The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
I adore reading books by the author Lisa See.
This is the first time I listened to one and I enjoyed it just as much as when I turn the pages she writes.
Here is a summary:
“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.”
Lisa See does a wonderful job of creating fiction that incorporates the history and traditions of many Chinese cultures.
Even though her characters and plots are made up, usually the rituals, beliefs, practices and geographical locations of various ancient cultures are real.
The research she does for her books is extensive and thorough…I always enjoy looking up things after to read and learn more.
She also has many complex issues of family dynamics and relationships woven throughout her stories, which is always powerful, complicated and full of various emotions from happiness to sadness to anger to regret to forgiveness.
This book really focuses on the unexplainable love between mothers and daughters, both biological and not.
But it also explores how deep our bonds to our ancestral heritage really goes into what makes us who we are as people…things that we know about that heritage and also things we do not know but are deeply ingrained into our genetic makeup.
Another issue this book delves into is the struggles that a transracial adoptee experiences throughout her childhood into her adulthood. To hear about the effect that growing up “culturally white” in the United States has on identity and emotional turmoil from the child’s perspective was eye opening to me…some of the inner battles surprised me and also educated me immensely.
I have yet to read a Lisa See book I did not think was a fantastic piece of “fictional anthropology” (as I once heard a critic say of her work)
Definitely recommend this one