Reviews of the Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Lisa See's new novel draws readers along a fantastic tea-infused trail
"No coincidence, no story."
Li-yan's mother repeats this simple aphorism as she interprets her children's dreams over a breakfast of thin goop in their bamboo house on a remote Chinese mountain. But this opening line of Lisa Come across's new novel, "The Tea Daughter of Hummingbird Lane," is also a provocative challenge to the reader. See wagers she will bear our attending through every coincidence and twist of fate on a fantastic tea-infused trail, from the villages of Chinese hill tribes to the drug-infested Golden Triangle and the glamour and wealth of Los Angeles.
(Scribner)
The story begins pocket-size, plunging us into the immersive detail of a unmarried grueling day picking tea with immature Li-yan, her mother, A-ma, and the rest of their ethnic-minority Akha family. After piece of work they must trek two hours to the tea collection center only to be told that they are too late to sell their leaves for the official quota. "The sound that comes from A-ma is not so much a groan as a whimper. All that work at half price."
What makes life endurable for the Akha is their belief system, which suffuses every aspect of their daily lives. The full sweep of their practices is flawlessly embedded in See'due south prose. When a bite of a stolen pancake leads to an entire village'south humiliation, the purification ceremony that follows feels completely natural.
Li-yan has been taught blind obedience to tradition, only her faith is presently tested. A-ma is a midwife, and as Li-yan assists at a nativity, she must watch her mother enforce the Akha'due south harshest rules when a serious taboo is cleaved. Her outrage at this incident leads Li-yan to question tradition, and the story is propelled forward when she falls meaning out of marriage, breaking another taboo.
This novel is largely Li-yan'due south story, but as she leaves her village to embark on a quest through many hardships, we as well get to see, through a selection of official documents, doctor's notes, family unit emails and babyhood writings, the life of Haley, a Chinese orphan adopted by a well-off California family. Tea will go the theme that holds these two stories in orbit around each other every bit Li-yan finds her vocation as a tea dealer while Haley grows up obsessed with one gift from her unknown nativity family unit: an one-time cake of dried tea with an unusual label.
The hardships that confront Li-yan in her life are as compelling equally the fog-shrouded hugger-mugger groves where she and her mother cultivate a special healing tea. I could have hung out here in remote China forever, but Run across has wider ground to cover, including Chinese adoption, the international fine-tea market and modernistic Chinese migration to the U.s.a..
Author Lisa Run into (Patricia Williams)
Information technology is harder to write with empathy about rich people, and as the story takes its biggest leap — from rural Cathay to wealthy Los Angeles — I did chortle at the line "Iii days later I'one thousand in Beverly Hills having dinner in a eating place called Spago." Just it is a testament to See'southward ability as a writer and to her impeccable research that she commands our attention again immediately. "I'm still struggling with how to utilize a knife and fork," says Li-yan, who eschews eating in fancy restaurants for shopping in Chinese markets and cooking for her husband similar a proper Chinese wife.
As Li-yan struggles to fit in with the newly arrived Han-majority Chinese millionaires in Pasadena, her story circles closer to Haley's. Li-yan hangs Han New year decorations and accepts an American name. Meanwhile, Haley, now in high school, must bargain with being Chinese amid white friends and yet "non Chinese enough" for the Han Chinese. She struggles with the pressures of being both an abased orphan and an adopted child treated as precious by her white parents. "Lucky but aroused" is the phrase her therapist uses, and through transcripts of a group-therapy session with several adoptees, See provides a blistering peek into their complicated emotions.
But equally properly aged tea from aboriginal trees has both flavor and a "returning taste," so this story balances moving on with returning abode. Both Li-yan and Haley must ultimately reconcile where they come from with who they are now, and they must compromise with the flaws of family and tradition if they wish to reclaim their roots. A lush tale infused with clear-eyed compassion, this novel will inspire reflection, discussion and an overwhelming desire to drink rare Chinese tea.
Helen Simonson is the author of "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand" and "The Summer Before the War."
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
By Lisa Run into
Scribner. 371 pp. $27
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/lisa-sees-new-novel-draws-readers-along-a-fantastic-tea-infused-trail/2017/03/20/11c0b9be-08fb-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html
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