Lisa See, the author best known, I think, for her book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, has written another wonderful novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane that brings the world of China and its very diverse regions and populations to an American audience. This novel focuses on the remote mountains where families make their living tea farming.
When the story begins the village of the Akha hill tribe have kept to themselves, isolated by the mountains that surround them. They with their tribal customs unaware of the changing world around them. They grow and pick tea leaves which they travel to sell at market. But they live with their own rules and traditions among their village.
Li-yan, the only daughter in her family starts to question the way of life she is growing up in. She goes to school and her teacher encourages her to continue her education further than anyone in her family has before. She falls in love and defies her parents in an effort to marry the boy she thinks is right for her, even though her parents are against the marriage. Li-yan also defies Akha customs when she has a child out of wedlock and gives her away.
She goes off and learns all the aspects of tea planting, harvesting and making tea. As she learns and becomes successful she is able to bring her village into a more modern era. They become acquainted with ways of life in the larger cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou.
This is a novel about mother daughter relationships, family dynamics and rural Chinese customs and traditions that have lasted for generations. See has written an incredibly informative story that you can just hear the people speaking in your head as you read. The dialect and speech patterns are wonderful.
Bringing the story full circle with Li-yan's daughter being brought up in America and learning how to deal with not only being an adopted child, but adding in the stigma of being Chinese in an American family. See has delved into many interesting dilemmas that face modern teenagers.
So many subjects so artfully tackled in this novel. It starts off slowly but builds to a wonderful story.
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