The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

by Lisa See

First published 2017

Amazon

4.4(19,793)

In a remote Akha village in Yunnan, Li-yan grows up within traditions governing marriage, childbirth and contact with outsiders. Her family cultivates ancient tea trees, but poverty and isolation leave little room for personal choice. When Li-yan gives birth outside marriage, she leaves her daughter at an orphanage with a tea cake as the only evidence of the child’s origins.

The baby, renamed Haley, is adopted by an American family and raised in California, while Li-yan leaves the village, gains an education and enters the expanding market for Pu’er tea. Their parallel lives connect social change in late-twentieth-century China with international adoption and cultural inheritance. As mother and daughter search for the history missing from their lives, tea becomes the material link between separation, memory and reunion.