced to sell our livestock. The new rules turned out to be good for us, because now nothing can taint the flavor of our tea. We borrowed fifty thousand yuan to build the drying and processing building, where our old home once stood.”
“And we all have our own houses with indoor plumbing!” Third Brother chimes in.
Their optimism and free-spending ways have been buoyed by an early thirty-year extension to the Thirty Years No Change policy. Knowing he would “own” land until 2034, First Brother ripped out the tea bushes on his terraces, while Second Brother took out his pollarded trees so new tea trees could be planted from seeds. A-ba gave up on his vegetable plots—“We can buy what we need in Bamboo Forest Village”—so that he too could plant tea trees. For all three of them, the few wild tea trees on their respective properties have helped pay for these improvements, while Third Brother’s once worthless old tea trees are now the most valuable asset in the family . . .
“His trees, and your grove,” A-ba adds pointedly. “Of course, we can’t get your a-ma to let us take a look—”
Mercifully, First Brother cuts him off. “None of us could have predicted today’s situation. Buyers now visit from all over Asia to buy Pu’er to drink, sell, and collect. We have to host big banquets, hoping to make them happy. There’s a lot of competition. That’s why we need to borrow at better rates.”
“And the price of tea keeps going up and up and up!”
Everyone pesters me about my chances of getting into the tea college.
“If you do well,” First Brother exclaims exuberantly, “you can sell our family’s tea and make it famous!”
I have only one response to that: “I have to be accepted first.”
* * *
No one embodies the changes in Spring Well more than Ci-teh, whom I see the next night at a banquet my family hosts for a buyer from Japan. Her giggling ways seem to be gone, and any embroideries that would mark her as an Akha have been packed away as well. She’s gained weight—as has almost everyone in Spring Well—and her stomach and breasts push against the buttons of her flowered cotton blouse.
“Visit me tomorrow!” she urges. And I do. Her house is the nicest in the village, naturally. “The first with electricity,” Ci-teh boasts. She’s also the first person in Spring Well to own a cellphone. She insists we exchange numbers. “So we never again lose our connection.”
We were once very close, but our lives have taken different paths, which she reminds me of again and again. “You abandoned me. You left without a word. So hurtful you are.” While the things that happened to me remain a secret, the steps in her life are well known by all on Nannuo Mountain. After her parents died, Ci-teh consolidated the land awarded to her family in the Thirty Years No Change policy. In addition to her own groves, she also leases stands of tea trees from other families, which has earned her the title of the single largest grower on Nannuo. She further strengthened her status when she paid the ruma and nima to allow her brother, Ci-do, to return to Spring Well after a spiritual cleansing—of what degree or intensity no one tells me—plus nine days of feasting provided to every man, woman, and child in the village, all paid for by her. The things money can buy . . .