When she gets down to the Dragon Gate of Chinatown on Bush Street, she turns the corner and walks along Stockton all the way to Woh Hei Yuen, where the Tai Chi Quan group is just starting their routine. Her husband, Jinlong, came here every day up until he had his stroke. He often tried to get Vera to join him, but Vera did not see the point in tai chi. Too slow to do much good, surely. It’s about as effective as yoga, which is to say, not very. Each time after Jinlong finished with tai chi, Vera would check his pulse and he never once broke eighty. What is even the point? Still, she walks through Woh Hei Yuen and waves at the tai chi group and ignores the way her heart cracks a little when she sees that Jinlong isn’t among the slow-moving people. Silly woman, of course Jinlong isn’t here, he is safe in a silver urn in her living room, and that’s that.
First thing Vera does at the end of each walk is to press her thumb against the inside of her wrist and measure her heart rate. Satisfied that it’s at a respectable ninety-two beats per minute, Vera trudges inside, through her dark tea shop and up the stairs back to her living quarters. After an invigorating cold shower, Vera eats a well-balanced breakfast of congee, preserved duck eggs, and fermented tofu. Finally, she toddles back down and bustles about tidying up and preparing her shop.
As a teenager, Tilly delighted in pointing out the inaccuracies in the name Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse.
“First of all, nobody knows about it, so it’s really not ‘world-famous,’ ” he said with a roll of his eyes.
Vera tutted, but before she could answer, Jinlong said, “Not true, your mother was very well-known back in China for her teas. Many customer come from faraway places just to taste her tea.”
“Mm-hmm,” Tilly said, clearly unconvinced. He quickly moved on to his next attack. “And why is it called Vera Wang? You’re Vera Wong.”
“Ah,” Jinlong said with an admiring glance at Vera. “That’s because your mother is very smart lady, very savvy. Vera Wang is very famous person, even white people know her name. So your mother said we might as well name it after her.”
“That’s called misrepresentation, Baba,” Tilly snapped. “You guys could get sued!” Then he added, very spitefully, Vera thought, “If anyone knew about this teahouse, that is. But I guess since nobody knows of its existence, it doesn’t matter.”
Jinlong only laughed and patted Tilly on the back. “Oh, er zi, you are so full of knowledge about the law. Maybe you go to law school, eh?”
Things were so much easier back then, when Jinlong was around to act as a buffer between Vera and Tilly. After Jinlong’s death, the relationship between mother and son had sagged slowly but inevitably into almost nothing. Tilly did indeed go to law school. Tilly is now a junior associate at a fancy law firm near the Embarcadero, with offices so high up that you can see the car lights twinkling on the Bay Bridge at night. Not that Vera would know; it’s not like Tilly ever invites her to his office, but she likes to imagine what Tilly sees when he gazes out of his office window.
Stop thinking about Tilly, Vera scolds herself as she lifts the last chair from the table and sets it on the floor. She goes to the front door and flips the sign from CLOSED to OPEN, then she walks behind the counter, perches on her stool, and awaits her customers.
Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse is open for business.
TWO
VERA
Truth be told, Tilly wasn’t wrong when he pointed out that calling Vera’s teahouse “world-famous” was stretching the truth just a tad. It is true that back in Guangzhou, Vera ran a teahouse that enjoyed a steady stream of loyal customers as well as the occasional out-of-towner who had heard of her special concoctions. But here in San Francisco, California, she’d had to start from scratch. In its best years, Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse attracted more than its fair share of regulars despite its humble positioning, tucked between Lucky Laundry on one side and Winifred’s Patisserie on the other. But the customer base was mostly elderly immigrants, and over the years, the steady stream turned into a trickle, then a drip, and now, the only remaining customer Vera can rely on is Alex.
This morning, as on all other mornings, Vera heaves up her tome-sized ledger from a cabinet and sets it down with a soft thump on the counter. She puts on her reading glasses and peers down at her ledger, her eyebrows going up in an effort to help her read the tiny handwriting.
May 23rd—Prunella vulgaris, dried watermelon peel, goji berries
May 22nd—Luo han guo, premium bird’s nest, rock sugar
May 21st—Fragrant toasted barley, chrysanthemum, candied winter melon peel
May 20th—Osmanthus buds, oolong
A small smile touches the corners of Vera’s mouth as she reviews the list of teas she concocted for her best customer. He particularly enjoyed the fragrant toasted barley, and no wonder, as its smoky taste went beautifully with the vanilla scent of the chrysanthemum and the sweetness of the candied winter melon peel. What should she make today? Taking off her glasses, Vera gets up from her stool and reviews the floor-to-ceiling cabinet behind the counter.
Vera’s tea cabinet is a thing of wonder. It has exactly 188 little drawers, each one filled with some high-quality ingredient shipped from the dewy hills of China. Okay, so Tilly had once pointed out in his usual disagreeable way that many of those ingredients haven’t been used in years and are probably expired. Vera would be the first to admit that perhaps the Tianchi tea might be past its best years and should be thrown out along with at least twenty other ingredients that she hasn’t checked on for years, but she’ll get round to doing it when she does a huge spring clean of her magical drawers. It’s just that with the lack of customers, she hasn’t had to even think about these ingredients that nobody has asked for.
Anyway, on to the present matter. Vera taps her chin twice, thinking, then climbs up a little stepladder and opens a drawer. Jujubes, also known as dried red dates. They’re subtly sweet and would go well with—oh, what is she thinking? Jujubes are so heaty. Alex has too much yang, which means he is naturally a bit too heaty, so she mustn’t give him any jujubes, no matter how wonderful they taste. Vera climbs down the stepladder and turns now to her counter display, which has about two dozen of the more popular ingredients. Right, ah, yes, she’d bought a big pack of mung beans the other day from Mrs. Ong’s shop. That would do well. She scoops out the little emerald-colored beans and pours them onto her traditional Chinese weighing scales, narrowing her eyes like Shaina from Love Is Blind season two as she works out the perfect proportion for Alex and his poor wife, Lily. Once she has the right amount weighed, she transfers it into a small mesh bag. Then she drops in two pieces of rock sugar and a knot of pandan leaves and pulls the drawstring closed. There. All Alex has to do is plop that into some water and let it boil for fifteen minutes, and he and Lily can enjoy a nice, healthy beverage that has cooling properties.