Lisa See
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See opens in 1988 with young Li-Yan from the Akha tribe of China’s Yunnan province. Her family are tea growers, and Li-Yan learns the trade from her parents. Steeped in the beliefs, superstitions, rituals, and taboos of her community, Li-Yan aspires to transcend her socially constructed gender restrictions. She receives an education and is set to take the exam to continue her education when she becomes pregnant. With the help of her mother, a respected midwife and healer in the community, she conceals her pregnancy. She gives birth to a baby girl and abandons her outside an adoption clinic. Regretting her decision, she spends the next two decades trying to locate her daughter. She later learns she has been adopted by an American couple and taken to America.
Li-Yan becomes a tea entrepreneur, successfully establishing a business selling tea grown in her community. She marries a prosperous business man, and they move to his home in California. Li-Yan travels to China during tea-harvesting season to oversee her business.
Appearing intermittently in Li-Yan’s narrative is the narrative of Haley, her daughter, growing up in California with her adoptive parents. As a Chinese American, Haley struggles with her identity. Samples of her letters and school assignments are included in her narrative. Haley graduates from high school, attends university, and drafts a research proposal on the impact of climate change on the medicinal attributes of tea. She goes to the region in China famous for its tea to conduct her research. This just happens to be the same region where her mother is from.
There is much to appreciate in the novel, especially its depiction of the strong mother/daughter bond. See skillfully immerses the reader in the culture and lives of the Akha people through her use of sensory detail. Her extensive research on Akha culture and on the growing, harvesting, and processing of tea and its different properties is evident. But sometimes the copious information about tea—its attributes, its varieties, its impact on the taste buds, its different methods of production, etc.—becomes overwhelming and weigh the narrative down. Li-Yan’s meteoric rise to wealth and success as a tea purveyor seems somewhat improbable as do the many coincidences. And to top it off, in spite of See’s efforts to generate suspense, the conclusion is highly predictable.