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 men—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.