I even have a fermenting factory in Menghai. The main room is as large as an American football field. Piles of tea—each twelve by thirty feet and a foot deep—cover the entire floor, each weighing five tons and each at a different stage of fermentation. The whole complex is surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. I receive many requests for tours from international connoisseurs, dealers, and scientists. I turn them all away, saying, “If you want to learn about our ancient tea trees, come to Nannuo Mountain.” Every tea I make is artisanal: no pesticides, no mechanization. All that can carry on without my presence—except for tea-picking season, when Paul and I return to the mountains to supervise picking, processing, and fermenting—because I have the help and trust of my family.
My three nieces who were all born in the same year are now nineteen years old. The government has a message for them: “Your duty to the nation is to have a child of high quality,” but not one of them has married. They dismiss those busybodies who tell them that soon they’ll be as yellowed pearls—too old to be fully loved. They still have eight years before they’re officially labeled shengnu—leftover women—so they laugh at the television shows that show women desperately trying to get a man at any cost: The Price of Being a Shengnu, Go, Go, Shengnu, and Even Shengnu Get Crazy. They tease each other about the “twelve products to help shengnu forget about loneliness,” and give those items as birthday gifts to keep the joke going: a garlic peeler, rainbow-colored linens, and single-serving teapots.
First Sister-in-law’s daughter works for me in my shop in the Fangcun Tea Market. Second Sister-in-law’s daughter has remained in the village but travels all through the mountains on her motorcycle to make sure the farmers who sell to us are picking the very best leaves. Third Sister-in-law’s daughter lives in the San Gabriel Valley and handles my Internet sales. When and if my nieces decide they want to go-work-eat with a husband, they’ll have plenty of men to choose from, for there are 30 million more young males seeking mates in China than there are prospective brides. But how to convince them? “I do what I want to do,” First Sister-in-law’s daughter told me the last time I saw her. “I go where I want to go.” Be that as it may, I know for a fact that my mother-in-law now sits on her bench in Martyrs’ Memorial Gardens when she’s in Guangzhou or wanders San Gabriel Square—what we sometimes laughingly call the Great Mall of China—when she’s visiting us to look for eligible (wealthy and handsome) husbands for my nieces. Let them try to get out of that!
Ci-teh and I still avoid each other, but I hear a lot about her, as I’m sure she hears about me. She converted much of the land she subleased to coffee, as she vowed she would seven years ago. Yunnan has even become a tourist attraction for Han majority coffee enthusiasts, and it’s said that by the end of the year more than a million people in our province will be working in the coffee industry, since we provide over 95 percent of China’s coffee production. As an added benefit, growing coffee has become a way for our government and those of our neighbors—like Laos—to replace opium poppy crops. Ci-teh sells Yunnan coffee to Starbucks for use in its Asian outlets and helped Nestlé found a coffee institute in Pu’er City, while I acted as the go-between who assisted the town of Libourne in France, home of the Pomerol and Saint-Emilion vineyards, in signing a marketing and trade agreement with Pu’er City to cross-promote their wine and our tea because both share polyphenols, which are reported to be so good for health.
I pull into the garage and find a note from Jin saying that he won’t be home until late afternoon. Sitting at the kitchen counter, I open my laptop and scan through my e-mails, looking for one in particular. During my last trip from the airport in Jinghong to Menghai, I saw among the many billboards that now line the roadway one that had been purchased by an individual family. It showed an infant’s face blown up so big it was blurry. The type, however, was completely clear:
I was found outside the post office in Jinghong on May 21, 1994. My American name is Bethany Price. If you are my mother, please contact me.
The birth date and clothes were wrong, and even as a newborn, she looked more Dai than Akha to me, but seeing the billboard inspired me to send an e-mail to the girl. Could this Bethany have passed through the Social Welfare Institute in Kunming as my daughter did? Might her parents have met the parents of my Yan-yeh? Does Bethany know other girls adopted from Xishuangbanna prefecture?
Today, again, no return message.
Nor do I have any inquiries from the messages I’ve left on various websites. A year ago, after finding posts written by adopted girls looking for their mothers, or, more infrequently, mothers like me, looking for their daughters, I wrote my own:
Yunnan birth mother searching for daughter left at Menghai Social Welfare Institute. She was given to new parents by Kunming Social Welfare Institute. My baby was born on November 24, 1995, in the Western calendar. I named her Yan-yeh. I put her in a box. She was found by street cleaners. I hid to make sure they delivered her to safety. I now have a seven-year-old son. I would love to find my missing daughter. You have a brother and a mother who love you very much.
I didn’t mention the tea cake. In a murder investigation, as I’ve learned from American television shows, you always hold out the most important evidence. Would someone take the bait? But the few e-mails I’ve received ask the same basic question: Are you my mother? I respond with: Were you found with anything in your swaddling?
We’re trying to grasp fish with our bare hands.
I’ve never forgotten what A-ma said to me before I left Nannuo Mountain to give birth to my son. She wanted me to have him in America in hopes that my daughter might intuit she had a brother. I know Yan-yeh is out there. I have the photo and footprint from the Social Welfare Institute. (I’ll forever be grateful that she was cared for by the good matrons there and not a baby who was stolen or confiscated from her parents. Even the Chinese government estimates that between 30,000 and 60,000 children “go missing” each year to be trafficked illegally and exported like so many factory products. I ache for the mothers in China and the mothers here who must always wonder . . . ) Nevertheless, shouldn’t there be more clues and traces of Yan-yeh? So I search the Internet when Jin is in meetings, at night when I can’t sleep, and on Wednesday afternoons during Paul’s soccer practice.
I’ve stumbled across several sites advertising “orphanage reunion tours,” where girls (and their families) can see the cribs they slept in and meet the people who once watched over them. Could my daughter have gone to China with Our Chinese Daughters’ Foundation or Roots & Shoots Heritage Tours? Even if she did, would a tour operator take a girl and her family to a town as small as Menghai? Wouldn’t they show people like my Yan-yeh the larger Social Welfare Institute in Kunming, where she was picked up? Mightn’t she (or her parents) want to look at her file? But all the files were destroyed in the fire. Still, once a week, I go to the tour websites and examine the photos of white parents or single white mothers traveling with their Chinese daughters. The girls seem totally American with their flip-flops, shorts, and Hello Kitty T-shirts. Would Yan-yeh look like me? Like San-pa? Like my a-ma? Or his a-ma? But I haven’t seen a girl with Akha characteristics or who resembles anyone of our blood.
On a Facebook page sponsored by an international group of Chinese adoptees, I saw photos of babies from the day they were found and the day they were delivered to their new parents. One infant was dressed in a dirty snowsuit with a purple knit hat. Her cheeks were chaffed with heat rash. Another—sound asleep—wore a blouse with a flouncy polka-dot collar. Yet another, perhaps eighteen months old, wore a diaper that hung down to her striped kneesocks, which, in turn, ended in red plastic sandals. I found photos of babies in ethnic minority caps, hats, and scarves, but none of them showed Akha handiwork. My heart filled with hope the day I discovered a website looking for DNA material to match mothers with daughters. I sent in mine but never got a response.
I’ve gone to the Los Angeles chapter of Families with Children from China to
teach a cultural class about tea. (The group, I’ve been told, is a shadow of its former self. The people who now run things—all volunteers—are new. Plus, apparently, they never kept great records to begin with.) I’ve also developed tea-tasting programs at the Huntington Library for adults and kids. And on the weekends, I visit garage sales to look for old tea cakes, because what if my daughter—or her parents—decided the tea cake I left with her wasn’t worth keeping?
None of these activities has yet brought me luck.
I check my watch. It’s 10:00, and business e-mail is arriving, but I decide to scan the human interest articles first—in China and America, in newspapers, and on a few blogs I’ve come to admire and trust—to look for pieces about adopted Chinese girls who’ve found their mothers or parents or siblings. These stories keep me optimistic and make me wonder if my daughter is searching for me too.
If my daughter were ever to post an inquiry, where would she do it?
If my daughter were ever to buy a billboard, where would it be?
If my daughter were ever to try to learn about her tea cake, where would she take it?
It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy. I see it from the opposite direction. I’m happy, but there’s an empty space inside me that will never stop suffering from the loss of Yan-yeh. After all these years, it’s a companion rather like the friend-living-with-child. It’s nourished me and forced me to breathe when it would have been so easy to give up. Suffering has brought clarity into my life. Maybe the things that have happened to me are punishment for what I did in a previous life, maybe they were fate or destiny, and maybe they’re all just part of a natural cycle—like the short but spectacular lives of cherry blossoms in spring or leaves falling away in autumn.
I will never give up searching for Yan-yeh, but now, at 11:00, I force myself to move on to business.
E-mail between Haley Davis and Professor Annabeth Ho, re: Stanford Senior Thesis. First week of October 2015
Professor Ho,
I so appreciate your agreeing to be my adviser next year for my senior thesis. When I visited during your office hours last week, you asked to see a draft of my research proposal. This is the first pass:
The Impact of Climate Change on Sensory and Medicinal Attributes of Tea (Camellia sinensis) Grown from Tea Trees in the Tropical Regions of China
This thesis will have two areas of study: 1. How are compounds that create the taste, smell, and look of tea—a combination of amino acids, catechins, theobromine, methylxanthine, and free sugars—being influenced by global climate change? 2. High levels of biodiversity in the tropical forest lead to a rich food chain, which helps to minimize insect and parasite infestations. Specifically, the compounds previously listed make up defensive agents against pathogens, predators, and oxidative stress that have arisen among tea trees growing in their biodiverse—and increasingly threatened—habitat. In numerous studies, these natural protections have also been shown to be beneficial to Homo sapiens. Of these, catechins—a group of polyphenolic flavan-3-ol monomers and their gallate derivatives—are considered to be the primary health-giving compounds in tea. The most important of these is epigallocatechin-3-gallate, which is the most bioactive and which has entered the domain of “well-being culture.” With the intensified monsoons brought about by climate change, many of these antioxidant compounds are decreasing by as much as 50 percent, while other compounds are increasing. Therefore, how are tea trees’ natural protections being affected by global climate change and what will the consequences be on the health benefits of the tea leaf? Materials and methods include farmer surveys, interviews, and the gathering and testing of tea leaves.
Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear your thoughts at your earliest convenience,
Haley Davis
* * *
Haley,
This looks very ambitious, but what else can I expect from a student with two majors, Biology and Earth Sciences? You must be aiming not just to graduate with honors, as all those who choose to write a senior thesis will achieve, or even to graduate “with distinction” (assuming your GPA is high enough, which I’m sure it will be), but with the Firestone Award for social and natural science.
Before we get into the meat of your thesis, I have a few practical questions:
1. I’d like to know your personal interest in such an arcane subject. Don’t get me wrong. The winners of the Firestone Award seem to specialize in arcana, which the committee appreciates. It will behoove you to flesh out that aspect.
2. I assume you plan to go to Yunnan. Are you applying for a fellowship or some other type of funding? Would you consider an internship with a larger academic study already under way? My concern is how you’ll get to these farms, where you’ll stay, and how you’ll communicate. On behalf of the university, I can say we don’t want you to do anything that will put you in danger or outside your comfort zone.
3. This looks like a multiyear study. Do you plan to carry on with your research in graduate school?
4. Regarding the “health benefits” to which you refer: We know that green tea has high levels of polyphenols. These antioxidants fight free radicals, which many scientists believe contribute to the aging process, including damage to DNA, some types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. But apart from the University of Maryland Medical Center’s study, can you point to proven health claims? I’m not interested in marketing, anecdotal evidence, or supposition about tea that isn’t backed by fact or reason. I want to see legitimate documentation on this before you move forward.
5. I presume one reason you approached me to be your adviser is that I’m Chinese. As such, I hope you’ll consider adding a third area to your thesis even though it’s not within the “hard science” realm: How do we reconcile the poetry and philosophy of tea with the practicalities of growing and processing the product? I grew up hearing ancient beliefs about tea from my immigrant parents: Every hour spent drinking tea is a distillation of all the tea hours that have ever been spent; and Truly you can find the universal through the particular of tea. Personally, I see a real disconnect between a sentiment like Tea is the cup of humanity and the hardscrabble life of tea farmers. If you can incorporate these humanistic aspects in your materials and methods, I believe the awards committee will take notice, and your thesis will rise above others.
I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you.
Professor Annabeth Ho
* * *
Professor Ho,
Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. I realize now I should have given you a little more background. Let me try to do that, as well as answer your queries.
Last summer, I went to the World Tea Expo, which happened to be in Southern California, where I’m from. I sampled teas from Thailand, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Uganda—seemingly everywhere. A whole section of the expo was devoted to the teas of Yunnan, especially to Pu’er, which is extremely rare in China, and even rarer in the world. People at the expo were gambling that tea will be the next big thing here in the United States, where sales of loose, bagged, and ready-to-drink teas have steadily risen over the last two decades. This year, the estimated wholesale value of the U.S. tea industry is $11.5 billion. The clincher, it seems to me, is Starbucks’s purchase of Teavana in 2012. It also doesn’t take a genius to notice the similarities between tea and wine connoisseurs; they both talk about vintage, harvest seasons, varietals, geographic source, the effects of light, soil, weather, and, of course, age on taste. Even the language to describe flavor is similar: “acidic, followed by notes of orchid and plum.”
At the expo, I also met a whole set of people I never expected to see: scientists and doctors. Yunnan is known as a Global Biodiversity Hotspot. The province is said to have “as much flowering plant diversity as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere combined,” which gives it a lushness found nowhere else in the world. The province makes up only 4 percent of China’s landmass, yet it’
s home to more than half its mammal and bird species as well as twenty-five of China’s fifty-five ethnic minorities. All this got me thinking about global warming and its effect on the quality and intensity of light, which, in turn, will change the final product—whether wine or tea. Plants with medicinal qualities are coming out of the Amazon rainforest. Couldn’t something come out of the tropical forests of Yunnan? And just as in the Amazon, the tea mountains of Yunnan are being encroached on by development and pollution, particularly air pollution, which I know is of particular interest to you.
Lastly, at the fair I met a man named Sean Wong. I showed him a tea cake that I have. He encouraged me to take it—what he called “an ideal specimen”—to the place of origin, as so many connoisseurs and collectors do. This was not the first time someone has suggested this to me. He said I could travel with him. I’m jumping at the opportunity.
I hope that’s a help,
Haley
* * *
Haley,
I need you to dig deeper and answer my very specific questions. I’m here to challenge you. I hope you understand that. And please don’t take this the wrong way, but I also need to inquire about your relationship with the person who invited you to travel with him. What do you know about him? Is he actually going to help you with your research? What is his motive to take a young woman to such a remote area? I’m sure you understand where I’m going with this, and it makes me very uncomfortable even to bring it up.