A Single Swallow

by Ling Zhang

  Even so, I couldn’t stay. The world had fallen apart. Staying would only help them live in degradation for a little longer, just prolonging the process of dying. I didn’t want to watch them live like that. The best thing I could do was save them from the emergency they faced at that time. I would start my journey as soon as the tea was harvested.

  It rained relentlessly. It wasn’t a heavy rain, instead persistent and light, but endless. Even so, the tea leaves could not wait—tea left too long ages, rendering it worthless.

  Ah Yan and my mother covered themselves with coir raincoats and went out early. I drove a donkey loaded with bamboo baskets. Picking tea was women’s work, not suitable for men’s hands. Ah Yan’s mother didn’t go to the tea field, but stayed home to prepare food and tea for everyone. This was how we had always done things. When we reached the field, there were only a few women there, waiting. My mother counted and found that about half were missing.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  They looked at each other, but said nothing. When she asked again, one of the younger women stammered, “They want to know if they pick the tea this year, will they still . . . still be paid?”

  The tea pickers had been recruited from the villages while my father was still alive. Most came from our own village, but there were a few from other villages too. They all knew a big change had occurred in the Yao household.

  My mother raised her head and looked at the sky, sighing. She quietly said to Ah Yan, “There’s no telling whether those heartless women have gone to another household to look for work. Picking tea goes slow on rainy days, and there aren’t enough people now. Why don’t you go to a few houses and see how things stand?”

  After a moment’s thought, Ah Yan said, “No. If I look for them, they’ll look down on us.”

  Ah Yan unloaded the baskets from the donkey’s back. She scratched her finger on an exposed bamboo strip in her hurry, then put the finger in her mouth. I handed her my handkerchief and told her to wrap up her finger to stop the bleeding. She shook her head, but didn’t look at me. She couldn’t look at me. She was afraid she couldn’t hide the hurt in her eyes if she did. She’d lost a lot of weight over the previous few days, casting dark rings around her eyes. She’d had too much on her mind, and that prevented her from mourning her father properly. I worried she would tell my mother that I planned to leave. She knew that the only person in the world who could possibly prevent it was my widowed mother. But she didn’t say a word. She gave everyone a bamboo basket. She, like my mother, was unsure about things. But she also knew that everyone’s eyes were on her at this moment. They were measuring her to see how tough she was—or rather, how soft.

  “Whatever you do, don’t let them see you’re upset. If you’re soft today, you’ll forever be a child in their eyes,” I told her quietly.

  She raised her head and looked at everyone.

  “Sisters, aunties, though my family has gone through a hard time this year, you won’t be shortchanged in your wages. This year, you won’t be paid by the day, but by weight. For every twenty jin you pick, you’ll be paid three copper coins. I’ll inspect and weigh your baskets at the end of the day. I’m sure you already know Uncle Ah Quan’s rules. Let’s get to work. We have a lot to do.”

  You could almost hear the abacus beads clicking in everyone’s mind. If they worked hard, they could earn almost twenty percent more than in previous years. My mother was puzzled. She wanted to ask Ah Yan something, but Ah Yan had already hung her bamboo basket around my mother’s neck and was dragging her into the tea field. My mother turned back to look. Seeing even fewer workers now, she became panicked.

  Ah Yan said, “Don’t worry. They’re just going home to get more women to come work.”

  Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, they all returned with more people. The Yao family’s tea was reasonably priced, but it wasn’t a precious variety of tea, like those from a single bud and leaf. My father’s rule was to look for one bud with two leaves. Over the years, the Yaos’ plantation had several regular customers, and the business depended on maintaining its credibility. In the past, if any of the women were careless, mixing in three- or four-leafed buds or even stems, my father would discover it, and he would let that worker go. There were many tea fields in the region, so a tea picker could always find work, but working for the Yaos meant higher pay. And they not only provided enough lunch but also included egg drop soup boiled with lard. Everyone knew the rules, so they didn’t say much, but just started to work.

  From the time Ah Yan could walk, she was picking tea leaves. Others picked with one hand, but she could pick with both at the same time. She didn’t have to look when she picked a leaf. It was like there was another set of eyes in her fingertips. These eyes allowed her fingers to move through the branches like snakes, knowing where to go, where to stop, and where to pick as they slithered along. Between the nimble movements of her thumb and forefinger, buds and leaves seemed to just fall into her bamboo basket. When the eyes in Ah Yan’s fingers were busy, it didn’t mean the eyes on her face were idle. In the past, as she picked tea, she kept watch around her, seeing what colors the butterflies were wearing this season as they flitted about the forest or what kind of flower was in the hairpin of the She woman coming down from the mountain to wash clothes in the river. But this year, the eyes on her face didn’t work. The butterflies were wet, hiding in the branches where she could not see them, and though the wildflowers on the slopes were in bloom, they all seemed gray. To the eyes of a girl who’d lost her father, everything lost its color.

  The tea picked on this day was sure to be more than ever before. When she was distributing the baskets, Ah Yan had calculated that if she paid a daily wage, she couldn’t control the speed of the workers. Everyone’s fingers had a way of being lazy. Of course, they could still be lazy, but it would be taking copper from their own pockets. No matter what, a bamboo basket could only hold about twenty jin. By calculating wages according to yield, each day there would be an increase in wages, but five days’ work would be completed in four. The wet leaves would be heavier, so she would lose a bit today. She made a mental note to do an extra round of straining during weighing and calculations.

  Not long after the harvest had begun, the rain stopped. The clouds split into a series of tiles, which then broke into fish scales that were blown away in the breeze. Suddenly, the sky was clear and beads of water glistened on the tea trees. The Qingming sunlight, during the third lunar month, seemed to have the brightness of Duan Wu, in the fifth lunar month, as it shone on our bodies. One hour’s difference was like a new season. Ah Yan took off her raincoat and hat and reached to roll up her braid, then remembered that she had no braid, and her head was covered with a white mourning cloth.

  I sat in the shade under a tea tree—it wasn’t yet my turn to be busy. I would do the work after Ah Yan. On such a hot day, the moisture in the tea leaves would be especially dense, so they couldn’t be spread out for too long. Tea leaves left out for too long would turn red. They had to be spread, panned, and shaped almost at the same time. I worried it would take all night to do it.

  At midday, the women took the first batch of leaves to Ah Yan’s house and took a lunch break. Following along, I saw houses that had been bombed by the Japanese planes. Some had only half a wall left, some only a facade. Parts that had been touched by the fire had been burned black, while parts not caught by the flames were now pale and exposed like old bones. Most of these families had already moved away to stay with relatives. One family had nowhere to go, so they stayed inside the damaged walls. The mother had used broken bricks to build a makeshift stove, and several naked children sat around a blackened blanket that had been snatched from the flames, waiting for the sweet potatoes in the woman’s pot to finish cooking. Scabby stood near the woman, chatting idly. Seeing that the woman didn’t have time for him, he picked up a stick and began to rummage around the ruins to see what he could find.

  The women grew warm as the
y carried the baskets of leaves, taking off their head scarves and fanning themselves. When Scabby saw my mother, he stood up and greeted her. He said, “My dear aunt, I wasn’t lazy when I sang for you that day, was I? When I sang about Uncle Ah Quan, I gave it special attention. My throat was sore for days after.”

  He was asking for a reward. My mother’s eyes turned red, and she lifted a corner of her shirt to wipe them.

  One of the nearby tea pickers scolded him. “Scabby, don’t you have a heart? Do you know how painful such words are?”

  Scabby twisted his mouth and said, “I deserve death. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  He took a few steps back and looked askance at Ah Yan, who was standing behind my mother. “Aiyah!” he exclaimed. Then he said, “Ah Yan, did you cut your braid? All the girls in the city are wearing short hair now. It’s the new fashion.”

  A rosy blush came over Ah Yan’s face.

  One of the women teased, “Scabby, when have you ever been to the city? In your dreams?”

  Everyone laughed.

  Scabby stomped his foot and said, “Don’t look down on others. One day, I really will make it to the city. What do you want to bet?”

  My mother sighed and said, “Well, you’re young and energetic. The tea harvest is a busy time. Every family could use some help. Why don’t you find work to do? Don’t just engage in idle chatter.”

  Scabby said cheekily, “You, my dear woman, have only my best interests in mind. You’re right.”

  A woman sighed and said, “Yang Bashu was such a good man. What evil did he commit in a previous life to make him raise such a heartless fellow?”

  Smelling the lard from some distance away, Ah Yan felt her stomach rumble. Every harvest, her mother made rice cooked with oil over a slow fire, saying that oily rice was the best food to guard against hunger. When we got home and unloaded the tea leaves, the women picked up their bowls and started to eat. There weren’t enough tables and chairs, so women had to squat in a black mass all over the floor. But Ah Yan had to inspect and weigh the baskets the women had brought in before eating. When she’d finished, she sat, but was too exhausted to even lift the bowl of rice. In truth, every harvest season was tiring, but this one was more exhausting than ever. In the past, she’d only had to put her body to work. This time, she also had to use her brain. The mental work had always been our fathers’ responsibility before.

  The tea from the Yao family’s plantation was cord-shaped. Once the leaves had gone through stir fixation, they couldn’t be aired too long, or they’d harden. When they hardened, it was hard to shape them. With so much tea collected all at once, shaping couldn’t be done by hand alone, so feet were used too. The rule among tea-growing families was that work done by hand could be done by women, but work done by foot had to be done by men, since women’s feet were considered unlucky. This rule had been in place for as long as there had been tea plantations, and no one dared break it. In the past, there had been four men in the Yao family who took turns stir fixing and trampling the leaves. Now all but one were dead, injured, or gone, so it was left to me to do it alone. All the experienced helpers had already been hired by other tea houses by now. There was no way to get additional help on such short notice, and I could only do as much as my own hands and feet could do. I would not be able to do more even if I had superhuman strength.

  After the tea picking was over for the day, Ah Yan’s mother opened the bellows to get the fire going beneath the wok for fixation. The injured fixation master lay in bandages on a rattan chair, weakly instructing us regarding the duration and degree of heating. Heat control for stir fixation was a great skill. Ah Yan’s mother vaguely knew what to do, but she was no master. That didn’t matter, though—on that day, everyone had to become a master. Ah Yan’s mother’s face flickered light and dark with the fire, the corners of her eyes hanging downward like two pieces of lead. Her hair was covered by a thick layer of ash. Ah Yan came to brush away the ash, but she couldn’t do anything. On closer inspection, she realized that the hair—her mother’s hair—had turned white overnight.

  “Ma, don’t worry. Let me manage the trampling. I know how to do it,” she said suddenly.

  The bellows in her mother’s hands stopped, and her eyes widened like two bronze bells.

  “Ah Yan, are you crazy? If anyone found out, would our family even be able to sell the tea?”

  “Ma, I’m not crazy. If you let me, at least we can still sell a few jin of tea. If not, all our tea this season will be ruined,” Ah Yan said.

  My mother rushed to close the door, saying, “Ah Yan, be quiet. Aren’t you afraid of the gods’ wrath?”

  Ah Yan snorted and said, “The worst disaster has already happened. What’s there to fear now?” She didn’t realize that her own destruction had just begun. There were still many disasters lined up along the road ahead, all waiting for her.

  I too was taken aback. I couldn’t have imagined that this girl from the countryside who had seen almost nothing of the world was far braver than all the affectedly sweet girls I’d met at school.

  “Rules are set by humans, not gods. When humans encounter obstacles, don’t we have to change our ways? Let Ah Yan give it a try,” I said.

  Everyone was silent.

  The fixation master shook his head and sighed. He said, “Take me home. If I don’t see anything, I can’t say anything. The world has reached this troubled state, so who gives a damn about rules? Do what you want. Just don’t ask me to be a part of it.”

  I took the fixation master home. When I got back, I fastened the bolt on the door and pulled the curtains tight. Then I lit a pine torch in the yard. Ah Yan sat in the glow of the flickering flames, washing her feet. Our mothers kept sighing. I was tired of hearing it, so I told them they could retire to their bedrooms. My mother left, but Ah Yan’s mother refused. She kept her head down, not looking at us. Squatting, she started to pick the stems mixed in with the tea leaves.

  I started to teach Ah Yan how to trample the leaves. “You can’t use too light a force, or the leaves won’t be shaped, but if you use too much force, they’ll be broken.”

  I’d always worked in the background with my father, just following his lead, almost mindlessly. I wasn’t sure how to teach Ah Yan. After a bit, she still couldn’t get the hang of it, and her legs began to cramp. Looking at the pile of leaves in front of me, I could only think about how there was more to come the next day. I was worried, but I couldn’t say anything, because I knew Ah Yan and her mother were both even more anxious than I was. Just then, there was a sudden bang. A flame burst from the torch, startling us. Ah Yan’s lips began to quiver.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer, but put her hand over her heart.

  After a moment, she got ahold of herself, and stammered, “Pa. I saw Pa.”

  Her mother turned around, her face pale.

  “Where?” she asked. “Where?”

  Ah Yan pointed at the shadow behind the torch. “He’s gone now,” she said.

  My hair stood on end.

  “You’re tired. You imagined it,” I said.

  “No, I saw Pa,” she said. “He said that you have to learn how to manipulate force in your toes. You turn with the left foot and roll with the right, moving the toe and only lifting the sole of the foot lightly. He scolded me for lifting my leg too high. He said I wasn’t pedaling a waterwheel, and if I kept on like that, I’d die of exhaustion, no matter how strong I was.”

  Ah Yan’s mother buried her head in her knees and wept. Ah Yan massaged the tendon on her leg, then continued to trample. Watching her, I could tell she really had gotten the hang of it. She was much faster after that. Seeing that it was now the middle of the night, I urged Ah Yan to go to bed, since she still had to pick tea the next morning.

  “In a few minutes. We’ll be done in just a few minutes,” she said. She was so tired, her speech was slurred.

  Ah Yan’s “few minutes” turned into an hour. When we’
d finished trampling the leaves into shape, we put them back into the pan to roast. By the time we finished that, it was already the wee hours of the morning. It felt as if our legs were no longer attached to our bodies. We tried to stand, but collapsed like piles of mud to the ground.

  Ah Yan’s mother went to the stove and scooped a pot of warm water. “You two wash your faces,” she said, “then go to bed. You can get up a bit later tomorrow.”

  Ah Yan didn’t reply. She’d already fallen asleep against my knee. Her short, uneven hair peeked out from beneath her head scarf, half covering her face, and a thin bit of saliva flowed from the corner of her mouth. I didn’t move, other than to take off my apron and cover her with it. A child. She was still a child. But there wasn’t room for children to grow in hard times. This troubled world was like a knife that didn’t even recognize its own family and cut childhood short. All the young people who went through it were turned into adults in one swift stroke.

  At that moment, the village’s most diligent rooster uttered its first crow.

  I’d been asleep for less than half an hour when I was startled awake by a knock at my door. It was loud, fierce, and impatient, as if announcing a death.

  I got up and ran to the door, where I found that everyone else had already awakened in fright, shuffling with their feet half out of their shoes, unkempt and still in bedclothes.

  The village security group head stood outside our door.

  “The draft officers have already been to Liupu Ridge, picking up able-bodied men according to the household registry. They’ll be here in less than half an hour,” he said breathlessly. He’d already run to several homes, and his face was covered with sweat.

  “Didn’t we agree it would be after the harvest?” my mother said, her voice trembling in panic.