Please join us in reading The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See for our suggested monthly read.
We will be reviewing The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane along with our book club discussion questions for October 31st, 2017.
Goodreads Summary:
Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate—the first automobile any of them have seen—and a stranger arrives.
In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change.
Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city.
After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations.
Praises for The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane:
LA Review of Books says: “Lisa See is a confident, lyrical, smart, impeccably researched writer … [The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is] both unique and a universal story of motherhood.”
New York Times Book Review says: “See is one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot.”
Publishers Weekly says: “With vivid and precise details about tea and life in rural China, Li-Yan’s gripping journey to find her daughter comes alive.”
I am looking forward to reading about the Akha culture and the history of tea in China!
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is available here.
From the summary, this sounds like a heartwrenching story already. Enjoy, Dinh. And, I hope she shares some tea brewing techniques.
Separation from all that you’ve known and family is something which is never easy to process or go through. The main character must go through many different emotions and I also really like the sound of this one being so grounded in culture too. That’s a theme that always catches my eye.
Hi Olivia!
I love to read about different cultures too and I am sure I will learn quite a lot!