“We’ll return after lunch,” Mr. Chow announces, whether to warn Mr. Huang and his son or to reassure me, I’m not sure.
As soon as they’re out the door, Xian-rong turns to me. “I apologize for my father. He’s like the fisherman who let a big one slip off his line. For him, it’s always the one that got away. Every year since he made his first blends, he’s traveled to other mountains, trying to re-create one particular tea, which he made into only two cakes—”
“But I’ve been missing one special ingredient,” Mr. Huang cuts in. “The leaves from your grove.”
A chill runs down my spine. They knew who I was all along.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
Mr. Huang laughs. “I returned to your village last spring. Didn’t your family tell you? And then there’s my old friend, Tea Master Sun.”
My stomach lurches. He was back in Spring Well? And he knows my tea master? I thought Tea Master Sun had only tasted Mr. Huang’s tea.
“Don’t let my father bother you, Auntie,” Xian-rong says, again in English, this time using an honorific to address me. “He made the mistake of selling most of the tea cakes made on Nannuo Mountain to a Korean collector. Can you imagine what they’re worth now? I’ll tell you: one thousand three hundred U.S. per cake.”
Waaa!
“Forget the fisherman,” Xian-rong goes on. “My father is more like Ahab in search of his whale.”
All right, so that stumps me.
I want them out of my shop. Sweat dampens my armpits, and I tremble despite my best efforts. It’s not a big room, and the three of us are standing together: the man staring at me, the boy embarrassed by his father, and me, feeling reduced to an inconsequential, uneducated, tu, hill-tribe girl. But rather than push them out, I elect to appear friendly and helpful.
“Please sit, and we’ll have some tea,” I say, keeping my voice steady as I motion to the stools in front of my tea table.
We spend the next two hours drinking tea and “catching up,” as Mr. Huang puts it. He still lives in Hong Kong, but he has so many construction projects in Guangzhou that he now maintains an apartment here. He sent his son to Andover, a prep school in America, where he was one of many overseas students. “But the boy fell in love with a white girl,” Mr. Huang complains. “I had to bring him home. Now he’s at the American International School in Hong Kong.” (Doesn’t Mr. Huang realize that his son will have an equal chance of falling in love with a foreigner at the American school?) “He’s a senior. Seventeen years old! We come here on the hydrofoil every Friday afternoon and stay the weekend, so I can teach him the business he’ll inherit one day.”
The son in question looks about as interested in that prospect as in digging ditches.
“The unridden stallion gets lazy,” Xian-rong recites in Akha. His voice still sounds weary, but for the first time since he entered my shop, his eyes have lit up, sparkling with our secret communication. “A boy who does not have skills will have difficulties. This is true the world over, is it not, Auntie?”
I love hearing the Akha coming from his mouth, and it pleases me that he’s retained what he learned as a youngster. In the future, if they visit again—and knowing Mr. Huang’s persistent ways, I expect him to come back next Saturday and the one after that—Xian-rong and I will have a way to converse without his father understanding.
Mr. Huang ignores his son, shifting the conversation to memories of the tea mountains and what it was like for them when they first came to Spring Well Village. On the surface, it all sounds polite and harmless, but the whole situation is disconcerting. Mr. Huang pokes at me with our connections: Why didn’t I know he did business with my a-ba and brothers last spring, what did I think of Mr. Lü’s iconic Pu’er, and why do I suppose Tea Master Sun never told me that the two of them have known each other for years from time spent in the highest circles of tea connoisseurship?
“I opened one of the cakes we made from your special leaves,” he confides, so sure of my interest. “Do you care to hear what I found?”
I jut my chin, pretending indifference.
“The entire cake was flecked with yellow—”
The threads from the mother tree must have spread and grown. But what’s even more striking is that this is what A-ma told me was in my daughter’s tea cake.
“The aroma was . . .” His voice drifts off. “Sublime.”
I can’t help myself. “How did it taste?”
He laughs all the way from his belly. “I didn’t drink it!” This is what Tea Master Sun told me had been rumored during my interview, but I still find it incomprehensible until Mr. Huang continues. “I wrapped it up again. That’s what you’d do with gold, isn’t it?” He turns to his son, pinches his cheek affectionately, and then lets his hand come to a rest on the boy’s shoulder. I remember how A-ma always said Mr. Huang loved his boy, and it’s still so clear.
But Xian-rong is now of the wrong age for such fatherly tenderness. He waits a minute or so before edging away from his a-ba’s protective touch. In many ways, though, the boy, still unformed and underdeveloped, is more sophisticated than his father when it comes to tea. His ability to taste the brews I pour is unusually refined. At the end of the visit, when his father goes down the hall to the WC and Xian-rong asks if he might return—without his father—I listen warily. Once Mr. Huang reappears, strutting down the dim hall, reflexively checking his fly as he stares through the windows of my competitors’ shops, Xian-rong’s pleas turn desperate.
“I beg you, Auntie. Please let me visit. We’ll speak the language of the mountains and share our friendship through tea.”
He seems so lonely and frail that against my better judgment I agree.
* * *
The subway is packed, but it feels even more suffocating than usual as I make my way to the stop closest to Shamian Island. Walking alone to the café to meet Jin, I struggle to rein in my emotions. Mr. Huang. Why did he have to come to my shop? When the café comes into view and I see Jin sitting at our favorite table under the colored lights with a single cup of tea before him, it’s all I can do to keep from running to him for solace. Instead, I take a deep breath to fortify myself, mortar into place another brick to hide my secrets, and settle my face into what I hope is a pleasant expression. When he sees me, he rises, drops a few coins on the table, and leaves the café before I reach it.
“Li-yan,” he says, his voice serious, “will you come with me?”
My mind is in such turmoil that I automatically think he’s going to tell me he no longer wants to see me. We walk together side by side. I try to memorize the moment: the height of his shoulder next to mine, the occasional brush of his sweater against my jacket, the sound of our footsteps on the cobblestones, the way the trees rustle above our heads.