Our fourth day is spent entirely in the car, as we’re driven down from Yiwu to Menghai and then up Nannuo Mountain, which he tells me has the largest number of ancient tea tree groves. We check in to a rustic inn. The main building has a kitchen, tea shop, and small tea-processing area on the ground floor. The family lives upstairs. Guests stay in bungalows built in the traditional style—bamboo and thatch on stilts—that edge a canyon. Mine is outfitted with a bed, period. There’s no electricity, and the toilet and shower are in a separate building to be shared by everyone here. Sean and I eat outside by candlelight. The proprietor’s mother makes a simple meal from ingredients grown on the property—a soup flavored with fresh mint, string beans sautéed with chili, greens with slivered chilies, and scrambled egg and tomato—which we eat seated at the ubiquitous tiny chairs and table. After dinner, fiery homemade liquor is brought out, and the proprietor performs Dai drinking songs for the handful of guests. Last, he asks us to join in a call-and-response Akha love song that was recently made into a hit on a talent show on Chinese television.
Sean translates as the other male guests sing to the women: “The flowers bloom at their peaks, waiting for the butterflies to come—”
Then the women sing to the men: “The honeycombs wait for the bees to make honey—”
Then back to the men: “A beautiful flower calls to her love—”
We’re both able to join the chorus. “Alloo sae, ah-ee-ah-ee-o, ah-ee-ah-ee-o.”
After the festivities, we’re handed oil lamps. Sean guides me to my bungalow. He leans in, barely brushing his lips against mine. He pulls back to gauge my reaction. The air feels so heavy between us I can barely breathe. He puts a hand on the small of my back and pulls me to him. Our kiss is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. In another minute, we’re in my little room. The oil lamps flicker. He slowly undresses me. “You’re beautiful,” he says. Nothing in my life has prepared me for what I feel when we make love.
Afterward, I lie in his arms. Something extraordinary is happening, but is it too fast? He edges up onto an elbow so he can stare into my eyes. I don’t know how, but I feel as though he knows me completely, and somehow I know him. And then he says the most remarkable thing.
“I’ve loved you from the moment you walked into my booth at the tea expo. I’ve brought you to the place I love most in the world. Wouldn’t it be incredible if we could spend our lives traveling the world, drinking tea, and reading the great poets?”
The realities of our lives escape me for a moment. We make love again, and it’s even more exquisite. When he falls asleep, I let my breathing follow his.
* * *
The next morning begins as it usually does—with Sean on WeChat, contacting the people we’re going to see—but with every second heightened by blissful joy. Then we get in the car and set off. After an hour, we’re driven onto a narrow unpaved stretch you could barely call a road. We reach a gate watched by a couple of men. They recognize Sean immediately and wave us through, but we don’t go far before we reach another gate. It’s decorated like some of the others I’ve glimpsed off the side of the main road—with a man with a gigantic penis and a woman with bulging breasts.
“We need to walk the rest of the way,” Sean says.
The driver parks the car. Sean and I pass through the gate—he warns me not to touch the posts—and proceed along a path. The wind rustles through the trees, cicadas whine, birds trill. The moist tropical air feels warm and soothing on my skin. The first thing I see when we reach the village are some barefoot children washing dishes in a pig trough. In the end, though, it’s much like the other villages we’ve visited. Everyone is involved in tea processing. People are bringing in baskets of tea leaves and spreading them on raised platforms to wilt, killing the green in outdoor woks over wood fires, kneading, steaming, or doing the twist on the heavy round stones that will press the tea into cakes.
We reach a house where a group of women sit around flat baskets, sorting tea. One of them is quite old and wearing full ethnic minority clothing. A little boy, eight or nine, sits next to her.
“Xian-rong! Mom said you were coming!” The boy squeals in English without a trace of an accent as he runs to Sean and jumps into his arms.
The old woman rises. “Xian-rong.”
I look at Sean quizzically. “They know me by Huang Xian-rong, my Mandarin name,” he explains. “And this is Paul.”
“Jin-ba when I’m here with Grandma!” the boy says cheerily.
“He lives in Arcadia,” Sean goes on.
“Then we’re practically neighbors,” I say. What a trip.
The old woman, who’s introduced as So-sa, doesn’t speak English, but she seems happy to see Sean. She pulls us to another table under a bamboo and thatch pavilion, where one of her granddaughters, whose name I don’t catch, pours tea.
“I really want you to meet Tina,” Sean says to me, “because she might have some ideas about your tea cake. While we’re waiting for her to arrive, why don’t you show it to So-sa? You never know . . .”
When I pull it out of my bag and lay it on the table, the old woman gasps and then scurries away as though she’s seen a ghost. The boy from Arcadia laughs. “Grandma . . . She’s so superstitious . . .”
The woman lingers at the edge of the main house, peeking out at us, wiping her eyes, then disappearing again. Sean looks at me and shrugs. The granddaughter pours more tea, but the whole thing is weird.
“Is she crying? Maybe we should go,” I say, rising.
Before Sean can respond, the old woman sidles back to us and angrily addresses him.
“She thinks my father has sent us,” he translates, but he sounds as confused as I feel.
“Your father?”
“My father and this family have a long history together.”
She gestures up the mountain and rattles off a stream of sentences directed at me.
“She wants you to go with her,” he translates, obviously editing. “She says the two of you must go alone.”
“What does she want?” I ask nervously. It’s one thing to be in a remote village with Sean, but it’s quite another to go off with some crazy old bat.
“She says no men are allowed,” Sean answers, but his voice goes up at the end as if in question. “You’ll be fine.” His words are hardly reassuring.