# Chapter 13: Sweet Pear Tea, Sleeping Guards, and the Women of Fenghuang
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 13 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook." This is a chapter of two worlds running side by side: one is a world of colonial offices, missing documents, furious military men, and a cup of tea that is far too sweet to be innocent. The other is a world of red knuckles, whispered laughter, ginger preserved in honey, and young women trying to build a life inside a teahouse that seems older than time itself. So let’s step into Xinjing, Manchukuo, in 1935, and watch how power falls asleep while the forgotten keep surviving.
The chapter begins with Fukui-jichō drowning in the machinery of empire. Construction sites are missing key planning documents. The government suspects opium is behind the negligence. Soldiers have been expelled from the army and sentenced to years of hard labor in prison camps. Then another memo lands: soldiers failed to defend a coal mine when Chinese outlaws set off explosives at its entrance. Laborers from Chōsen are brought in to dig out the debris, but coal shipments to Japan are still delayed for over a month. In disciplinary hearings, some soldiers claim they were paralyzed by grief for their fallen peers and could not act. The excuse sounds almost human, but military leadership is not interested in human weakness. They are furious.
What troubles Fukui-jichō even more is the pattern. He has already heard rumors of soldiers fleeing in fear during routine village inspections before official reports reached his desk. One low-ranking private was executed after testifying that he burned with shame over his treatment of Chinese people. These problems seem localized, but Fukui-jichō knows he must cross-check with outposts near the borders with Chōsen and the Soviet Union. Whether the fault is training in Japan or some process deficiency in Manchukuo, the annoyances keep him and his colleagues working late into the night. They are under immense pressure to prove that Manchukuo can generate revenue, but they cannot do that if the military keeps failing to secure its assets.
Then comes the tea.
His secretary brings in a tray stacked with letters and a cup of tea. Fukui-jichō notices the aroma immediately. It is not something she has served before. She explains it is a gift from the wife of a local businessman, a thank-you for their civil service in modernizing Manchukuo. Fukui-jichō has no doubt it is an offering meant to speed up approval of some contract. These Chinese are no strangers to bribes. Still, something sweet is exactly what he needs to boost his flagging constitution in the late hour. He dismisses the secretary and begins opening his letters, taking small sips. Then he catches himself setting down his papers just to pause and savor the tea’s sweet pear essence. It is remarkable. He decides he must ask the secretary for its name, though perhaps after a quick nap. The overtime is getting to him. He cannot be productive in this state.
Fukui-jichō slumps over on his desk.
And his secretary, too, has fallen at her post outside. The doors to their offices remain open for anyone to come in and access their statecraft secrets unseen. The chapter does not shout about danger. It simply leaves the image there: two bodies asleep, open doors, and a sweetness that may cost an empire more than it knows.
Then the story shifts, gently but sharply, to Young-Ja.
Since Baek Yong-Woo’s return, life at Fenghuang Teahouse has changed for her. She is still expected to work her fingers raw, but she no longer faces every task unaided. The other women toil alongside her. Many still keep their distance, but they do not shun her as they seemed instructed to do in the first months of her arrival. No pile of laundry or dishes seems quite so daunting when tackled in the company of others. Young-Ja is steadily regaining her vigor as she falls into the coordinated beats of the working women’s strong arms and no-nonsense efficiency.
She has produced hundreds of jars of cheong in her early months, but her cheong-making punishments have become rarer as she grows deft. Her most recent turn was not even due to her own error. She stepped up when she saw the petrified face of the newest kitchen girl who had shattered a particularly fine plate. Young-Ja can still feel the gust of wind tickling her nostrils when Feng-nüshi’s cane handle swung by her face and slammed into the wall in admonition. She trembled at the thought of losing her nose as she sat locked in the storage room, forced to peel and slice ginger to preserve in honey. Her foolish impulse to take the blame surprised her at first, but she does not resent extending a sympathy she had not received in kind from the others. If this is to be her home, she wishes to act in ways that remind her of the sister she had once been, the girl her parents had raised her to be.
Routine settles in, but no real comfort follows. A muted but ever-present anxiety makes Young-Ja fear that she could one day lose this nearly bearable life of servitude just as quickly as she lost her previous lives. In a desperate bid to hold on to this stabilized footing, she keeps a vigilant eye on the women around her. If someone walks with a limp, Young-Ja runs to help carry her load. If someone cuts herself on a knife while washing dishes, Young-Ja takes over the scrubbing without a word while the wound is dressed. She strives to ensure “burden” is never uttered in the same breath as her name and carries out her duties with unimpeachable excellence. This is partly to ward off Feng-nüshi’s often punitive scrutiny. But it is also partly an urge to appease the women around her, to be accepted into the smiling, knowing glances they reserve for one another over Young-Ja’s head.
Still, Young-Ja manages to find three sources of warmth in this modest life.
The first is Baek Yong-Woo. He drops by the teahouse periodically, seeking her out with a smile and his faint smell of pine needles. On such days, Feng-nüshi allows Young-Ja breaks to greet her visitor. She gets to nibble on whatever new confection Yong-Woo brings from his travels and speak to someone who had known her in Joseon. She cannot bear the thought of ever disappointing Yong-Woo. This she fears even more than Feng-nüshi herself. Her heart aches each time he leaves. She often wonders where he goes, what he does, if she has just seen him for the last time. She does not want to give him a reason to avoid her, so she does exactly as she is told without complaint, bottling up all unpleasant feelings for release only when she is alone.
The second source of warmth is Chinese classes. Feng-nüshi requires all teahouse women to master the languages of their customers, even those who, like Young-Ja, never leave the kitchens during the day. Older teahouse staff fluent in a given language tutor their fellow workers every day before Fenghuang opens for business. Young-Ja looks forward to each morning. Not only is it sanctioned time away from the drudgery of work, but it also allows her to tap into a pleasure she has always found in learning. She soaks in these language lessons with as much eagerness as she once approached the lessons taught by her parents. Most teahouse staff focus on improving their Japanese, including the beautiful servers Young-Ja sometimes glimpses at the edges of the kitchen. There are only three others in her Chinese class. All are Mongolian women who came to Xinjing in search of opportunity. Young-Ja still cannot communicate much with them, but the small group shares an eagerness in working through the right tones and words. The general rhythm of local speech is pleasing to Young-Ja’s ear, and she is gratified by the increasing pliability of her tongue. With every lesson, the fog of incomprehension that has dogged her since her arrival begins to lift. She cannot help but claim a small pride at finally understanding what is happening around her in the kitchen.
The third and final source of warmth is Meiyu. The girl with the pigtail braids seems impervious to whatever fear Feng-nüshi has lodged into the other kitchen women about interacting with Young-Ja, and she babbles away in her choppy Korean. Meiyu keeps swapping her duties with others so that she can work with Young-Ja until people give up on assigning them separate tasks. They take their meals together, sleep next to each other in the dorms, and even develop the same red knuckles and blisters from laundry. Young-Ja finds it easy to lean into the ebullient swings of Meiyu’s chatter and rekindles her atrophied ability to laugh. When passing memories of her family threaten to knock her from the march of her daily labors, Young-Ja finds solace in imagining that her parents, her siblings, and even Seiko Obaa-san would be happy she had taken refuge in Meiyu’s vibrant nature.
Meiyu had also been brought to Fenghuang Teahouse by Baek Yong-Woo. She arrived only a few months before Young-Ja, when her father tried to sell her to a brothel to settle his gambling debts. Baek Yong-Woo—or Bailong, as he was known to the Chinese—purchased Meiyu’s contract for a few yuan and placed her to be trained in the teahouse instead. She has not seen her father since.
“What’s a brothel?” Young-Ja asks.
“It’s a place where men pay to put their thing between women’s legs,” Meiyu explains.
“Why would they do that?”
“Men like it,” Meiyu answers in a matter-of-fact tone.
Despite her best efforts, Young-Ja cannot make herself forget the dread of feeling Masaharu Ojiisan’s hardness against her back. She has no desire to behold a penis and scrunches her face at the thought. Meiyu claims never to want to see her father again. Her declaration has the practiced confidence of someone who has long since spent her tears. She confides in Young-Ja that her dream now is to grow into a beautiful woman and become Bailong’s wife. She imagines running away to Mongolia with him, where they could ride horses all day and never wash another dish. As silly as Young-Ja thinks this is, she envies Meiyu for having a dream at all. Other than the desire not to be thrown out of Fenghuang, Young-Ja does not know if she has any real aspiration toward which she can strive. The only thing she knows to yearn for is her family, and that is not something she can obtain through hard work.
The chapter closes by returning to Fenghuang Teahouse itself and its terrifying mistress. For all the changes in Young-Ja’s life, Feng-nüshi’s demeanor remains constant. The old woman asserts her stringent rule every day, inspiring a flinching but unconditional obedience with the bangs of her cane. It is said that Feng-nüshi can walk through walls, for her cane is heard in the wake of every broken dish or spilled cup of tea. The staff also suspects that the ceilings have eyes, for even an errant napkin cannot be concealed from their mistress for long. While few dare open their mouths unbidden within Feng-nüshi’s earshot, the women fold gossip into the margins of work, whispering wild stories about how their mistress came to run this establishment.
Feng-nüshi, given name unknown, came to Changchun from afar. Some claimed from the mountains in the west; others claimed from the sea in the south. Everyone knows she built Fenghuang Teahouse with her own wealth, but no one can recall when. The grizzled old cook likes to tell the youngest Fenghuang girls, “I started working the kitchen when I was around your age. If you think I’m an old crone, Feng-nüshi was just as gray the day I arrived as she is now. But while I’ve gone blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, she hasn’t changed one bit in the past several decades.” The girls chide the old cook for teasing them, but no one else can recall a time when Feng-nüshi was not fearsome, elderly, and rich. The tempestuous turns of the world do not seem to faze her steady enterprise even as other businesses crumble away. It does not matter who is emperor, what famines strike the region, what warlord threatens her supply chains. Fenghuang Teahouse always attracts gold.
And so the chapter leaves us with two kinds of power: one asleep at an open door, vulnerable because of a sweet pear tea, and another ancient, cane-wielding, impossible to surprise. One empire may be leaking secrets into the dark, while one teahouse continues to draw gold no matter who rules the world.
## Reader’s Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter is quieter than a battle scene, but it is tense in the best way. I loved how the story placed Fukui-jichō’s downfall beside Young-Ja’s small, stubborn survival. The poisoned or drugged tea sequence is chilling precisely because it happens so softly. No struggle, no shout—just a tired man savoring something sweet while his secrets lie exposed. Meanwhile, Young-Ja’s world is painful, but not hopeless. Meiyu’s blunt explanation of a brothel broke my heart and made me laugh at the same time. The way Young-Ja helps other women, even after being shown so little mercy, says everything about who she is. And Feng-nüshi remains one of those terrifying figures you cannot look away from.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
## Next Chapter Prediction
The drugged tea will almost certainly lead to a major security breach. Someone wanted Fukui-jichō and his secretary unconscious, and open doors do not stay open by accident. I predict stolen documents, a scandal, and perhaps a connection to the Chinese outlaws, resistance networks, or even foreign intelligence. Fukui-jichō may wake to find his career destroyed. At Fenghuang Teahouse, Young-Ja’s fragile peace will also be tested. Baek Yong-Woo’s secrets may begin to surface, Meiyu’s dream of running away with Bailong could put them both in danger, and Feng-nüshi’s mysterious past may finally step out of the shadows. The sweet tea may have been the first move in a much larger game.
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