Coach: Coaching the Grizzlies at the beginning, playing the bantam

The morning mist under the tea king tree on Nannuo Mountain had not yet dissipated, but Hannah's fingernails were already filled with Pu'er tea stains.

Lu Yong squatted beside a century-old tea tree, holding up a SLR to focus on her ponytail covered with spider webs: "Tea pickers have to smile, otherwise the boss will deduct their wages." Before he finished speaking, the strap of the backpack suddenly broke, and the green tea buds sprinkled all over his neck.

Yan Wen, the son of the tea factory owner, swung a silver toothpick and laughed: "This is how you should rub fresh leaves." He wrapped his rough palm around Hannah's hand and rubbed out the bitter juice on the bamboo plate. Lu Yong suddenly squeezed in between the two of them, and flipped half of the tea leaves on his knees: "We Bai people are more energetic in rubbing the dough!" Hannah held back her laughter and watched him perform the ancestral tea rubbing method until his palms were scalded by the copper pot and blisters appeared.

"You deserve it." As she chewed the mint leaves and applied them, Lu Yong was staring at the photo on the shrine of the Yanwen family - the champion of the first Tea King Festival in 1998, who looked % similar to Hannah in profile. When the tea cake pressing machine roared, he suddenly put their hands together and pressed them on the stone mill: "Press a concentric cake, it will be a family heirloom a hundred years later."

The rubber slippers at the Daluo border market were stained with foreign dust. When Hannah shook off the jade vendor who approached her for the third time, Lu Yong was bargaining with the woodcarving owner in Burmese. "When did you learn this?" She poked the elephant bone dagger hanging on his waist, and the blade reflected the copper-colored reflection of the border monument in the distance.

As they crossed the No. 135 boundary post, Lu Yong suddenly pulled her into the banana forest. The hot and humid air was mixed with the spicy scent of poppy shells. Hannah's sandals sank into the red mud, and her ankles were scratched by vines, leaving thin blood marks. "Follow me." He untied the red cloth strips wrapped around the rubber tree, tying one strip every twenty steps. When the chanting of the Burmese young monks penetrated the banana leaves, Hannah realized that they had circled back to the Guanyin Temple in China.

Incense ash fell on the hem of her chiffon skirt, and Lu Yong suddenly stuffed a hundred-yuan bill into the merit box: "Donate to the Bodhisattva to buy a GPS." Heavy rain was falling outside the temple, and the frame of the umbrella he borrowed was printed with "Menghai County Family Planning Association 2003 Advanced Award."

The Dai medical clinic in Mannongfeng Village was filled with the pungent aroma of medicine. Hannah stared at the moxibustion box smoking on her lower abdomen, and Lu Yong's laughter was stuck when he saw the doctor take out the bamboo cup. "The moisture in your body is heavier than the Lancang River." The old Dai doctor flicked the reflex zone on her soles, and suddenly clamped Lu Yong's wrist with tongs: "Young man, your liver fire is too strong."

Hannah laughed so hard that her ashes shook as she watched Lu Yong's back covered with purple and red round marks from cupping. "It looks like a seven-spotted ladybug." She rubbed his shoulders with medicinal wine and found that his cell phone album contained secretly taken cupping diagrams - one of which was obviously photoshopped with a Peppa Pig pattern. The Noni fruit trees outside the window rustled, and the old Dai doctor stuffed a black pill into each of their hands: "Take it with rice wine before going to bed, and you will dream about your past life's marriage."

That night, the glass ceiling of the Starlight Room was covered with dew. Hannah dissolved the pill into plum wine: "Do you dare to drink it?" Lu Yong tilted his head back and swallowed it, then suddenly pressed down on her wrist: "I must have been a strangler fig in my previous life." His kiss carried the astringency of Nannuo mountain tea until Hannah touched the wrapper of the hangover medicine he had hidden under his pillow.

On the night of the Lancang River lantern show, an anti-smuggling boat was conducting a surprise inspection. Hannah's lotus lantern had just been filled with wishes when it was startled by the searchlight and fell into a whirlpool.

Lu Yong dragged her to hide under the willow tree where the fishing boat was tied. The sirens were mixed with the clang of vendors closing their stalls. "What did you wish for?" He licked the wax oil that had rubbed off her palms, tasting the flavor of beeswax mixed with instant coffee.

Suddenly, a Kongming lantern rose up on the other side of the river. Hannah pointed at the silhouette on the lampshade and asked, "Does it look like the photo we took at the Big Buddha Temple?"

Lu Yong took out a lighter and lit her half-wet skirt. The flame twisted into a golden snake in the river breeze.

"It's brighter this way." He ran with the human-shaped torch until Hannah screamed and jumped into the shallows. The floating lotus lantern was stuck on the propeller of the anti-smuggling boat, and the word "peace" could be vaguely seen, but it was blurred by the water and turned into "uneasy".

When the wooden shuttle of the old Dai brocade workshop in Menghun Town got stuck on the 32nd gold thread, Hannah's thumb was bruised by the warp. Lu Yong sat cross-legged behind the loom, with Hannah's peeled lychee shells piled on his knees, and the sweet juice was dripping along the cloud pattern hand-painted by the Dai grandmother.

"Use force like you're pulling the hair of your ex." Eighty-year-old Yu'ermee gestured with a faded headscarf, and the twenty silver bracelets on her wrists clattered with her movements.

The moment Hannah pulled the weft hard, the loom suddenly collapsed. Lu Yong rushed over to hold the beam, and his jaw hit her shoulder blade. A silver bell rolled out from the tangled silk thread, which was lost in the Wild Elephant Valley that night.

Yu'ermie picked up the bell and sewed it into the edge of the brocade: "I used it to call back the soul of my old man Botao." When dusk climbed up the window lattice, peacock tail feathers were twisted on the half-meter square Dai brocade. Yu'ermie insisted that it looked like mandarin ducks embracing each other.

On the way back, the motorcycle rolled over the tea drying field. Hannah put her arms around Lu Yong's waist, and the undried isatis root dye on the fabric stained his T-shirt.

In the rearview mirror, Yu'erme was standing on the second floor of the workshop waving the broken brocade, like a waving banner of love.

The screws of the skywalk under the Parashorea chinensis tree in Bubang Village loosened during the heavy rain.

Hannah clutched the safety rope and backed away, the wind from 30 meters above filled her wide-leg pants. Lu Yong stamped his feet in front of her, and the aluminum alloy plate vibrated and popped out a rusty nut: "Jump over here, I'll count to three!"

The tropical rain forest was surging dark green waves under his feet, and the safety rope tied around his waist smelled like the sour smell of elephant feces. The moment Hannah jumped towards him, lightning struck the entire forest, illuminating Lu Yong's own hair in his pupils. When he caught her, his elbow hit a tree knot, and the Swiss Army Knife slipped from his trouser pocket and was caught by the vines, shaking like a silver fish in the green sea.

"The engraving habit will be punished." Hannah locked the safety buckle into his belt loop and found that the love lock of the couple in 2019 was hanging here. The lock core was stuffed with Zhang Chao's sticky boat ticket, from Jinghong Port to Guanlei Port, which was the Wednesday they missed last week.

During the Manfeilong Village Centennial Rice Noodle Banquet, when it came to the chicken stew with sour bamboo shoots, Hannah's silver earrings fell into the pottery jar. When Lu Yong was scooping soup, he fished out the earrings and took the opportunity to feed her a spoonful of boiling hot chicken soup. When the steam blurred the lens, the village chief's daughter suddenly pinned a wild ginger flower on Hannah's collar: "My sister has received the flowers and wants to toast to the brothers present."

Thirty-six cups of homemade wine were arranged in a lotus formation. Lu Yong kicked the stool away and tried to drink for her. Three men in horn hats held his arms. When Hannah raised her head to drink the seventh cup, she saw him secretly pouring the wine into the food bowl of the big yellow dog under the table. When she was drunk to her collarbone, she suddenly sang a toast song in Dai language. In the boiling room, only Lu Yong could hear that she sang "harvest" as "elopement".

After the banquet, they sneaked into the winemaking room. The moonlight in the wine vat looked like melted jade. Lu Yong's nose was stained with mash, and Hannah bit his lower lip and tasted the fishy sweetness of the Lancang River. The dog on guard outside the window suddenly barked, and the two fell into the grain pile, startling a group of moths with the scent of wine.

The blue water lilies in the tropical flower garden bloom at midnight. Hannah walks barefoot on the moss on the observation deck, holding a flashlight to look for the twin lotus flowers during the day. Lu Yong squats beside the Victoria amazonica leaf to measure its bearing capacity, and the memo on his phone notes "2.3 meters in diameter, can bear 42 kilograms", with a scribbled wedding dress sketch on the corner of the page.

When the night watchman's beam swept over, they hid in the shadow of the giant pitcher plant. Hannah's tie-dyed skirt got stuck on the edge of the insect trap, and the hot breath from Lu Yong startled the flying insects in the cage. When the fluorescent green insects took off, he suddenly took out the Delonix regia pods he had picked up from the botanical garden: "I heard that the seeds can predict marriage."

The crisp sound of the pods bursting startled the night watchman, and seventeen red seeds rolled all over the ground. Hannah grabbed three seeds and tried to run, but a water snake in the royal lotus pond snatched one away. Later, when drying her skirt in the toilet of the scenic spot, Lu Yong looked through the "Flora of Xishuangbanna" but couldn't find it - the seeds of the royal poinciana tree would not mature in the rainy season.

At 4 a.m., the chanting of sutras at Mangge Temple was wrapped in the scent of mangoes. Hannah secretly wore Lu Yong's shirt as a nightgown and stepped barefoot over the nirvana painting under the mural. When the night watch monk handed her the oil lamp, she found that the flying fairy in the mural was wearing a peacock silver hairpin bought from the Shwedagon Pagoda. Lu Yong traced her sleeping face on a copy of the Bayeux Sutra, and his fountain pen smudged the Dai annotations on the "Reincarnation" chapter. When the morning bell broke the dawn, Hannah's shirt button got stuck on the axis of the prayer wheel.

When Lu Yong was dismantling the items, he felt a love letter in the cracks. It was written by an educated youth from Shanghai in 1997, and the signature was actually his mother's name.

The prayer flags brushed against their clasped hands, and outside the temple, the aerial roots of five hundred banyan trees were quietly wrapping around the stone steps.

…………

The stalactites in the Mengyuan Wonderland Cave were dripping with millennium-old cold water. Hannah’s fingertips had just touched the calcification lines on the stone wall when Lu Yong pulled her back to the plank road: “Didn’t you see the Dai script prohibiting touching?”

When she looked up to argue, bat droppings from the cave ceiling just happened to fall into her open mouth. Lu Yong laughed so hard that the flashlight on his cell phone flickered, illuminating a half-bamboo raft floating in the deep dark river, with wilted wild ginger flowers on the raft's bow.

"The remains of the expedition team destroyed by the last flood." The guide used the tip of a sickle to pick up a rotten life jacket, and a 2008 Olympic commemorative coin slipped out of the inner pocket. Hannah bent down to pick it up, and the straps of her sports bra suddenly broke open, and the metal hook bounced on the stalagmite, sparking sparks. Lu Yong took off his quick-drying T-shirt and threw it to her. The words "Wild Elephant Valley Hiking Champion" on the back had long been soaked by sweat and turned into an abstract painting.

When passing through the stone curtain of "Yin Yang Boundary", the guide suddenly turned off the lights to explain the blind fish in the dark river. In the dark, Hannah's ankle was stuck by something. Lu Yong wiped it in the dark and found that it was calcium carbonate crystals dripping from stalactites. "Now it really has become a crystal shoe." The mosquito repellent left in his palm mixed with the cold air in the cave, condensing into light white lines on her skin, which looked very much like the Dai divination map seen in Manting Park.

The bark of the mulberry tree in the ancient paper mill in Mandiu Village steamed with a grassy smell. Hannah held up a bamboo screen to make paper, and for the sixth time she sifted the fibers to make them unevenly thick. Lu Yong sat cross-legged and fiddled with paper medicine, and the banana juice mixed with cactus mucus pulled out silver threads between his fingers. "Bai ethnic group tie-dyeing is much simpler than this." He secretly replaced Hannah's paper pulp and pressed his palm prints on the wet paper, but was mistaken for an intruder by the swarm of bees on the paper drying rack.

When they ran away, they knocked over the indigo dye vat, and Hannah's linen pants were instantly soaked in deep sea blue. The workshop owner took them and hid in the paper drying room, where the charcoal fire under the iron plate burned their calves. "It just saves the batik process." Lu Yong used a charred branch to draw a group of pictures on her trouser legs. The brushstrokes deliberately trembled at the knees, and the elephant trunk extended ambiguously to the burn scar on the inside of the thigh - it was the hot oil splashed from the barbecue stall the day before yesterday.

The drying yard was full of translucent papers, and Hannah suddenly found a sheet of paper that reflected Lu Yong's profile. Only when she got closer did she see that it was a portrait made of broken leaves in the paper pulp, and the mulberry fiber had tied a knot at his Adam's apple. When the wind blew, the pages in the yard fluttered like soul-calling flags, carrying their unspoken feelings and falling into the wastewater pool beside the drying yard.

The pineapple fields next to Gasa Airport were still being harvested at three in the morning. Hannah climbed over the wire fence and her slippers got stuck in the pineapple crowns. Lu Yong shone a flashlight on the crickets on the ground: "Didn't you say we were going to watch the plane sowing seeds?" Before he finished speaking, a pesticide sprayer flew low over them, and the two were soaked in the spray that smelled of aviation kerosene.

When they hid in the banana farmers' rest shed, Hannah's lace underwear was covered with purple pesticide stains. Lu Yong turned on the mineral water to rinse, but saw her using her mobile phone flashlight to shine at the night sky: "The seventh star of the Big Dipper has turned red!" He squinted and saw that it was clearly the reflection of the airport runway indicator light in the clouds.

At dawn, Hannah discovered that the copy of the palm leaf scripture in the back pocket of her jeans had been eroded by pesticides, leaving a hole. The missing part was exactly the outline of the sleeping face that Lu Yong had drawn in the Buddhist temple. In the distance, a Boeing 737 took off, shaking off the dew on the pineapple leaves, which merged into a miniature Lancang River between the lines of their clasped palms.

Under the century-old Bodhi tree at Jingzhen Octagonal Pavilion, an old Zanha Orthodox girl sang the narrative poem of Zhaoshutun. Hannah's silver bracelet got stuck in the gap of the elephant-foot drum, and Lu Yong was pushed to the center of the crowd by the girls wearing gold foil on their heads. "The prince must kneel on one knee to receive the peacock feather!" Old Zanha stuffed a handful of glutinous rice into his palm, and the sound of the gong in the distance made the leaves fall into Hannah's collar.

Just as Lu Yong was posing in a funny proposal pose, a furry object suddenly fell from the treetops - it was a macaque baby that had stolen the fruit offerings, holding half of a tourist's pearl necklace in its claws. Hannah reached out to take it, but the monkey nimbly jumped onto Lu Yong's shoulder and used its cold claws to hook open the lotus brooch in his chest pocket. Amid the laughter of the crowd, he chased the monkey and ran around the Bodhi tree three times, crushing the glutinous rice phoenix in the offering plate.

"Use this in exchange." Old Zanha took off the silver bracelet from Hannah's wrist and tapped out seven musical scales in the sunlight. The macaque loosened its claws and the brooch fell into a silver bowl filled with clear water, which scattered the reflection of the octagonal pavilion floating on the water. When Lu Yong retrieved the brooch, sweating all over, he found a small tooth mark on the back, which matched the ice cream spoon that Hannah had bitten at the Shwedagon Pagoda.

The fishing rafts on the Mandan Reservoir were over the warning mark. Hannah's sunscreen spread on the water, attracting silver-scaled fish to peck at her toes in the water. Lu Yong sat cross-legged mending the fishing net, and the nylon line left red marks on his fingertips, which looked very much like the cinnabar marks on the prayer wheels in the Buddhist temple that night. "Collecting the net should be like collecting your heart." The Dai father at the stern suddenly spoke, and the ash from his pipe fell into the mesh of the net to form a strange spell.

The rainstorm came faster than the fishing season, and the bamboo raft was tossed like a willow leaf in the dark green waves. Hannah grabbed Lu Yong's belt and vomited, and the sour smell attracted a half-meter-long giant fish. The moment the oar broke, Lu Yong picked up an aluminum lunch box and smashed it at the fish's head, and the reflection scared the egrets on the shore. When the searchlight of the rescue speedboat pierced the rain curtain, they were tying up the unconscious giant fish with their belts, and the wild ginger petals from the Manfeilong Village Banquet were stuck in the fish's gills.

Blood-red dragon claw flowers bloomed among the broken walls of the Dai King's Palace. Hannah squatted beside the well where Concubine Nanxiang died for love, copying the inscription on the tombstone. The moisture rising from the bottom of the well made human-shaped water stains on the rice paper. Lu Yong chewed a lemongrass stalk to measure the depth of the well. Suddenly, a string of bubbles floated up in the flashlight beam, holding up a piece of faded Dacron fabric - the same pattern and color as the educated youth's love letter.

"Want to try?" He pointed at the dark red scratches on the edge of the well, and suddenly hugged Hannah's waist tightly to imitate the falling posture. The rubbing paper was blown into the well mouth by the wind, hanging like a white butterfly three inches above the water surface. The croaking of rock frogs came from the bottom of the well, mixed with the echo of love words on an evening twenty years ago. When the administrator came with a loudspeaker, their intertwined little fingers were hooked on the well rope, and the knot was exactly the same as the one on the tree in the Wild Elephant Valley.

At the end of Gaozhuang Night Market, the wandering singer plucked the last string of his guitar.

When Hannah threw coins into the guitar case, Lu Yong was gesturing to the vendor selling volcanic stone grilled sausages: "I want them so burnt that you can carve words on them."

The hot grilled sausage poked at her lips, and the chili powder piled up like an equator at the base of her thumb.

The singer suddenly sang "Phoenix Bamboo in the Moonlight" in broken Chinese, and Lu Yong's engraving knife moved across the surface of the grilled sausage, carving out the crooked peacock on the Dai brocade of Menghun Town.

As the roar of the urban management motorcycles tore through the melody, Hannah was choked by the chili pepper and tears came to her eyes.

Lu Yong dragged her into the interior of the elephant sculpture. Three silver jewelry vendors who were trying to escape from their stalls were squeezed into the narrow space.

Amid the interweaving smell of sweat and lemongrass, he suddenly bit off the carved piece of sausage, and his red tongue tip rolled away the chili seeds on her eyelashes.

"Isn't it more exciting than the nuts of the Parashorea chinensis?" In the beam of light coming through the elephant's trunk, the sapphire glass of his watch reflected the plane taking off 800 meters away. (End of this chapter)