A morning at Old Lin's pickle courtyard in Meijiawu

The first sound in the courtyard was not the kettle, which had not yet been lit, but the dry shuffle of mustard leaves being moved from one bamboo tray to another by a woman whose name we did not yet know. It was twenty past six. Meijiawu was still inside its damp tea-country fog, the kind that holds at chest height and does not lift until the sun has climbed past the ridge, and the sound of the leaves was the only thing in the lane besides a pair of crows working over something behind the shed. We had been told to arrive before Old Lin opened the first crock. We were five minutes late. He had already opened it.

The crock sat against the north wall of the courtyard, half-sunk into a packed-earth platform that had been built around it years before any of us were born. It was a brown salt-glazed jar about the height of a kitchen stool, weighted with a flat river stone, lidded with a square of unbleached cotton that had gone the colour of weak tea from fifteen winters of use. Old Lin lifted the stone with both hands, set it down without ceremony, and folded back the cloth. The smell came up at us at once. It was sharp and slightly sweet, vegetal in the way a cellar is vegetal, with a metallic undertone that sat somewhere between iron and old wine. He did not bend to it. He had stopped bending to it years ago.

Lin is sixty-seven. He has lived in Meijiawu his whole life, in a stone-and-tile house two lanes back from the tea plots his cousins still pick in late March. He is known in the village for tea, because everyone here is, but the work that organises his year is not tea. It is the row of seven crocks behind his shed, in which the winter mustard greens from the household plots are layered with sea salt at the end of November and left to find their own way through the cold months. The mei cai, when it is ready, is what every family in the lane eats with braised pork through the spring and into early summer. The crocks belong to him because his mother kept them, and to her because her mother-in-law kept them, and so on back to a beginning none of them has bothered to specify.

“It was the chewing of someone who had eaten thousands of these tastings and was, this morning, listening for one specific note, the way a tuner listens for a beat.”

The spoon hangs from a nail above the platform. It is wooden, hand-cut from a single piece of jujube, the bowl no larger than a child's palm and the handle worn smooth where his thumb sits. He took it down without looking. The wood has darkened to the colour of espresso and the grain has filled in with the residue of fifteen winters of brine, so that the spoon is no longer really a tool we share with him. It is part of the ferment. He explained this matter-of-factly, the way a baker might mention that the wooden bench has its own culture. The spoon goes into the crock and comes out, and goes in again, and over the years it has carried whatever lives in the brine from one batch to the next. He has tried, twice, to replace it. Both times the crock soured oddly and he went back to the old one.

He lowered the spoon into the brine, brought up a small twist of leaf, and ate it. He chewed for a long time. We watched him chew. The chewing was not theatrical. It was the chewing of someone who had eaten thousands of these tastings and was, this morning, listening for one specific note, the way a tuner listens for a beat. After perhaps thirty seconds he nodded once, dipped the spoon again, and held it out to us.

The leaf was soft, not slimy, with a faint snap still at the stem. It tasted of salt first, then of something like sour apple, then, several seconds later, of a deeper register we had no real name for, somewhere between mushroom and aged paper. It was not pleasant in the way a snack is pleasant. It was complete in the way a finished thing is complete. The brine on our tongues left a long, slightly cool aftertaste that sat at the back of the soft palate and did not leave for several minutes. This, Lin said, is the year. He used the phrase without explanation. Every November he salts the leaves and seals the crocks and waits, and somewhere in late spring, on a morning he cannot predict in advance, the mei cai arrives at the taste that is its own. He has been wrong about the date by as much as twelve days. This year, it was the nineteenth of May, which he marked on a sheet of brown paper taped to the inside of the shed door, beneath the dates of every previous year, going back to 1994.

We sat with him through the rest of the morning while he transferred two of the crocks into smaller earthenware jars for the families that had ordered them. The work was unhurried. He weighed nothing. He used the spoon to lift the leaves and a pair of bamboo chopsticks to press them down into the smaller jars, and he tasted from each one twice before sealing it. While he worked, his wife came out with a thermos of Longjing from the spring picking, poured into small glass cups so the leaves stood upright like reeds, and we drank it standing. Tea was the visible year here, the one outsiders came to photograph. The mei cai was the year underneath, the one that ate the surplus leaves the household could not sell, the one that fed the family through the months when the tea income had not yet arrived. The two rhythms ran on the same plot and the same hands and almost no one outside the village knew the second one was there.

By half past nine the fog had begun to lift and the lane outside the gate was waking. A scooter passed. A neighbour called something over the wall about a delivery. Lin wiped the spoon on a clean cloth, ran his thumb along the grain once, and hung it back on its nail. He set the river stone over the cotton and pressed it down with both hands until it sat flat. The crock that had been opened that morning was now a crock that was being eaten. The next one along, he said, was still asleep. He would open it in eight days, perhaps ten. He could not yet say. He walked us to the gate and stood there with his hands in the pockets of his work jacket, and the spoon, on its nail behind him, was already drying in the air of the courtyard, holding whatever it was holding for next year.