Chapter One
The Vocabulary
In the city, Wei An had a hundred and forty words for what tea tasted like, and she was paid to use them.
Orchid, she would write, in the tasting room with the good north light. Cream, stone fruit, wet granite, the small bitterness that opens the throat, the finish that arrives a full minute late like a guest who knows the party is not real until they walk in. Buyers flew in from three continents to hear her do it. She was, the magazines said, the palate of her generation, and she kept in a drawer of her apartment, unopened, in a plain paper wrapper posted each June, four years of her family's own spring tea, because there were no words in her professional vocabulary for what that tea did to her, and a describer who cannot describe a thing learns to keep it in a drawer.
Then her uncle telephoned, on a Tuesday in winter, and used five words that ended her fluency altogether.
Ah Ma had a stroke.
The mountain took four hours by rail and bus and a last shared van, up through the betel palms, into the cypress, into the cloud, which was not weather on Yunjian but architecture, the resident element, the thing the tea grew inside of. She had forgotten the smell of it, and when it came through the van's window vents, wet stone and cold leaf and woodsmoke, her whole childhood stood up inside her without asking permission.
