The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane: A Novel

by Lisa See

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa See, “one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot” (The New York Times Book Review), a moving novel about tradition, tea farming, and the bonds between mothers and daughters.

In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations—until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen.

The stranger’s arrival marks the first entrance of the modern world in the lives of the Akha people. Slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock—conceived with a man her parents consider a poor choice—she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city.

As Li-yan comes into herself, leaving her insular village for an education, a business, and city life, her daughter, Haley, is raised in California by loving adoptive parents. Despite her privileged childhood, Haley wonders about her origins. Across the ocean Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu’er, the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for centuries.

A powerful story about circumstances, culture, and distance, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond of family.

• ISBN10: 1501154842
• ISBN13: 9781501154843
• Publish Date: 21 March 2017
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Imprint: Scribner
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 384
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

DNF @ 11%

Content Warnings (in what I read):
- infanticide
- ableism
- misogyny

I actually picked this up because of all the information about how tea is picked, made, brewed, etc., so I knew what I was getting into there. Unfortunately I had no idea (and no warning!) about the novel’s horrific ableism or its condescending and strange attitude toward the Akha people.

I’ll get the ableism over with first, because it’s the easiest to address. I’m always reminded how much we really need to add content warnings to the beginning of books (like we do to movies, video games, etc.), here especially because within the first 30 pages I was thrown into an intense anxiety attack. Granted, the ableism is in-book and obviously not Lisa See’s views, but reading things like, “If human rejects [disabled people or twins] are allowed to do the intercourse, over time an entire village might end up inhabited by only them,” and reading characters learn how disabled babies must be murdered (and the parents banished and their home burned) really does a number on my self worth. No, this is not necessarily a critique of the book. I’m mentioning in case anyone else who needs this warning can maybe see it.

But the quote I used brings me to my second point. Lisa See is Chinese-American, but as far as I know, she isn’t Akhan, an ethnic minority group in China. She may have researched a lot, and that comes through in her writing, but so does a really strange attitude toward the Akha. Why is their dialogue so stilted, when, flipping through the rest of the book, the dialogue by American people and even the MC after she emigrates to America obviously doesn’t match?

It’s also … hard to explain, but there’s an attitude pervasive through her writing that paints the Akha as such a backward, almost barbaric people with such obvious distaste that it’s really uncomfortable to read. I'm not Chinese, though, so I may be getting this all wrong. And I’m not sure if this attitude changes, but I’m just not ready to read nearly four hundred pages of it.