The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is a novel by contemporary American writer Lisa See. See is one-eighth Chinese, and most of her books feature Chinese history and traditions. First published in 2017, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane centers around the story of a young girl named Li-yan, who lives with her family in remote tea mountains of China. In their everyday life, her village relies on rituals, belief, and taboos, and they are very detached from the rest of the country. This changes when a stranger arrives in a car, the fist vehicle the people in Li-yan’s village have ever seen. He serves as a link that eventually connects the village with the outside world, and Li-yan becomes the first in her community to consider leaving the mountain and getting an education. Her plans change when she gets pregnant out of wedlock, and the subsequent decision she makes has a lasting effect on her life and the life of her daughter. Exploring the themes of identity and belonging, the mother-daughter bond, and the effects of progress, the novel brought See great acclaim, in particular for her thorough exploration of Chinese tea-growing culture.

Other works by this author include Lady Tan's Circle of Women, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and Shanghai Girls.

The first chapter of the novel opens in a remote village of an indigenous hill tribe called the Akha, who still live and follow the same traditions as they did 100 years ago. Li-yan’s mother, A-ma, interprets her children’s dreams over breakfast. Li-yan doesn’t tell her the truth about her dream because it was full of bad omens. After breakfast, the family leaves the village to go pick tea. Later, at the tea collection center, Li-yan meets a boy named San-pa, and he offers her a bite of his pancake. When a pancake seller notices the children, she blames them for stealing her pancake, and Li-yan is punished with a ritual to cleanse her from breaking Akha Law.

A few weeks later, a woman in the village called Deh-ja gives birth to twins, but their culture considers twins as “human rejects” (15). The villagers then kill the twins and exile the parents. Li-yan doesn’t understand this tradition, so she distances herself from her culture and instead concentrates on her studies, hoping that one day she can become the first person in her village to go to the second-tier school. Her only schoolteacher, Mr. Zhang, lives in the village because he was exiled from Beijing during China’s Cultural Revolution. He sees potential in Li-yan and encourages her to continue her studies. When the second-tier school admits Li-yan, she meets San-pa again. The two become friends and then fall in love. During the swing festival, where young people are supposed to look for partners, Li-yan and San-pa sleep together. They want to get married, but Li-yan’s family doesn’t like San-pa. San-pa leaves the village, promising that he will find Li-yan when she is at university.

One day, a man called Mr. Huang visits the village. He is a connoisseur in search for aged Pu’er (a type of Yunnan tea), and he promises villagers to pay 10 times more for their tea than what they receive at the tea collection center. Li-yan, as well as everyone else in the village, work on harvesting and processing their tea under Mr. Huang’s supervision. However, Li-yan gets so involved in the work that she misses her opportunity to continue her education. At the same time, she finds out that she is pregnant with San-pa’s baby. According to Akha Law, a child born out of wedlock is a taboo and must be killed. A-ma, who is a midwife, promises her daughter that she will help deliver the baby. For the labor, they go to Li-yan’s secret tea grove, which she inherited from her mother.

When Yan-yeh is born, Li-yan decides to walk to the orphanage in Menghai and leave her daughter there since she can’t return to the village with her. Shortly afterward, San-pa returns and the two marry. Li-yan tells San-pa about their daughter, and they go to the orphanage in search of her. The director there tells them that an American family adopted their daughter. Li-yan and San-pa move to Thailand, where they live in poverty, and San-pa becomes addicted to heroin. When Li-yan decides to leave him, he follows her into the jungle and saves her from a tiger attack but dies in the process. Upon Li-yan’s return, A-ma and Teacher Zhang help her get into a nearby trade school so that she can make a fresh start.

At the same time, the author reveals that Li-yan’s daughter, now called Haley, was very sick when her adoptive parents got her, although she eventually recovers. Constance and Dan, her adoptive parents, are very caring, and they provide Haley with a loving home. Nevertheless, as Haley grows older, she becomes interested in her origins in China and wants to find her birth mother.

Meanwhile, Li-yan, who is now 26, studies to become a connoisseur through a new program at the Pu’er Tea College. Upon graduating, she becomes a successful businesswoman. As the part-owner of a tea shop, she sells tea from her village and helps her family to secure a steady income. In the park, where she likes to spend time after work, she befriends a woman, Mrs. Chang. She introduces Li-yan to her son Jin, also a successful entrepreneur, and the two soon fall in love and marry.

While Li-yan and Jin are in America on their honeymoon, Li-yan leaves her tea shop in the charge of her best friend from the village, Ci-teh. Although Ci-teh initially manages the shop well, Li-yan soon learns that Ci-teh has been selling counterfeit tea in her absence. Li-yan returns to China and goes straight to her village, where she works hard to restore the reputation of her tea among buyers. Shortly afterward, Li-yan gets pregnant and gives birth to a son, Paul.

In the meantime, Haley, who is now a student at Stanford, writes a senior thesis on Pu’er. For her research, she decides to travel to the tea mountains of China. Eventually, she finds her way to the village and meets her birth mother. Although it has been 21 years since Li-yan and Haley separated, the mother and daughter recognize each other immediately.